If The Happy’s Master-Craftsman Is Drawing These Lines, Imagine What You Could Do

Channel Islands lead designer Britt Merrick and team manager Nathaniel Curran recently had the opportunity to head up to the Surf Ranch. Its perfectly shaped waves were the ideal place to test out Britt’s new all-around shortboard model called the Happy.

“The Happy is a super approachable shortboard design built to give surfers the freedom to easily go wherever their mind takes them,” explains Britt. “It’s an all-in-one board we originally made for Dane Reynolds and our World Tour surfers who wanted a single model they can scale up or down with ease vs bringing several different ones to meet their needs. What we’ve learned from our R&D on the Happy is that its foam forward design helped us reach our goal of seamlessly scaling the same model to step-up dimensions—especially with round tail—without any hiccups.”

Britt went on to explain that it has low entry rocker and strategically placed forward volume that allows the board to paddle well, get up to speed quickly, and perform extremely well in the tube, while being easy to ride. Single concave under the front foot, transitioning into double between the fins, and flat off the tail give the perfect combination of speed and control. To harness all that speed, Happy’s refined rails, thinned out tail and curvy rear rocker make for a highly responsive board that is also extremely forgiving through critical maneuvers, and it holds like a mutha – no matter how hard you turn. It’s a board that scales nicely to a step-ups, with surfers like Zeke Lau using it all last winter in Hawaii to our team in Bali using it as their go-to step-up on bombing Indo walls.

We’ve recently tested the Happy in fun-to-solid conditions in Central America, with a corresponding Joyride dropping next week. Stay tuned, and check out the Happy here.