Red Bull Decades ep five: Mayhem’s Hydro-Flex Rocket

Welcome back to Red Bull Decades. This series, based on some of the world’s best surfers riding some of the most iconic boards in surfing history, has so far seen Kolohe Andino, Julian Wilson, Ian Walsh and Jamie O’Brien riding a Greg Noll Elephant Gun, a Gerry Lopez Pipeline Gun, a Glenn Pang x Martin Potter Town and Country Twin Fin, and the Channel Islands x Kelly Slater 6’1″, shaped by Al Merrick. We now land a little more into the future, at the hands of Mr Matt Biolos, who gifts the crew a caddy of Hydro-Flex Rockets. So, what’s Hydro-Flex mean? “Instead of using wood stringers, we opted to go with a composite fibreglass carbon stringer,” says Matt. “It allows the board to flex a lot further without giving out and breaking. Then they were vacuum glassed with a 3D glassing technology, and that really fuses the Epoxy resin into the blank and sucks out all the unneeded resin to keep the board really light and really strong.”