Weird enough for ya? Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Zack Flores isn’t a standard thruster kind of surfer. He likes weird surfboards. Surfboards with odd fins and odd shapes. Surfboards that aren’t off the rack — which is good, because he’s an extremely talented shaper, and he’s almost always on a surfboard he made himself. In this video, he takes out a newly finished single fin to put it through its paces, but he thought it’d be fun to try it out with a handful of different fins.
Not normal fins, though. Odd fins. “I just finished my single fin, so instead of surfing it normally, I decided to test the three weirdest single fins I own,” he wrote. “I start with a Greenough Power Blade to set a baseline, then I try a 3D-printed CAD fin with a toothed edge that was designed to be hyper hydrodynamic, and finally, I paddle out on a Cheyne Horan winged fin.”
The oddest, to my eyes at least, is the 3D printed toothed thing. “This fin was fast,” Flores said after giving it a go, “but it was kind of sketchy. Like really wobbly. I did one turn where I hit the whitewater. The board flattened out on me. It was weird. I think if I rode this fin a bunch in this board I’d get used to it and it could work really well, but it’s really unstable and really wobbly. Kind of sketchy.”
For Flores’ money, the oddest of them all is the Horan winged fin. “This is the final boss of experimental fins,” he laughed. “It is quite possibly the craziest fin that I’ve ever seen. I’m super excited to try it. I’ve actually wanted to try one of these for a long time.”
Horan, as you likely know, was known for doing things his way. “He went super against the grain with his experimental fins and surfboards,” Flores explained. “He’s kind of the reason we have modern surfboards and the outlines they have today. This was his take on trying to keep the single fin alive and relevant.”
After all three were tested thoroughly, the winner was a surprise. It was the Horan winged fin. “I am super shocked,” Flores said. “I did not think it was going to work very well.”
