A Slick Explanation Of The Midlength As Gateway Drug

Midlengths are having a moment right now. 

Even typing that sentence sends shivers down our spine. 

Regardless, with any sudden renewed interest in a genre, there are good and bad takes on outlines and rails and fin set ups, bastardized plugs with enough foam for two decent standard shortboards. 

So it was with great care and attention to detail that Channel Islands seem to have approached designing their controversially popular CI Mid.

“At Channel Islands, everything we do is performance oriented,” says Britt Merrick. “We’re not satisfied with just making boards that go straight and fast. We want speed, flow and glide in that feeling we’re all after—but you’ve got to be able to do the turns that you want to, and you’ve got to be able to do your best surfing. So that’s the philosophy that we took into our CI Mid project.”“One of the cool things we have at CI, having been around for 50 years, is this incredible design library of templates and history, and rockers and all the things that go into making a board,” adds Britt.

“In the ’70s, my dad had a board called the Huevo Caliente, which was this really beautiful looking midlength, egg sort of board. We’d been looking at pictures of that around the factory, and felt pretty inspired by that so we dipped back into the archives, and pulled out some of those old templates to accomplish those curves that created the CI Mid. We also updated the bottom so that it performs like a modern board but still has that classic feel and vibe that my dad created so long ago.”

Click in to the edit above for some very, very precise surfing and some well-considered thoughts on alt-design’s most dangerous opiate.