1999-2002 Naish 8'5" boards....

[swchandler]

Never heard of him, but I live in Santa Barbara. We had our local shapers back in the late 80s, but more often then not, their real focus was making surfboards. I bought a couple custom sailboards from Dave Johnson at Progressive Surfboards.

[dllee]

Yeah, Kevin was a local Berkeley sailboard shaper, from '80 thru around '86 or so, and the whole of Berkeley's race crew bought wave boards from him to sail at Waddell.
Certainly nothing like my surfboard shapers Robin Prodanovich, Tim Bessell, Roger Hinds, or Steve Morgan, who are internationally known.
Robin made my a 7'7" x 23 swallow tail twin fin wave board in '84, which worked well except for MY specified strap placements, which I had to move.
That was spring of 1984.

[AfterDarkMark]

I have the orange, red and yellow boards from 1999, and they are great!
When I first moved to the Gorge in '99, I bought a 8'7" yellow flame freeride used from Eddie Patricelli. It had won out over the ten or so other boards I had demoed. Partly because it was so fast and also because it could handle the sharp Gorge rocks, unlike RRD, etc. I have to disagree with Iso about it turning like a school bus, it turns fairly tight for its size, IMHO. I still ride it, esp. in the ocean. I have to second Iso on Naishs being great through the years across the board, pun intended. I've enjoyed my orange 8'4" Wave (69 ltr), for high winds, 35 to 55. I wanted a '99 red flame 8'5" Wave (78 ltr) for a long time, finally found one 2 years ago. It's been great fun on typical Gorge days, although I wish the rocker were a tad flatter to plane earlier and handle lighter coast winds better. Same with the Orange. I guess the flatter Yellow spoiled me! It was great fun to demo the light blue flame 8'6" one time and I had a blast! Seemed very smooth and fast for a wave board, almost like the Freerides.

[isobars]