As far as surfing goes for So. Cal. 2016... was pretty good. The water temps remained very nice. I only put on a winter wet suit once last January, which was a mistake, got to warm. The warm water temps remained  through spring and summer as well. Love that warm water.

It's gone now, back to the typical cool temps. The Anacapa buoy has been reading 58 degrees of late. That's the coldest it's been for 2 years, and normal for this time of year.

The surf was pretty consistent for the most part. This past November was going off as a matter of fact. This past summer got off to a good start with back to back southern hemisphere swells for most of the month. But the hurricane season, what was up with that?

I love hurricane swells and watched no fewer than 15 develop off Mexico this year. Always hoping for the best where they would hook to the north for a couple days and send us some surf. All but a couple weak ones did. They all did a bee line toward Hawaii instead, leaving us with.... not much.

The thing about surf, you never know what's in the future. We can have surf or not. We can have great weather for going to the beach and no surf when you get there. We can have surf with junk weather so the surf is no good. You can have your day off to surf be epic or not worth the effort. You can have every day available to surf but see a long run of no surf and bad weather... so long that you're going nuts from boredom. I mean really, a guy can only make surfboards for so long before the need to get in the water is over whelming.

Fortunately 2016 was pretty good for surf. Hoping 2017 is as good or better.

Happy New Year!

D.R.  

If you think about surfboard design and are motivated to work through a certain design idea then being able to make your own surfboard is nice.

I consider myself fortunate that making surfboards is what I do. Being able to make a surfboard with some certain design elements and then go surf the board can be inspiring. Having a plethora of outlines accumulated over the years can make putting a new design together almost effortless. At least if the curves you're interested in match up nicely.

It's best to work off of something you're familiar with. So when I was asked to make a mid length performance type board that's not egg shaped or have a round nose I first thought of my Gadget model because of it's performance characteristics. But I would need to get a narrow nose on the front end.

So I got to thinking about another favorite performance board that runs about the same over all width with a narrow nose. It's a board that I surfed while living on Kauai and made for a number of guys there. Sure enough, this boards front end lined up very well with the Gadget back end. So using the Gadget profile and blending the two outlines together I came up with a new shape.

And as usual I didn't want to let the board go when it was finished. But it was promised to my friend Bob. Plus he wanted the board to be a tri fin. I've got ideas on making one for myself now but with a completely new fin set up I've been dreaming about.

More on that later.

D.R.