As you may be aware from a recent feature here, Coco Ho and Album Surfboard’s Matt Parker recently hitched their wagons together to create a new surfboard brand. It’s called XO COCO, and the boards they’re coming up with are stunning.
The project came about after Coco rode a handful of Matt’s boards. Like most people who ride Matt’s boards, she loved them. She was finished with the tour — although still competing every now and then on the QS — but feeling a little stagnant. Bored of her usual high-performance shapes, she began spicing things up every now and then with twin fins.
Although surfboards aren’t generally made with a female or male rider in mind, Coco is of the opinion that certain tweaks can be made.
“I did know that a lot of stock boards were too wide for females, especially fishes and [other alternative shapes],” Ho told The Inertia. “A male’s fish is like 20″ wide, you know. A girl can’t really be whipping that around without digging rail… The female’s average foot size is a lot smaller than the male’s. That’s what causes people to dig rail, a board that’s too wide. [A narrower board] brings a quickness to your transitions and turns, especially on shortboards, to be able to go from turn to turn a lot quicker. If you have too much width, that gets in the way.”
After so many years surfing on the tour, Coco’s surfing was geared towards what the judges like. That, she found, wasn’t necessarily how she liked to surf, but it took some time to retrain that muscle memory.
“Now, truly, I have a board for every condition,” Ho said in a recent interview with The Inertia’s Cooper Gegan. “I’m sitting here on the beach watching Sunset Point and, after being on tour and being such a high performance surfer, you look at maybe a kind of boring wave and, with my new quiver, anything looks fun.”
With XO COCO Surfboards, Coco has found that her surfing is evolving, the way any good surfing should.
“These boards have given a new projection and a little bit of a freeness to my surfing,” Ho told Inherent Bummer. “My lines are becoming slightly different… So yeah, the new boards give you this variation that you didn’t even know was there when you’re riding a true twin and I’ve been going as small as 4’7’’ on some. It’s just such a fun feeling to go that fast and not really have to do a million turns. It’s something I had to work on when I first got off tour and now it’s all making more sense. Less is more.”
Coco is keenly aware of just how important having the right tools for the job is, and the job in surfing is simple: to have as much fun as possible. “If you don’t have fun boards,” she says in the video above, “it’s easy to not want to go surf. I think that’s been really major. These will get everyone in the water.”
