Nev Hyman shows off the record setting surfboard that he launched friday at noonNev launches another world-record-breaker at HB
Nev Hyman is a dreamer, but what do you expect from the guy who made the biggest surfboard in history?
Today his dream to break the world record for number of people on one board was realized. Actually Nev realized the dream in Australia at Snapper in may of this year with 47 people on the board, but today Nev broke his own record. This time he put 60 junior lifeguards on the board and rode it through the Huntington shorebreak.
It took a crowd of about 40 people half an hour to wax the enormous board. But there was a problem, the sponsorship logos on the board, made of vinyl and stuck on top of the fiberglass, couldn’t be waxed, which made for entertaining viewing as the crowd of pro surfers and lifeguards clamored aboard. While the board was being towed outside, a set came in and a few people fell off. “It was so funny,” said Nev. “This 3-foot set is coming in and a bunch of pro surfers are squealing like little girls”
The organizers had a buoy hooked up to a laptop that allowed them to know exactly when a big enough set would come. After a few minutes, Surfline’s Sean Collins announced that a set was on its way. The ski gunned it, but the board weighs 1200 pounds without 60 people on it, and the wave runner struggled. The ski wasn’t able to get enough speed to catch the wave, which left the board stuck inside for the second wave of the set. The board got caught by the second wave and ended up dragging the ski with the driver falling off.
After the mishap, the driver got back on and towed the giant board into a small inside section. As the board cruised toward shore, I was expecting the 60 stowaways to go over the nose of the board when the 6-foot fins caught in the shallow sand, but instead all three giant fins snapped off. Kids from the crowd rushed forward, grabbing the giant fins as souvenirs.
I talked to Nev after his future plans for the board. Next up is a trip across America raising money and awareness for disaster relief charities. “My ultimate goal with this, after it has gone through the US raising money, is to bring it back to Indonesia, maybe aboard the Quiksilver Crossing and get the kids in Nias on the board, show what the world has done to help them”
Nev is the kind of guy who has a lot of projects on the table at one the same time, besides building the world’s largest surfboard he has designed a new kind of surfboard that he claims is both lighter and stronger than a Tuflite. He showed me this board starting the demonstration by laying the board on the ground and jumping on it, the thing flexed a lot, but no damage.
This new technology uses a triple stringer along the rails of the board, the inside foam core (there are two) is covered in fiberglass, but the fiberglass that can move over the core, the fiberglass is not adhered to the foam, they can slide against each other. This is then covered in another layer of foam and then fiberglass. The result is a really light board with amazing flex.
When you go into a turn the board flexes, and then as you come out that flex snaps back generating a lot of speed. It is the same principle that ski racers use coming out of a turn, and apparently it works really good on a surfboard. The one problem I could see with the board is that if you’re in the middle of a big bottom turn and the board is suddenly really flexed it is going to have a lot more rocker, so it could push a lot of water.
But no matter how much it flexes, there’s one guarantee: it will never push as much water as yesterday’s world record-breaker.