Something started when the Chapter 11 crew drove north up 101 and raided the Channel Islands factory a few years back. Maybe “Out of the Rafters” sparked a timeless theme in surfing — that yellowed boards are still worth riding. Even if they look a bit odd at first glance.
“It’s not like a fish at all,” Dane Reynolds said of an obscure Channel Islands model he pulled out for the video below. “It’s like a gun with a twin fin on it.” This clip doesn’t feature Dane himself on the board, but it does show him hyping it up and his pals Eithan Osborne and Matt McCabe having a blast on it.
This CI model came out in 1995 as Rob Machado’s TwinFinner, hence the name MTF. Dane first rode his (a 5’8” x 18 ⅛” x 2 ¼” blade) more than a decade ago in Mexican pointbreaks, but this model has lived mostly in obscurity.
As you’ll see from Eithan’s turns at Rincon and Matt’s Emma Wood antics, this thing works. Based on the two boards on offer in this video, it looks like the foam up front and thin swallowtail in the rear get this thing moving with minimal effort. “I got so much speed where I’d just stand up and not move,” Eithan said after riding his newer, whiter version. “I was just going so fast.”
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“It goes so sick,” said Dane, who is not shy about criticizing a board’s shortcomings. “Look at how thin that tail is. Honestly, at the time I was just into trying different shit. I was on your, saw this thing, saw it looked rad and wanted to try it. But more so for the challenge. It’s so small for me now, but you can tell when a board has the hydrodynamics. Like a good board flows over water so sick and has the best turning point.”
Is there a moral to this story? Probably not, but it’s worth remembering: diamond hands with old boards.
Related: Watch Now: “Out of the Rafters Bali”, Featuring Dane Reynolds, Shane Sykes, and More