These two make some seriously great surfboards. Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
For quite a few years now, John John Florence and his long-time shaper Jon Pyzel have been creating a pretty incredible lineup of surfboards. The Ghost family are John’s shapes of choice, and since surfing evolves, so too do the surfboards. The newest addition is called the Power Tiger.
Florence and Pyzel know a lot about surfboards. Working together with Pyzel’s knowledge of shaping and Florence’s knowledge of surfing, they fine-tune endlessly, honing dimensions and rails and fin placement. It’s a never-ending process, but Florence loves it.
“This has been a really fun process for me, continually refining our shapes in the ‘Ghost family’ over the years,” Florence said. “With these boards, we started with the model I get the most excited to ride and worked back from there.”
The Ghost — which Florence was referring to as his model of choice — is a surfboard made for waves with that famous Hawaiian juice. But not every day of surfing will bring those waves, so Pyzel whipped up the Red Tiger for waves with a little less oomph. But of course, there are the in-between days where neither was suited perfectly.
“I surfed Rocky Point and a few other similar waves a lot last winter, and I kept finding days where it wasn’t powerful enough for the Ghost, but it also wasn’t weak enough to where I felt good on the Red Tiger,” Florence explained. “We worked through a couple of changes to the point where Pyzel started writing Red Tiger ‘Power’ on my stringer, and somehow that became the Power Tiger.”
The Power Tiger has now made its way into the official Pyzel lineup, and for Florence, it’s a staple of his quiver for those middling days.
“I’m pretty excited about how it works on those in between days,” he said, “feeling like I get all the speed I would want and I can still push it as hard as possible through turns.”
