Chris Christenson: All right, here we go. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Here we go. There we go. This is the Daytona. Probably do cool tricks on this if you know how to surf. I vaguely do. So, good. I was really surprised in how good it went. Completely different than any mid-length or long fish I've ridden. It felt like it was thriving in some steeper overhead waves. This is the new Daytona model. Ready to launch it.
Been testing this for the last few months. Myself, Mitch Abshere, and my other team rider Gavin Idone. For me, it's my favorite long railed egg, mid-length, whatever you want to call it. It has my low airplane wing rails to keep the board up on top of the water and keep it lively. Initiates the turns really fast. This board rides small. Like you'll see in the videos, Gavin's on a 6'10" and Mitch is on a 7'4". The board's really lively and rides small, and a lot of that is just the low volume in the rail wide point. You're able to carry it back with a wider swallow tail, and then it's got a traditional just forward V.
The trick to this board is what I call a tight cluster thruster. If you picture a thruster as a triangle, the tighter you can make that triangle, the more radius you're going to get out of the turn. The way this plan shape is, it already has a gas pedal and plenty of horsepower, so I don't have to worry about spreading the fins out to get more drive out of the board. Bringing the cluster together is an old Skip Frye trick, set somewhat far in off the rails. This board has a lot of radius in the turn. Honestly, on the days that are a little too big for the log and too much paddling for the shortboard—we have a lot of days like that over here from those building hurricane swells where if you try to paddle on the shortboard, you're going to be paddling up current for hours—you still kind of want to ride some high performance board and not work as hard. So I'm going to be breaking that thing out a lot more during those swells.
Mitch Abshere: It's crazy for a 7'4". I was shocked how well this paddled. I think the foam is just like nice in the middle rail. This is like a really easy board to surf, so I feel like you could be in any range and you will not be sad. It livens up when there's a wave like that board. You get it like head high and it just comes alive, which I could tell today. A couple of waves I got, I was like, "Oh, here we go." I'm super honored to be able to ride his boards. I'm always excited when he comes up with something new. Usually I'll get to try one of them and it just makes surfing that much more fun. All right.
Last time I was running Christenson's thruster set, which felt pretty good, but I think I've gained some weight. Might be the donuts, I'm not too sure, but felt good. Maybe try something just a little different for fun, so I'm going to go with the little twin trailer and see how that feels on it. Maybe I just need to back off the donuts.
Well, it's a mistake, but who knows? This board knees, too. You can knee on this thing. I've ridden it in super crappy waves, beach break, and at Churches, and all three waves felt fun. Like this little beach break we just surfed, the thing goes. I feel like you could really ride it in almost anything. I think then you just mess around with your fin setup depending on the waves maybe and go from there.
Chris Christenson: So Gavin and I, we prefer these Boomerang fins from True Ames. They're really low volume and pretty small fins, but for guys in the under 175 lbs range—I'm 170 lbs and Gavin's about the same—I really like this fin. It just really livened the board up and it rolled over really nice. For riders over 180 lbs and up, I'd recommend standard thrusters. I like mine with the ones I have from FCS and Futures. It's even a good option to run them as a 2+1; you can run them as a twin fin with a stabilizer, especially because the fins are set back relatively far and the rear's up. As you see in the video, Mitch liked the 2+1 setup. A lot of people have fins now, so find your own formula and what you like best.
Those are my recommendations. This is kind of a Swiss Army knife as far as boards in the 6'10" to 8'0" long rail range. I'm really excited about it. That's the Daytona. She's fast. Yeah, kind of looks like my hair. We have like the same thing.
