THE CHAMELEON

Posted in: News

Not long back when the legendary Buttons passed away a picture of him squatting on the grass showing his little squashed stinger swallow with a single fin right up the board, caught my eye. It took me back to that era (let’s just call it the green era or even the phsicadelic) where these guys were flowing pivoting and sliding all over the place albeit all so gracefully. Having the flyer so far up the board in line with a step in the bottom line gave them this forward release consequently forcing the tail into a control slide which was a direct contrast to the power school in both the US and OZ at the time.

I think only Hawaiians could have gotten away with it, or at least made it a popular endeavour. Anyway back to the point of this little experiment. I have used this type of design for an  experiment to see how many functional fin set ups can be put into one particular board, and indeed what works and what does not! I did not particularly want to do all that tail sliding, but I did want to include that facility just in case I came across some good buds! Seriously though, I had a ball through the side slipping era, so I did want an opportunity to re live it, but this was not the main focus or indeed having said that, the experiment was to include as many themes as possible into one board. So I put in an extra-long box to facilitate the good buds so to speak, thus allowing for the big single fin to be rammed further north.

Another idea was to keep this fin further north but to prevent the tail slide by including two quad type trailors south of the alpha single. So far this has proved to be a little tight but a little more shuffling may be needed to either discount the idea or not. Wait! There is more- after all the Chameleon has many colours! I made sure that the positions of the other 4 fin plugs were stragically placed, and I might add- had an inch of play to facilitate a 2 +1 set up.

This set up I have surfed and love the feel. I have not mentioned this yet but the big single I am using is the FCS fin which has a ball bearing mechanism in the tab which allows you to just lift the back end out while in the water and slide it forward or back to experiment with every wave that comes by in the one session. In one session of late, I moved it about five times allowing me to really hone down the right position for that day. Indeed it may need to be moved again for another day when the waves are different.

I have been experimenting with the 2+2 idea a lot lately also, so I made sure the fin plugs would also be in the right place for a quad where the bigger fins were in the back and clustered further forward toward the front fins allowing for a more pivotal arc, but without any slide since the fins were bigger in the back and could afford to be further forward. This application just flew and pivoted perfectly (for a quad). Mission accomplished here! The standard quad position had also been included and once again the 1” play allowed this to happen.  On those smaller beach break days when you are surfing those slow close outs, you want the quad to be very loose and turn early so you can make some distance before it’s all over. The Chameleon came up trumps again in this department also. I think I still need to catch a lot more waves with this board in order to learn more, but even at this point I can see there are many out there that get bored pretty quickly after the novelty of a new board wears off. Well, it will take them a year for the novelty to wear off with this little number!

In closing I might add the shape of the Chameleon does not specifically have to be the same as this one, but it does need to have some width and to be relatively short.   So who’s up for it? Sorry no free buds with this one!