SurfboardsPumpkin Seeds 

When it comes to surfboard design, we can get a little geeky here at Surf Simply. When I say a ‘little’ i mean that that it’s not unheard of for Harry’s 20 minute board design classes to a sneak up to the 2 hour mark with the right audience.

We’re always looking for the best boards with which to teach specific skills. Some boards are great for horizontal turns while others are better for more advanced, vertical turns. Some work well when you’re focusing on wave selection but at the same time, are impossible to duck dive.

When we stumbled across the Santa Cruz Pumpkin Seed, an all round fun board, made out of a similar material to the SurfTech epoxy, it took us several months to realize just what a awesome board it is.

Disclaimer – We’re not on commission and don’t have any affiliation with Santa Cruz. These are just great boards.

We had a 6’8″ although you can buy Pumpkin Seeds from 5’6″ to 7’6″. I took it on a small day when the waves weren’t big enough to ride a shortboard and I was surprised how easy it was to catch waves, turn and duckdive (I’m about 160lbs).

I thought it must be yet another small wave board to add to the arsenal but, just for fun, I paddled it out last autumn when we had one of the biggest days of the year and, rather than skidding around like most small wave boards, it felt solid and made surfing double over head Guiones a piece of cake.

We’ve actually found that it’s by far the best all round board we’ve ever had: great for making the transition from longboards to shortboards; it goes fast in small surf when other boards stop; it feels solid in big surf when other boards skid out and while the epoxy is not as smooth to ride as tradition PU boards, the difference in performance is only going to effect a tiny minority of elite surfers.

We recently used the Pumpkin Seed for shooting some of the demo footage for our new series of surf coaching podcasts which will be out soon on iTunes. The board did everything we wanted it to without any surprises (and with a little bit of forgiveness).

So we’ve just gone and bought a few more Pumpkin Seeds last week: a 7’6″, a 7’0″ and a 6’6″, all for you to try on your next visit to Surf Simply. I’m not quite sure about the spray jobs on the bottom of the boards though (that wasn’t my selection). You can be the judge!