The Warp by Shaun Tomson
Channel Islands team rider and 1977 World Champ Shaun Tomson came to us wanting to design a board more for the young at heart guy who wants a performance board but still wants to get the most out of the average waves they find themselves riding. The result was the Warp. This board features more volume, allowing for easy paddling and wave-catching. Single concave under the front foot allows for punchy drive on takeoffs and double concave to vee provide lift and easy rail-to-rail transitions. The Warp comes standard as a swallow tail. Ride the Warp about the same length as your Flyer.
Read more about Shaun Tomson’s Warp in this Stab Magazine Interview
For me, I’ve always been a carver and I’ve got this new board that I’ve developed with a young Aussie shaper actually, a guy called Mike Andrews at Channel Islands. It’s called the ‘Warp’, which is just a play on the concept of time-warp and speed. It’s made for old-school carving, which is great for Rincon. It’s actually quite popular over here with the over-40 crew. The guys that haven’t got pilot’s licenses. The reason I developed it is, I’ve found that as you get older you lose that explosion of power to your feet. And you need a little bit more volume under your chest as you’re paddling over the edge. Each year you lose a millisecond and once you reach around 45, it’s a bit more profound, so I wanted a board that had a little bit more volume under the chest. Most boards are so finely-tuned and when young guys paddle they have that really profoundly-arched back and their weight is much further back. You need that volume under your chest just to get you up and going, because as soon as you get up and going quickly, you get the speed and any maneuver is possible. I also wanted a board that could be put on rail really hard. Most modern boards are a single-to-double concave. The whole thesis behind modern surfing is power and release. When you’ve just been a power guy all your life like I have, and a lot of guys who’re over 40 who never got into the air thing (not because they didn’t think it was valid, but just because they couldn’t do it), then you never really subscribe to that design. I wanted something that had the speed of that concave and had that rail-to-rail transition on the V. On the outline we fooled around with a half-inch single wing. I just don’t like that volume behind my back foot. So I wanted to really bring in the area behind my back foot. We worked out some different fin-positioning and flattened out the entry curve, which really starts to give you a lot of lift in small waves. I wanted to base it more around the zero to five-foot range, which is what most the waves here around Southern California are. So it’s just a really good board for 40-plus. Read the entire article on Stab Magazine.
