How many times have you had a board that works better going frontside than backside or the reverse? Surfing on your forehand is a completely different animal than surfing on your backhand. I read somewhere that Tom Morey said that symmetry was one of the least important parts of surfboard design. I think that symmetry has more to do with how we want our boards to look than how we want them to surf.

Asymmetric boards have been around since the 1960's, with their main perpetrator being Carl Ekstrom who experimented with these on longboards for many years, and Morey-Pope used an offset fin on their Blue Machine model in the mid '60's . But there has been very little development since then, with the exception of asymmetric tails designed to facilitate the riding of directional point breaks.  It seemed to me, that this is a little odd. After all, isn't an asymmetric surfboard obvious (and I'm not talking about the general lack of symmetry found on most hand shaped boards).

The premise is this: As much as you'd like to weight, edge and drive your board equally on your toe side as your heal side, you can't. Your body does not bend the same way. Heel side you loose the flex/power of ankle flex. Your ass drops in a different position, and the relation of your hips to upper body is different. To boot, your front foot is (almost always) pointed somewhat forward, putting your toes 2" to 3" further forward relative to your heel from the tail of the board. Surfers may ride equally well heelside and toeside, but they do not ride the same way. Due to the design of the human body, you simply cannot.

So in theory, in order to make the board handle in much the same way on the heelside turn as it does on a toeside turn, the board would have to be asymmetric to compensate for our bodies not flexing/powering the same way. An asymmetric board would produce a symmetric ride. This was the premise used to design the asymmetric race snowboards of the 1990's. As snowboards got narrower, so the degree of asymmetry offset was reduced until it became negligeable and commercially unviable in a shrinking segment of the market, requiring 2x the number of board models (goofy/regular). But the theory that drove the initial concept remains sound.

To make a board handle the same on both turns, you need to move the hip and foil back on the heelside, shorten the rail length overall on the heelside, and give it more curve overall. The rail should also be slightly less boxy. The distance between the center fin and the side fin on heelside slightly less than on the toe side. This would give it a tighter radius turn. Conversely, the toeside of the board would be shaped a little more like a gun, with the wide point more centered, and a more gradual sweep to the rail. A centered foil and greater distance between the fins would reduce slipping out, and allow the rider to generate more drive through the turn.

Here is my first asymmetric surfboard! The toeside rail is faster and has less curve to it and the hip is a little more centered. The heelside is 1" wider, thus has more curve to the template and the hip is considerably further back. I've tried to give it a squashtail for both rails, so this means there is a dogleg in the tail to compensate (rather than going with a slated tail like the those of Carl Ekstrom which effectively makes the frontside tail a pintail. The heelside ended up being offset from the stringer in the nose as I drew the template, and then I adjusted the curve and pulled it back in that first foot so the stringer is centered, even if the curves are very different.

Board Dimentions: 5'11" x 18" x 2 1/8". Shallow single concave to flat tail.