Surfing Explained: Ep12 Choosing a Longboard Outline - Wide Point Back/ Center / Forward

In this week's episode of Surfing Explained, Coach Will explains the differences between the three common varieties of longboard outlines, and how the position of the wide point determines its functionality with noseriding.

Script:
There are three basic outlines that are more commonly seen within the long boarding community.
Wide Point Back.
Wide Point Center, or a paralleled railed design as its sometimes referred.
Wide Point forward.
As we understand from previous episodes of Surfing Explained, the surfboard outline can be looked at in two halves, the front and the rear. With longboards we generally use the front half for speed, grip and stability when we engage the rail of the surfboard into the wave face, and then the rear half of the board for maneuverability and responsiveness, where we can lean our weight on the tail and lift the nose high out the water to disengage the rail from the wave face and pivot off the back foot to change direction.
The widest point is going to loosely define where the divide between these two controls sits and how the overall speed and grip or maneuverability and responsiveness is either increased or decreased by effecting the outline shape of the longboard.
Noseriding is a particularly desirable skill within longboarding, and such a skill relies on a combination of both maneuverability to manage the riders position on the wave, and then speed and stability to maintain enough support, security and grip for the rider to move to the nose, and so we’re going to use noseriding as our metric of performance when comparing these longboard outlines.
To put ‘wide point back’ into some context, we are talking about surfboards like Dale Velzy’s original “Pig” from 1955 which premiered the design, or the slightly more subtle wide point back of Nat Young’s Magic Sam from 1966, or the more recent Bing Pocket Knife. On all these boards the nose width appears more narrow than the width through the Tail
Boards in the 50’s were still constructed from solid wood, and so maneuvering the heavy boards was particularly challenging. Pulling the wide point of the board back increases the amount of curve through the back half of the outline, making the board easier to carve through turns and by narrowing the nose, and reducing the material and weight up front, the swing weight of the board through a maneuver was reduced, thus making the board more responsive. Equally by eliminating the width of the nose, it reduces the risk of catching the outside rail, and so encouraged surfing closer to the curl where the tight diameter of the wave curve previously made this difficult.
Although this all sounds positive, there is a trade off. With the rail line naturally pulling away from the wave face and less lift from the reduced surface area up front, the rider has less support from the wave, which means that riding on the nose on slower softer sections where the wave produces less lift is much more challenging. These designs therefore require a steeper wave or a more technically proficient surfer to noseride sucsessfully.
As we move the wide point further forward, closer to the mid point of the surfboard, we end up with a more balanced outline where the nose and tail are of a closer width. As the nose width increases so does the stability of the surfboard in trim. Creating more surface area to provide lift and thrust, which is particularly useful in either soft waves, or noseriding when speed and grip is particularly important to the success of the maneuver. This is probably the most common outline we see in modern longboards as it gives a lovely balance of manoverablity with stability on the nose.
When both nose and tail widths are widened further we see the standard outline of the classic “Logs” of the early 1960’s. More recently the Bing Levitator is a good example of what can be described as a “parallel rail surfboard”, where the length of straight rail that is available to the wave face is as long as possible, and so will provide more grip and hold in a straight line. This means that with both an increase in speed up front, and grip in the rails the surfer can potentially noseride in a greater variety of positions on the wave, and isn’t limited to the more technical steeper curve right against the curl - ultimately creating a more user friendly board and experience.
The downside of wider “Log” style boards is that those straight rails can be hard to break out of the wave face when you want to turn, and so boards of this style often use other features such as increased tail rocker to help the rider initiate the turn. They can also become quite hard to control in bigger, more powerful waves, when their abundant surface area can start to generate too much lift.
Finally an outline that has pushed the widest part of the board forwards of the mid point and continue on from what we mentioned before about increasing lift in the front portion of the board. Boards like Donald Takaya...WORD LIMIT REACHED.