The everyman’s magic stick. iPhone Photo: @Juicewhale
I am a very average surfer. In fact, as much as it pains me to say, for the amount that I surf, I kind of suck. I’ve been messing around with different shapes for a long time now –longboards, single fins, even strange little squared-off shapes, and of course, a whole pile of different shortboards. I’ve never liked the idea of surfing one surfboard for every condition, and since I don’t get paid to surf, I just want to have as much fun as possible. Because I live in LA, shortboards aren’t always a go-to. Until a few months ago, if it wasn’t head-high, I’d usually grab a longboard off the rack. But that’s changed now. It’s changed because I found the right board for me. Turns out it’s a 6’1 Slipstream from 7S.
Surfing shouldn’t be a struggle. It shouldn’t be frustrating, at least not once you’re through with the initial learning stages. Surfing should be fun. It should be fun because you’re sliding around on nature’s slip-and-slide like a little kid on the bluest, wettest front lawn on the planet. And having the wrong surfboard is like riding a BMX on a velodrome, or taking a gokart on an F1 track, or dancing without music. Still kind of fun, but not even close to the kind of fun you could be having. Why would you screw yourself out of fun?
A few months ago, I walked into our office to find a very large box propped up beside my desk. I’d ordered a surfboard from a designer/shaper name Richie Lovett, who knows pretty much everything there is to know about surfboards. Richie’s an ex-pro with 10 years of WCT experience under his belt. Like most professionals, he held his shapers close. Greg Webber, Simon Anderson (yes, that Simon Anderson), Greg Clough, Luke Short, and Chris Goulding all carved magic sticks from rough pieces of foam for him, and Richie soaked up their knowledge like a sponge soaks up water. Then, in 2005, in his tenth year of competing in the world’s best waves, Lovett’s life changed. Doctors told him he had cancer.
“It’s one of those life changing moments, and you can’t ever prepare for that,” Lovett remembered. “You go into survival mode, and basically prioritize everything else around what you need to do to get well again.”
With his life turned upside-down and the pro tour now on the backburner, Richie set about defeating cancer, and he was determined to get back in the water as fast as possible. It turns out that would be many months later, and on boards that were very different to what he was used to.
After an invasive hip surgery to remove the cancer, Richie found himself staring down a very long road. “Following the diagnosis,” he said, “the doc explained he was going to remove the entire top section of my femur, part of the femoral shaft, and also some muscle from the side of my hip. In the back of my mind I knew my life as a surfer would change, and despite what they told me, at that point I was still holding onto the dream that one day I might return to the tour.”
Recovery involved painful rehabilitation, several months out of the water, and learning to do even the simplest things all over again. Surfing, of course, presented a challenge that seemed nearly impossible to overcome. At 33, with a new metal hip and a determination to teach himself to do the thing he loved the most, Lovett paddled out on a longboard for the first time. Even the basics were completely foreign. Almost all the power in his back leg was gone. He had to wear his leash on his front leg, as the tension on his bad leg from a wipeout threatened to ruin all his hard work. For the next few years, he worked his way back to fighting shape and form, riding everything from longboards and standups to hybrids, before eventually finding his way back to shortboards. It was an interesting journey, and one that could almost be described as an apprenticeship into the functionality and performance of every surfboard genre.
Then in 2007, having not been able to find what he needed in a surfboard during his recovery, Richie sat down in front of a computer to design his very first surfboard from scratch. Drawing from his recent experience and those early years of learning from some of the best shapers in the industry, he found he had an innate understanding of how a surfboard works. Soon, he was co-designing boards for Aloha Surfboards, honing his craft both behind a screen and in the shaping bay.
“It’s weird that up to that point in my life. I’d literally ridden thousands of boards, but I’d never actually shaped one,” he said. “With that said, it didn’t take long before I was hooked on the whole design and shaping process; I just loved it. You create something on screen, jump in the bay, and from there it’s a matter of test and refine. That fact that I have the skills to be my own test pilot as a real advantage too, because the feedback is immediate.”
After working with Aloha for several years, Richie moved into his current role as Brand Ambassador and designer for Global Surf Industries. One of the boards he’s come up with is called the 7S Slipstream, which, as I said before, happens to be the right board for me. His idea was to create a board that would make surfing easy, and with this functional single-board quiver, it has never been more possible. The Slipstream, with a front portion similar to a modern fish and a back half on the traditional shortboard side, is such a perfect mixture of ease and performance. Paddling hard is for suckers. If you’re anything like me, the waves you surf on a day-to-day basis aren’t world class. They’re a little slopey, rarely big, and on a regular shortboard, can be difficult to get into. I’m 6’1 and around 175 pounds – a little on the thin side (I’m wirey, damn it) and I surf enough that I want to get into as many waves as I can without completely gassing myself. When I was younger, I surfed twice a month. It was fine to run myself ragged, paddling as hard as I could for eight hours straight, then spending the next day recovering. But now I want to surf every day. I want to catch waves. Simply put, I want to increase my fun.
On first impressions, this new board looked like an interesting mix of functional shape, combined with a little tech – it’s epoxy, with what Richie describes as “a carbon fiber netting on the bottom and rails that controls the flex.” The first time I paddled out on the Slipstream, it was around three-feet with a breath of onshore wind. Not perfect, by any means, but still fun enough. On pulling up, I immediately wished I brought a longboard, and saved my new one for a better day. But I was there, the waves looked semi-fun, and I didn’t have time to drive home and grab something bigger, so I paddled out. The first wave I paddled for changed my entire perspective on shortboards. It was sloping, crumbly, and slow. The board under feet, however, made it into something entirely different. With more ease than seemed fair, the Slipsteam let me onto the wave–which, with any other surfboard that I owned, would have required a paddle-fest of such Herculean proportions that both shoulders would have dislocated. Since I expected to spend the majority of this shitty wave simply struggling to stay on it, I gave a few quick pumps to get a bit of speed. Never, on any board that I have ever ridden, have I had a response like the one I had. It was like a sensitive horse unused to being spurred. The speed off the takeoff on a shitty, sloping wave that shouldn’t have offered anything but a few quick pumps and an even quicker bog was startling, and I quickly found myself way too far ahead of where I wanted to be. The tail on the Slipstream is basically perfect for the everyday surfer. It’s nothing fancy; no gimmicks, just a smooth round tail and a nice balance of speed and flow that, for me at least, is unmatched. It allowed me to do one full wrapping carve back to where I wanted to be–which, given my skill, probably shouldn’t have been possible. But it was. The Slipstream made me a better surfer than I actually am. Or was, before I got the right board.
I’ve since ridden it on much larger days. I’ve found that boards that work well in smaller waves usually don’t work on larger days, and I half expected the Slipstream to follow suit. On a bigger 6-8 foot south swell, I headed back to the same spot. A hard offshore whipped the backs off the Pacific’s wrinkles, ironing out their faces into ruler straight lines that wrapped off the point. I counted seven people out, all scoring. The sun was just barely peeking over the hills to the east, and I nearly pissed myself with excitement. Again, I swore at myself for not bringing my other shortboard, the one I was used to, the one that I knew worked. Turns out I had no reason to be upset.
If anything, the Slipstream excelled in conditions like the ones that day. With a moderate rocker that allows for earlier take offs but also fits into those steeper waves, everything about that board on that day was perfect. My girlfriend watched from the cliff while I did one of the best turns I’ve ever done. She missed the shot, of course, but I have a snapshot in my head of exactly how it felt… and I can’t wait to do it again.
Richie Lovett’s Slipstream is a surfboard built for the average surfer. It’s built to make performance surfing easy–which, if you think about it, is exactly what all shapers are shooting for. For me, Richie’s design changed how I surf. I’m more confident, able to do things that I never could do before, and most importantly, I have more fun.
