QUADS

There is a movement in surfing and it's Quads.

Quads have been around since Glen Winton and Bruce McKee invented them in 1982.
Since then there was resurgence 5 or 6 years ago with William Stretch Riedel working with Nathan Fletcher to repopularise quad boards.
They did a great job stimulating surfers to think about their equipment beyond the bounds of high performance Thrusters in small surf and also waves of consequence.
Quads have been working well on big boards for mega spots like Waimea, Mavericks, Cloud Break and recently paddling in at Jaws in Maui.
But maybe the quads have been on the wane lately in smaller surf.
Enter Kelly Slater.
Kelly has singlehandedly repopularised the Quad in small surf but not as you would think.
Kelly's claim has been that quads perform better in the barrel. He has been on about this for 2 or so years and performances during the Pipe Masters at last years contest on a fishy looking quad did not help the cause. But this year Kelly is on more normal looking good wave quad boards.
Kelly's 5'9 quad option round tail board
Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson have done testing in Barrels at the Gold Coast, Kirra etc, in the early part of this year and come up with the same conclusion as KS, that quads are good or unbelievable in the barrel.
At the recent Quik Pro in Hossegor I noticed a lot of guys in and around the event had a round tail performance quad board in their quiver that they were preferring to surf at La Graviere in the epic hollow beach break waves.
It also seems like Kelly, although he has been going backwards and forwards from quad to Thruster, that lately he is tending to surf the quad in everything including recently at the Hurley Pro Trestles, a definite performance type wave.
Parko surfed his quad at La Graviere and also chose to surf it in every heat in Portugal.

I think what is happening right now is that surfing a board in epic conditions, ie barrelling kegs, gives you confidence and an affinity with that board. These guys are surfing pretty epic surf consistently enjoying the quad and it's not surprising they are going back to them and surfing quads in more diverse and normal conditions.

So very interesting, we will see where it goes.
My man at Hossegor - Shyama Buttonshaw - ready to test his 5'10 quad option roundtail
I am working on numerous quad option boards and my range will reflect this in the coming months.
Will be introducing a performance quad option round tail Thruster, as well as at least 3 small wave quad option models that we are testing at the moment.

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