Table of contents for February #59.8 2019 in Surfer

I shaped a board once. Just once. I did it a few years ago, and, up until recently, I thought that was more than enough for this lifetime. It’s not that there was anything wrong with the board—a wide, thick, almost-rockerless, chop-tailed 5'5" quad that had plenty of giddyup in gutless knee-to-chest high surf, and could turn on a dime because, well, there really wasn’t much board to turn. It was just that I knew someone else—say, a 50-year veteran shaper like my dad, Robin Prodanovich, who makes all my boards—could make me a much, much better version, and they could probably do it blindfolded with plastic cutlery. Sure, I could try to put in the 10,000 hours to master mowing foam, but that’s a lot of time to spend…

About halfway through the recently-released HBO documentary “Momentum Generation”, a film by Jeff and Michael Zimbalist focusing on the New School crew’s swift rise to fame in the ‘90s, there’s a scene where Kelly Slater and Rob Machado recount their competitive rivalry, which came to a head in 1995 while the Momentum gang was in France. While at shaper Maurice Cole’s house, Slater told him that the quiver he’d made for Slater’s European run wasn’t really working out. Trying to rectify the situation, Cole told Slater that three of Machado’s boards were downstairs and that he should grab one to test out. Slater didn’t need to be told twice and threw one of his traction pads on the board before taking it for a spin at one of the nearby…

“I think there were about a hundred surfers out there on this day,” says local Mundaka standout Txaber Trojaola of the idyllic-looking swell pictured here. “A strong swell hit the coastline of Bermeo and the wind and consistency of the swell produced really good waves at Mundaka. That was not the typical day, with all the waves barreling like that. When Mundaka breaks with that kind of size, you can surf seven or eight hours a day. You can ride the best and longest tubes of your life here.”…

There’s something about a twin-fin surfboard that just feels right. In the water as the rider draws a racy line or in the racks of your local surf shop just begging for a test-drive, twin-fins have a certain magnetism that perhaps no other fin configurations do. Thrusters, sure, they’re the cream of the performance crop and make every surfer better and blah blah blah. But there’s a certain feeling, a certain flow, that has made twinnies an increasingly popular choice for a daily driver. Once you get to your feet on a twin-fin, the appeal is obvious—pure speed. Without the drag of a center fin, the planing surface of a twin-finned board squirts over sections of wave face like greased lightning. Small waves become more fun, big waves become a…

“On day two I got some other tools, because the cheese grater wasn’t really cutting it,” deadpanned a dust-caked, purple-haired Andrew Doheny. He was describing his first handshaping experience—one that apparently involved various kitchen utensils—as we stood in front of a barn-turned-shaping-bay nestled among towering pines in Moss Beach, California, some 8 hours north of Doheny’s home in Newport Beach. Unsurprisingly, the board that came out of that first slapdash shaping session looked like “quite a piece of shit,” according to Doheny. “But, sure enough, the board kind of worked. My friends were riding it and they were doing airs on it, and it was pretty cool to have a board that looked like a piece of shit, but was really fun and could still put a smile on your…