Muzza's Trippin' - "THE STINGER FISH "

The Purpose of The Stinger Fish

The purpose of this design is to experiment with deck contours to enable extreme bight and drive

Board Specifications

5.9 X 19 5/8 X 1 7/8
Nose lift 4 1/8 Tail lift 2 1/16
Planshape Flyer swallow
Bottom Shape Forward concave running into 4ml tail vee.

Muzza's Ramblings

The big feature of this board is the deck shape. Up front I have designed a concaved deck that sits over a concaved bottom which meant that the rails up front were much thicker than the centre stringer which is quite the opposite of normal rolled decks. At the other end in the tail slice I have designed a very radical veed deck which sat over a vee in the bottom. I tried to keep these slices as far apart as possible to allow them to interpolate without any weird bumps along the rail line and this I did astonishingly well (must give credit to the program). The deep vee top and bottom in the back half made for a very thin bighting rail and at the other end the rail is uncharacteristically thick for the centre stringer thickness. Check the profile of this board and it appears that t he tail is much too thick but put it under your arm and it actually feels front heavy due to the rail thicknesses (very thin at the back and very thick up front). I guess the whole point of this experiment with the use of a quad fin set up and a flyer strategically positioned in front of the leading edge of the front fins is to create a sort of pendulum form of drive. The profile below also shows the extra thickness in the stringer in the back half of the board which was the opposite to the rail line due to the deck contours.

Prediction

Before I go too far with this I gotta say that this design was inspired by a fish I saw shaped by some creative mind in Sydney whose name escapes me as I write and what his intentions were I am not too sure however when I got mine out of the machine I had a pretty good idea where it would excel and where it may fail. The pendulum turn is one where the front feels heavy and is swung hard and once it gets there it drags the tail along with considerable momentum. The thinnish rails in the tail aided also by the bight of the 2 fins on rail I feel sure will give the board unprecedented bight whilst the boatish rails up front combined with the widish nose area will allow the surfer something to really push on, thus delivering great drive for a small fish. The flyer position almost up as far as the old stinger design will also add to the pendulum action. It will also be interesting how the deep veed deck feels like under the arches. Many deck grips build in high arches for the same reason which I think is increased rail to rail control.

Results

To date Brooko has clocked up the most water time on it and was quite excited about how it went. He said he could not spin it out no matter how hard he tried and also noticed how much drive it had for such a small fish. I will have a testimonial from him and also Steph Gilmore who took it to Indo recently.

In Troy Brook's Words -

"This one was a surprise to me, muzza trips out a bit with some crazy designs but this one had something too it. At first it looked weird, a big VEE deck in the tail and deck concave through the middle. It paddled really well and surfed sharp. From 3ft Snapper to 1ft Broken Head I had fun on it. On a down the line wave like snapper it had plenty on run and speed off the start like a normal Fish. The best thing was I could lay it over as hard as I wanted and I couldn't slide it out. It would just carve all the way back around. Most fish shaped board are a bit skittery on rail but this just ripped around. I could still get the fins loose out of the lip and slide the tail out. Very fun board. Big tick in the box for this one"

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