Carl Ekstrom

"Yeah, well, Carl Ekstrom, see I'd worked with Carl Ekstrom, and he and Al Nelson were the two main people who taught me how to shape. Carl had an asymmetrical design concept he had worked with. I noticed that the swallowtail would be, in essence, overlapping two asymmetric templates, even though the outline of the board would be symmetrical. The continuous line of the swallowtail, if you took an imaginary line up each side of the board would be an asymmetrical, and each side would overlap and lay on top of each other. That concept appealed to me, because the asymmetrical has a very positive function, especially in one direction. In this case we were going to have, we should have, the benefit of that in both directions." -
Bear Mirandon, late sixties dual fin, twin pin, swallowtail pioneer, excerpt from Hydrodynamica interview, 2003. photos by Bear Mirandon & Ryan Field (2006)


in, Hydrodynamica