“You get 60 to 70 people plus the weight of the board, you’re over 10,000lb, you’re over five tons,” says Miller. A trial run in Huntington Harbor is also planned. Nothing off the lip.” While HB is not worried that the board will float, they did bring in nautical engineers to do displacement testing and determine how much laminate is needed to hold 60 people. “But the idea for this board is to keep it going straight and not turn. “The original thought was we were going to do a thruster,” Bowser says, referring to the common three-fin setup. They brought in Stewart to help shape the board some more, added tow holes near the rails, and routed and laminated the fin boxes in place. They glued a basswood stringer (a piece of wood that usually runs down the middle of a board) to one piece of foam and fit the two halves together to form the blank before glassing both sides.īowser estimates around 50 gallons of epoxy resin were used on the board. In April, Westerly Marine, a boat manufacturer in Santa Ana owned by Lynn Bowser, began assembling the board. MouldCAM was able to cut a giant piece of EPS foam to spec, machine it into two halves and send it cross country via tractor trailer. The result is the Big Board, constructed from a foam blank much like any short board but on an enormous scale.įirst, working from Hyman’s tweaked CAD drawing, Huntington Beach hooked up with mouldCAM, a Rhode Island company that owns a CNC router big enough to cut something up to 85ft long. When that failed, HB decided to build their own. Recently, when the idea of a repeat attempt was floated, Huntington Beach tried to get Hyman’s board, which is still in southern California. No one from Guinness was there to adjudicate, and the ride didn’t count. “You just showed up and you could get on the board.” But there was one major problem. “It was totally unscripted,” says the Visit Huntington Beach CEO, Kelly Miller. A few months later, after Hyman’s board was flown to the States, it was ridden by 60 people in Huntington Beach. In 2005, a 39ft board designed by Australian shaper Nev Hyman set the record with 47 people aboard at Snapper Rocks in Queensland, Australia. The current attempt to set a Guinness World Record is actually HB’s second bite at the cherry. The seaside city, site of the annual US Open of Surfing, is home to the Surfers’ Hall of Fame and Surfing Walk of Fame, as well as the Big Board’s intended final resting place, the International Surfing Museum. The Epic Big Board Ride is the latest endeavor undertaken by Huntington Beach to cement its reputation as SurfCityUSA, a trademark it already owns after winning a 2008 legal battle with northern California rival Santa Cruz. To accomplish this, the 11ft-wide, 16in-thick board, holding 60 to 70 standing watermen and waterwomen, will be towed by JetSkis past the break line and on to a wave that they will attempt to ride unassisted for 10 seconds. From there, the 1,350lb board will be launched into the surf south of the Huntington Beach pier in an attempt to set two Guinness World Records for “World’s Largest Surfboard” and “Most People Riding a Surfboard at Once”. On Saturday 20 June, the Orange County beach town will transport it from nearby yacht and boat builder Westerly Marine to the Huntington Beach shoreline. Of course, the Big Board is designed to be big, as in “world’s largest”. “I’ve been calling it the Megalodon,” local board shaper Chiron Stewart says, referring to the extinct species of giant shark. And what “it” is, more than anything, is big. Unlike a boat, the Big Board is not a “she”.
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