Drivey, loose, front footed and back footed. This is my favorite of all stretchs boards. It's one of stretchs older models now. This would be the 6th s2 I've ridden. The difference....This one is a Poly blank with epoxy glassing. This is actually the first poly stretch I've ridden, and it just felt like an old shoe. I started riding his boards after clark shut their doors and stretch had moved over to all eps blanks. Hard to believe that was actually almost 8 years ago. This design is a good ol' fashioned High performance thruster. It litterally does everything well. Stays loose in the pocket while maintaining drive through the flats and down the line. The very first stretch I rode was his original bat tail quad, which was actually one of my top ten boards of all time. I believe it had a very similar rocker to this (at least it feels the same). It paddles incredibly well, you can feel it catch waves super easy. Pretty low entry in just the right place...under the chest. It has a really balanced outline with the wide point in dead center and a little wider nose and tail, which at the time of it's design was a lot wider. Now a days all standard shortboards seem to be wider in the nose and tail due to everyone going shorter in length. When Stretch came up with this design an 11-12 inch nose width was considered fishy. The rocker on this thing is nothing short of amazing to me. how he came up with a curve that can litterally do anything well baffles me. If it's mushy...it's fast, if it's hollow it's loose and turns on a dime in the pocket. It's low enough that it paddles and grovels well, but it has enough curve that you can surf it in pockety bowely waves. Todays Session was on the pockety hollow side, very unorganized cross up of windswell 6.6 ft at 10 sec and sw swell 2ft 14 sec at an undisclosed beach break north of town. Surf was really unpredictable but the board handled it really well. Got into waves super easy and early, really drivey off the bottom and loose through the top turns. The only thing negative to this board is that it doesnt handle the later drops quite as well. That low entry can poke if your not used to it, but once you adjust it's not too bad at all. I'd say its worth the trade off for the paddling you get. Over all, I love this one. I'd highly reccomend it to anyone looking for one board that does it all in almost any conditions. I rode one very similar to this at a cobblestone reef once with nearly 12 ft faces and did a few of my best turns I feel I've ever done...at least for this fat guy.
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