Trailer: Stab In The Dark with Mick Fanning

With three years of Stab In The Dark‘s firmly in the rearview, this year Stab zigged, then zagged, in the Search For The World’s Best Surfboard. 

With his retirement announcement in early-2018, this year’s SITD Mystery Surfer was pretty much always going to be Mick—the perfect swan song for Australia’s most recognizable surfer.

But we needed an angle, a narrative hump to overcome; we needed to ensue there were some unexpected twists and turns from Australia’s highest paid surfer. 

We needed Conflict. 

So we scrapped the Stab In The Dark PU and wooden-stringered script that had served us so well with Julian, Dane, and Jordy, and refocused the project’s purpose (at least for this year). 

With regional players and international brands alike now pushing their own Proprietary Tech—which is to say boards comprising some combination of stringerless EPS blanks, carbon fiber, and epoxy resin—there’s never been more construction options for surfers looking to add a high performance shortboard to their quiver. Nearly every surfer we know has at least one trusty “epoxy” as a daily driver we worked with Sustainable Surf this year and all boards were also “eco-certified” as part of their construction. 

But not Mick. Despite DHD pushing new constructions on Mick many, many times over their decades-long shaper/surfer relationship, Mick’s experience with “epoxy” is, as he puts it, “slim to none.” They just never felt, well, right to Mick. 

Which made him the perfect Lab Rat this year. And let us tell you, the results are very impressive.

Thanks for our sponsors Awayco, Sustainable Surf and Rip Curl.