It’s not often a surfer purposefully looks for bad waves. Almost never, we’d wager. Sure, bad waves are easy to find — far too easy — but perhaps that’s only because we’re not looking for them. “Timmy Reyes spent the last two weeks looking for bad waves,” reads a release on Firewire’s site. “He couldn’t find any because Huntington Beach was having its first round of south swells of the season, with maxing conditions.”
Timmy was looking for bad waves because he was testing out a new design called the Twice Baked, a refined version of the Baked Potato. It’s designed for excelling in junk conditions, which, as much as it sucks, happen far more often than perfect conditions. Eventually, though, he found those perfectly bad conditions he was looking for in Huntington Beach, where the waves were as bad as they were crowded. And they were very crowded.
The Twice Baked, if you can believe it, is thinner in the nose and tail than the Baked Potato was. It’s got a bit more of a tapered rail, as well, and inside that short, wide plank is a whole lot of speed. “It’s still so fast down the line because of its generous width not common in shortboards, even among other popular grovelers,” reads Firewire’s description.
Dan Mann, the brains behind the Twice Baked (and a whole lot more), prefers to ride the Twice Baked as a quad, preferably with stiffer fins. That’s because the board has a refined the V bottom and double concave. And for a whole bunch of surfers coming out of quarantine, a board like this might be just the ticket to getting your wave count back up to normal — even when the waves aren’t all that great.
