the widest shortboard you've ridden, and why?

[Jimi]

Hey all. I'm at the stage of wanting to make an experimental board, and I think I'll be outrageous and make a sort-of fish (just like everyone else out there seems to experiment on).

So my question is, how wide is the shortboard/fish you ride in small surf, how heavy are you? What fin set up and how does the board feel? I know the paddlind ability of each board will be different, but I'm more interested in how loose, and how free to turn it is, and how it handles soft mushy-type waves.

The crazy part of my plan is to do something with a retro-fish outline (wide fish-tail), that's about 6'6 long, and about 23" or 24" wide by 3" thick. I'm thinking of going a thruster fin set up, and having a moderate tail-kick to initiate turns more easily.

Ultra high volume, and impossible to duckdive, but hopefully buoyant enough to float me clean out of the water, and paddle fast enough to take off well before my current crop of shortboards.

[IB_Surfer]

You mean like this one?



or like this one?



Both are 6'8" x 22 x 2 3/4, both quad. The green I asked for too much peformance, had a lot of rocker and really pulled back, ended up feeling like a big shortboard. The white with blue stripes came out perfect, had the shaper use very little rocker, single concave but with 50/50 rails instead of the the regular rounded rails. A few years back I got into the retro/modern fish idea, so I bought a thruster fish, did not like it as much as the quad. I use small fins on back, super release and super glide but still hold nicely in big surf. Here is the fish at baja, perfect for big mushy point breaks too: