Simon Travels: QLD, Australia 2007
March 2007: WCT QUIKSILVER PRO, SNAPPER ROCKS
This year they had fabulous to pretty good surf on the Snapper. The fabled super bank was lined up beautifully just like groomed snow on the Super Trail at Thredbo.
Stand out performers were off course Mick (the first repeat winner of the Goldie three Musketeers MF, Deano & Parko), Bede Durbidge (just sacked by Billabong and as a result without a major sponsor) and Josh Kerr who lived up to the hype in his first WCT contest, which is not easy. KS is still looking dangerous and special mention to Danny Wills who was surfing beautifully connecting turns, floating and carving with speed, grace and precision. Back to Mick he looked better than ever, the usual lightning speed mixed with a dynamic vertical element defying the laws of physics.
Spending time around our Queensland board manufacturing plants you get to see how Mick operates. He spends a lot of time on his boards making sure the glassing (weight and strength) and sanding (edges and fins are right) even keeping abreast of what blank is being used as well of course working closely with DH on the shapes and design improvements. For board makers thats a lot of pressure but what it does do is keep you focused, and takes you to the next level of quality performance equipment, which does filter down to production boards throughout the Base network.
My mission at this years event was to take my own design program on the PSS pre-shaping machine (located at the back of Kirra) to the next level by working with Dayyan Neve on boards for the Quik contest. We had a 4 board program which included 2 models, 3 rocker variations and 2 different concave bottoms, starting with the SXE and XFC models with single concaves. The SXE felt the best for Dayyan fitting into the tight pocket at Snapper a little better than the XFC. Next we applied single to double concave to the SXE producing a board that was pretty close. In the mean time I was working on a slight rocker variation to the XFC that I thought looked good. This was the 4th board in the program and turned out to be the one (see model development and team update).
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