Daniel “Tomo” Thomson makes surfboards. He makes surfboards unlike anyone else, really, and looks at surfboards as a scientist would. A requirement of any good shaper, of course, is that they must know how to surf and have a fundamental understanding of what, exactly, those little tweaks to rails and volume and fin placement do in a practical sense.
When Tomo was in his teens and early twenties, he competed a lot. He was good, too, but he was lacking something very important in competitive surfing. “I didn’t have the killer instinct to really break that level of sponsorship required to support a full WQS campaign,” he said. He won a few smaller Pro-Am events on talent alone, had a few finals in Pro Junior and WQS events, but the passion for competing just wasn’t there. All the winning he did, though, was done on boards he shaped himself — and as it turned out, that lack of competitive drive was a very good thing. For him and for surfers around the world. “Looking back,” he said, “I think things have panned out the way they were supposed to be. If I qualified, I probably wouldn’t have developed my designing as much. I am happy where I am today so I wouldn’t change things if I had my time over.”
Nowadays, Tomo is one of the world’s most successful surfboard shapers. In a new series called Tomo Test Sessions, he breaks down the design elements of his latest quad fin design: The El Tomo Fish. And then, like any good shaper should do, he takes it for a spin.
