What Happens When A World-Class High Performance Shaper Tries A Mid-Length With Harrison Roach?

Surfing is full of unjustifiable dogmas, sacred cows and superstitions.

Nothing illustrates this point better than the divisiveness of Mid-Lengths and their place in surf culture.

On one side you have people saying that they sacrifice performance for wave-gluttony and training wheels, on the other you have people saying that they’re not proper longboards. In this binary a mid-length is neither here nor there. They exist in a taboo grey-area in the middle of surfboard dogmaland copping hate from both camps. 

Harrison Roach’s latest 4 minute clip for J.S’s breaks down the binary. Scored to Dr Sue’s Unusual Practice, Harrison radically dismantles the claim that you can’t have it both ways, riding their new model, the Big Baron. 

As a career-long shortboard pedantic with a history of disdain for quirky, alternative craft that looks great but surfs shit, I approach everything with an unhealthy degree of suspicion. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ grumbles the old dog in me. 

But if you can thread tubes, do turns, catch more waves and float across flat sections on mid-lengths, am I not the frustrated victim of surfboard dogma trying to ride my holy cow backward down the escalator? 

Much reflection, much dissonance, much repenting. 

Allow Harrison to corrupt your worldview.

Get your hands on one, here.