Surfing Waves

Hello i am completly uneducated when it comes to my new board that i am looking for , could somebody direct me to or explain to me what the different shapes are for boards as it is quite confusing, ie rocker
thanks

well, rocker is how curved the board is. like if you lay it flat on the floor, the rocker is how curved up the nose (nose rocker) and tail (tail rocker) are. a bigger (steeper?) rocker will help you out in bigger surf with steeper wave faces, whereas less rocker is generally used in smaller surf, like on fishes etc - they have fairly flat rocker.

for a first board (no doubt youve read loads of posts on this, and if you havent well shame on you and go and look) you ought to be going for either a longboard or a minimal, the latter of which is a shorter version of a longboard. A rounded nose and fairly fat tail, or even a square tail, will help you catch waves easier. round tails are the most common on minimals.

hope that helped a little bit.

There are a ton of sites that dive into board design some basic and some advanced...google surfboard design or some such phrasing you'll find tons of stuff already out there.

As for rocker...if you look at your board from the side; you are pretty much checking out the rocker. How much the nose curves up from the center of the board & and how much the tail curves up.

If you lay the bottom of the board on the ground with no fins in it you can tilt it back and forth (nose to tail) like a rocking chair.

Thanks for the advice, it is actually for my second board and i really want to choose carefully, that is why i feel it is important to know how the board works and what causes it to act the way it does in the water, understanding this will hopefully help me in my quest .

what board have you been riding, and what sort of board are you looking to get?

I have a 7ft 6 Mini Mal popout which i now want to change but only if it will make any difference (see previous thread) so before i choose i really want to know what to look for i.e. shape and length thanks

Hope this helps, there are way too many variables.

Some basic 'rules' concerning rocker are as follows: The more rocker or bottom curve that a board has, the looser (but slower) it will be. Water flow has to follow the excess curve, ends up pushing water, and drag is the result. Flatter rocker brings more speed but brings a decrease in maneuverability. Generally, boards with more rocker work better in larger, hollow waves where the added curve and drag can contribute to more control for the rider. Flatter bottoms are normally used on small-wave boards designed for slower, mushier surf, where the speed (and added leverage) help keep the board planing.

Northswell good pick … It is a nice extract taken from an article by Dave Parmenter published on the surfline site. As already stated, there is a lot of information out there; you just need to take the time to look.

Good to see that you are focusing on possibly the most important design aspect of a surfboard…The last two posts on my BLOG entitled: “Rocker – The basics” and “Rocker –Lines” looks at some of the basics... I feel that “Rocker – The basics” may have something of interest to you ; although the information focuses more on my design of a Nose rider rather then performance rockers.

…a well designed bottom rocker that is both functional and in tune with the design parameters on a whole is the foundation in the search for that “magic board”.

Also be sure to check out the SCSURFER site: http://www.scsurfers.com/board/index.html