We came across some footage of Cam Scott on a small day at Bondi Beach a couple of days ago and it made the crew at The Inertia smile. He makes it look fun as hell. The irony is that finless surfing is not nearly as easy as it looks. It’s difficult as all hell, as a matter of fact. And personally, things with a steep learning curve are things I gripe and moan about. You know, not having fun.
Anyway, Cam is still on the finless groove (and still has great music taste, by the way). And he’s also actually a really fascinating guy. Originally from New York, Cam goes by the street artist name NotNotCamScott around Sydney. Several years ago he apparently became fascinated with the intersection of digital life and the real world, which started influencing his work and eventually led to a TEDx Talk about social media, clickbait, and a street art series he created that was inspired by it all.
His fascination with creation also intersects with preservation and this whole finless thing he has going on. He’s been shaping wood and foam Alaias, which brought us back to another edit where he’s playing around with one of his prototypes.
“After my favorite flat-bottomed soft boards started to be made with too much rocker for finless, I decided to make my own dead flat finless,” he says, explaining his approach to his shape. The goal is to make something with “no channels, no contours, and almost no drag as a result.” Realizing he didn’t like drag and the feeling of pushing water on boards with more rocker, he set out to make something that would glide through slides while surfing backward.
“The endless glide you get in any direction by having a completely flat bottom is wild and I find it offers much more traction on the wave face,” he says. “I think the back half of a flat rail actually slices into the face and projects you forward rather than curving up the face and feeling more likely to slide out when you don’t want it to. I used a super light, low-density EPS blank that I had to get custom-made to accommodate the dead flat rocker but had it glassed very heavy as I’ve snapped way too many foamies struggling to explore the limits of finless.”
Cam also says there are a few other things he wouldn’t mind tinkering with in the future but he’s going to let himself have some more fun testing this one out for now. Like I said, he’s making it look like a lot of fun for the rest of us.
