Recently a friend of Tanners contacted me to make a copy of one of his old personal boards (the Olsen/Arrow seen in the picture below) and I had many old memories wash through me during the making of it. I thought I would reflect a couple of them.
Tanner was the first person that ever ordered a board from me, we were just punk ass kids that surfed the point all the time. I'll never forget that first board we made together. We called it the "Cosmic Pig" and it was an orange & blue resin swirl fat fish twin fin board that he ended up surfing to death. I'll never forget polishing the thing in the morning before class while he stood outside my makeshift shaping room in his wetsuit. I sent him on his way, headed to school and spent the day of class dreaming and worrying about what the verdict would be. Would he love it, would he hate it? By this point he was already an established ripper in the scene and so many uncertainties flooded though my mind that I had pretty much thrown in the towel by the time I made my way home from school and checked the surf. I was shocked to see that he was still out. Stoked, I ran home and grabbed my stuff, I was in the water in 10 minutes later. Paddling out through the channel, I saw him take off on a nice wall and started heading down the line, coming right at me. POW, He chucks a huge front side air right in front of me. The verdict was obvious, he loved it.
After that we built piles of boards over the years, refining and tweaking mostly fish designs to his always curious and stoked taste. The fish that you see displayed on this page is probably the most recent design that we developed together. It's at least 7 years old, coming out of the "fish movement". Tanner rode a Skip Frye Steve Lis style fish for a few months when they were becoming popular but really wanted something that was more maneuverable, more "shortboardy" ...this board was it. It's basically a shortboard disguised as a fish... the rocker is modern, the fins are modern, and the outline is actually just a shortboard template that was pushed out from the stringer with a swallow tail and the nose pulled back in to the tip.
A giant concave runs down the center getting deeper out the tail tip, so that the rocker down the center actually does the opposite of what it does in most concaves- it doesn't get flatter, it actually gets curvier. This is because the board was meant to run on rail like a modern shortboard, performance was always the name of the game for Tanner. We spent years just figuring out the fins on this design.
Most of the time, we would just focus on the templates like everyone else. But we noticed that there was something more afloat with the design of one particular design, it turned much better than all the other boards and had much more drive. On a whim I had foiled the fins in a particular way, so that they were concave on the inside, just as an experiment. Below you can see how I was taking molds of fin foils at this point, totally focused on what was going on with the foil aspect of the fin.
Here's a couple of shots of his friends board. It's fun to see the shape stay the same and the brand change. Out with the old, in with the new. <(") Carl
