WSL Longboard Tour Is ON!   Now that the WSL shortboarding world tour has ended for the season, the focus has moved to the longboard tour, which has two championship events on the roster, as well as a 1000-point qualifier in Brazil in November. The longboard world tour kicks off this week on September 29, as 36 of the world’s best longboarders (18 men and 18 women) head to the Surf Ranch in Lemoore, California. The world’s most famous wave pool hosted a specialty longboard event in 2020, but this is the first time that results at the Surf Ranch will count toward the cumulative world title. Kelly Slater’s wave is well-suited to longboarding, as it is a long, perfect, relatively sectionless peeler that tops out at around chest- to head-high—pretty much every longboarders dream setup. While the Cuervo Surf Ranch Classic is the first longboard world tour event of 2021, 🤙🤙 the rankings from the abbreviate 2020 season are still in play when it comes to crowning a world champion. Points from the February 2020 event at Noosa Heads, Australia, will be combined with points from the Surf Ranch, and the final event of the 2020/21 world tour will follow shortly...

🍒 Cherry Picker 🍒 Ben Skinner is one of the world’s best performance longboarders, and a master shaper as well. But lately he has had to step outside of his comfort zone and focus more on traditional logging. Over the past year, the Longboard World Tour (under the guidance of Devon Howard) transitioned away from performance surfing and more toward traditional surfing, emphasizing single fin logs, extended noserides, and powerful, traditional turns. Ben loves logging as much as the next guy, and is an excellent noserider, but over the years had specifically focused on performance longboarding because that’s what was required in world tour events. Now with the focus returning to traditional surfing, he started tinkering with a single fin log, which he ultimately took with him to New York for the world tour event last year. After that event, Ben realized that this was the perfect time for him to really focus on developing a great traditional longboard—both for himself as a surfer and for his customers as a shaper. He took the board from New York and started refining it, going through three or four different versions before finally settling on the shape that would become the Cherry Picker....