Mike Olson grew up surfing in the ocean where every wave is different and in recent years began using the consistent wake behind a boat as the perfect environment to experiment and test surfboard design theories. In the course of his experiments he became obsessed with designing a wake surf board that would have the feel of a high performance ocean surfboard behind the boat.
Wake Expansion Theory
The ocean is huge and wakes are small… you can’t create a bigger wake but, you can experiment with board design to create a more efficient faster, looser shape that will expand the usable area of the wake and create a more surfy feel.
Straight is fast… so he straightened the rail lines. A hard tuck is fast so he put a hard skim like tuck on the rails. A wide tail block is fast, accelerates quickly and has lots of pop for performance surf airs… so Mike put a nice square tail with scallops on it for grip.
He also needed the board to be responsive, quick turning and fit the tight transitions of a wake. He narrowed the plan shape for quick precise rail to rail transitions and he used a much higher surf style rocker than is traditionally used on wake surfers to allow deep carves in small spaces.
The addition of narrow shape and high rocker can tend to slow a board down… this is where Particle Acceleration Dish (P.A.D.) comes in.
Particle Accelleration Disk
Water particles flowing across the bottom surface of a board and dipping through a shallow concave dish remain laminated to the board but, have to move faster across the bottom surface of the board than particles moving straight under it… the result is lift and speed. Mike experimented with various options and put our dish concave right between the front fins to insure it was in a consistently highly pressured area of your board. The speed P.A.D. creates more than compensates for the narrow plan shape and deep rocker allowing you to downsize your board, travel to formerly unreachable regions of your wake and enjoy that deep rocker surfy feel.
How do we know this isn’t just a monstrous, slippery conspiracy theory… Mike built the same Crak’n board with and without P.A.D. and the difference is night and day… P.A.D. is much faster… more speed is more surfy and more surfy is more fun… that was all we needed to know!
