Rob Machado is a man who knows surfboards. He’s ridden them all. He knows the little adjustments to a shape that will make a surfboard do a certain thing, and he’s spent years looking for a board that does it all. And while that will never truly be possible—some boards do things that others just can’t—he thinks he might’ve figured out a shape that’s pretty damn close. “It felt incredible,” he remembered. “It was exactly how I imagined it. This board feels good… this is it. This is the one.”
While he was doing a few days of test-driving at Teahupoo, he happened to see a kid who surfed really well. “I kept seeing this grom out there,” he said. “He was paddling into these waves and sliding down the face getting these rad little tubes. I was like, ‘woah, this kid’s good, man.'”
A few days passed, and Rob decided to go find that grom and do something that he most likely won’t ever forget. “We took him out to this little reef pass,” Rob said. “It was kind of like the perfect scenario. Once we got back to the dock, I was like, ‘it’s yours, man. Keep it.'”
While Rob can surely get many more of that magic shape, what he got from giving it away was probably far more special.
