Jack Robinson checking the dims. Screengrab: Gage Roads Brew Co//YouTube
No surfer alive can resist the urge to check the dims on a board the first time they touch it. It’s as primal as anything else we do. Grab the rails, feel its weight, run our eyes up and down the outline of the board, and flip it over to check those magical numbers immortalized under a few ounces of glass. Those numbers tell us so much. How it’ll go, what it will feel like under our feet. Our mind’s eye sees that back foot shifting toward the tail as the board points up toward the lip. We can even feel that front foot move up ever so slightly toward the nose as an imaginary section stands up in front of us.
All that comes from a few numbers.
It’s entirely imaginary, of course. We tell ourselves an exact litreage down to a fraction of a milliliter will be too much, too little, or just right. We are wrong. But even as my logical self makes this claim, I’m arguing against it somewhere deep down. One of my favorite humans ever, a South Bay shaper named Mark Brog, has poured himself into more than one custom board for me with dimensions I’ll never know. I’ve known the man more than 15 years and he refuses to write the dimensions on my boards or ever tell me the exact width, exact rail thickness, or exact volume.
“People become too obsessed with the numbers, and it gets in their head because they think a board should be this or it shouldn’t be that,” he’d tell me. “Just surf it. It’s right for you.”
I actually love this approach. Mark knows the dims. They’re all written down somewhere. But once you have the board it either goes or it doesn’t. There’s a trust I’ve built into those boards by letting go of the need to know the numbers that were never written on the bottom of them. I can’t say that about the off-the-rack boards I own, where I know their precise dimensions. I love those boards too. But just knowing those numbers so often influences my choice to pull them out on a given day or leave them at home. It’s…weird.
Chris Garrett, the shaper behind Phantom Surfboards in Duranbah, knows all about the everyday surfer’s obsession with volume, too.
“I love the way the modern surfboard has evolved into the common denominator of ‘How many liters are in your board, mate?'”
Garrett says the first thing any surfer asks about a board is how long it is. And if that’s not the first question, then they’re asking about the volume. The width and the rails are secondary concerns, he says. And so Garrett and Gage Roads Brew Co. took a creative approach to our obsession with volume by designing a board with adjustable volume. The single fin has a section of the board carved out where beer can be added (presumably) or taken out to adjust the volume. It’s not high performance, but neither is my surfing. It’s just a helluva gimmick, and I’m here for it.
But seriously, how does it go?
