Daniel “Tomo” Thomson looks at surfboard design a little differently than most. He’s not into fads. He’s into making designs that work, and it’s an ever-changing process. As with any good design, many facets of it borrow from the past. That’s how evolution works, after all: take the good and scrap the bad. Mix in a little bit of forward-thinking design genius and a dash of aeronautical ingenuity, and you’ve got the El Tomo Fish, a recently released bit of weirdness made from foam.
As it turns out, there’s a lot of Bob Simmons in the El Tomo Fish. “I was super inspired by all these mathematical formulas that he wrote for his planing hulls,” Tomo explained. “I was like, ‘this is such a higher-level engineering thought process that’s going into surfboard design than anyone’s ever done that I was aware of in surfing.'”
So where’d the idea for that strange-looking tail come from? Well, the “jet-fighter tail,” as Tomo calls it, is a little chunk of Simmons, too. “It’s through the inspiration of Bob Simmons as an aeronautics engineer and how he applied the thought processes and design processes of aircraft into his surfboards. At a certain point, I was like, ‘well, if Bob was doing that in the ’50s and looking into aircraft design to inspire a surfboard, why can’t I look at the most cutting edge aircraft of the modern era?'”
