Rob Machado showing off the board named for his hometown. Images: Firewire/Todd Glaser
You may remember a few months ago when Rob Machado teased the surf world with a board he designed with a question in mind: “What if you could only ride one board for the rest of your life?” We were introduced to his creation via a Hurley produced video that ended with Rob giving his board to a small boy who liked surfing. Now, after a little fine-tuning and a few tweaks, that board has become Rob’s latest shape, which they’re calling the Seaside, for obvious reasons.
It’s an evolution of an older board that (one assumes) sold very well called the Go Fish. “The Go Fish feels skatey and loose and I love it,” Machado said. “Riding it for a couple years made me want to have some sessions that feel more high performance – more carves, tighter turns. So the Seaside is about refining… less area in the tail, narrowing the tips of the swallow, creating more curve and narrowing the nose. All elements for ripping while the Go Fish stays cruisey and fun. They’re both in my van all the time.”
Of course, one must remember that Rob Machado is Rob Machado, and a board does not a surfer make. Still, though, it’s encouraging to note that we appear to have gotten away from the wafer-thin, heavily rockered surfboards that Kelly Slater made popular, effectively making a decade of surfing less fun for those who decided a board does a surfer make. Many shapes that come from Rob’s brain are good boards for the everyday surfer surfing everyday waves.
Those tweaks we mentioned? The Seaside is exclusively a quad. “I decided that if I was going to make a quad I would make a quad that’s strictly a quad,” Machado explained. “Design the concaves and bottom contours around that. I actually redesigned the entire concave setup that I’ve been using on the Moonbeam and Go Fish, and did it with a quad only setup in mind so that it all works together with the new fin set.”
It’s also built in Helium, a material Firewire made that is “an alternative sandwich skin material to the existing FST build. HELIUM combines this new composite with a redesigned parabolic wood rail that includes both Balsa and Paulownia woods. The end result is that HELIUM is even lighter than FST, a slightly faster flex and rebound characteristic, as well as a higher breakpoint.” Whatever all that means, it sure sounds good. Marketing genius!
On November 15, the Seaside will be in surf shops in the U.S. and in Australia. Europe has to wait until January, those poor suckers.
