I met Brian Whitty yesterday.....
Posted: Tue Oct 20, 2015 10:48 amSo yeah, I met Brian Whitty, the inventor of FCS plugs.
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I went to buy a used surfboard from what turned out to be a very nice guy who was very good friends with Brian, and for whom Brian had designed the board in collaboration with a well known local shaper (Bruce Hansel....another Hawaiian north shore shaper transplant, maybe W-chan knows him too)....had been wanting to try a Hansel, and when I saw this design it appealed to me esp. with the wet season just around the corner complete with mushy, crumbling, smaller sized waves...anyway, I go to meet the guy and he had arranged for Brian to come by as well so that I could meet him and he could tell me about the board and his design theories that he had built it around (really nice pair of guys right!?!) The seller proceeded to fill my phone with numbers and email addresses and asked me if it was ok to share it with Simon Anderson (Mr. Thruster) since we're roughly the same size and he apparently sells his personal boards to people he knows when he comes as well as a couple of other guys....a real networker. All those guys apparently grew up together and still keep in touch with each other here. A really positive experience that came as a total surprise.
Here's some pictures of the board....interesting design, the deck is stepped with an angle down to the rails so the rails are thin, but the centre of the board is thick, really thick (2 15/16") so there is a good amount of volume there....double concave all the way through, he recommended quads which I rode it as today....really positive results. I spent the first hour trying to figure out the best place to lay on it to paddle out, to paddle to catch a wave, to paddle to make a late drop with varying degrees of success....was a solid 6-7ft face day so plenty of push to get into waves but at the same time it was a mess out there, ripping side shore to slightly onshore winds was blowing out the waves and making them fat and crumbling as well as weird chop and lots of double ups....good waves for this board....after an hour I started to have better consistency and sorted my different positions a little better and started to get into waves easier and back to the lineup faster....and pulled off the longest ride that I've ever had at that break, connecting to the inside section and wound up way down the beach. The board is a good one, everything about this story is golden.
A weird aside....I sold a board on Sunday that I didn't like that much to another exceptionally nice guy....he and his buddy were out there today and he was loving his new (my old) board...we shared a word and he was generally stoked.....a real feel good sesh today.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php? ... ry_index=0
I went to buy a used surfboard from what turned out to be a very nice guy who was very good friends with Brian, and for whom Brian had designed the board in collaboration with a well known local shaper (Bruce Hansel....another Hawaiian north shore shaper transplant, maybe W-chan knows him too)....had been wanting to try a Hansel, and when I saw this design it appealed to me esp. with the wet season just around the corner complete with mushy, crumbling, smaller sized waves...anyway, I go to meet the guy and he had arranged for Brian to come by as well so that I could meet him and he could tell me about the board and his design theories that he had built it around (really nice pair of guys right!?!) The seller proceeded to fill my phone with numbers and email addresses and asked me if it was ok to share it with Simon Anderson (Mr. Thruster) since we're roughly the same size and he apparently sells his personal boards to people he knows when he comes as well as a couple of other guys....a real networker. All those guys apparently grew up together and still keep in touch with each other here. A really positive experience that came as a total surprise.
Here's some pictures of the board....interesting design, the deck is stepped with an angle down to the rails so the rails are thin, but the centre of the board is thick, really thick (2 15/16") so there is a good amount of volume there....double concave all the way through, he recommended quads which I rode it as today....really positive results. I spent the first hour trying to figure out the best place to lay on it to paddle out, to paddle to catch a wave, to paddle to make a late drop with varying degrees of success....was a solid 6-7ft face day so plenty of push to get into waves but at the same time it was a mess out there, ripping side shore to slightly onshore winds was blowing out the waves and making them fat and crumbling as well as weird chop and lots of double ups....good waves for this board....after an hour I started to have better consistency and sorted my different positions a little better and started to get into waves easier and back to the lineup faster....and pulled off the longest ride that I've ever had at that break, connecting to the inside section and wound up way down the beach. The board is a good one, everything about this story is golden.
A weird aside....I sold a board on Sunday that I didn't like that much to another exceptionally nice guy....he and his buddy were out there today and he was loving his new (my old) board...we shared a word and he was generally stoked.....a real feel good sesh today.
extra thick and wide the rails tapered up so they don't catch water when you turn and create drag and you still get a flat deck to work with.