Puerto Padi

The Puerto Padi came about when Nathan Florence asked me to re-design his favorite Padillacs to better suit the late drops and tricky barrels of Puerto Escondido.

The Padillac has proven to be one of the best big wave designs of the past decade, but they wanted something that would let them take off later and deeper, and be able to knife under the lip even easier, so I made some small yet significant changes.

These changes have worked out well enough that Nathan has ridden his Puerto Padis on 2 waves that are considered to be at the top of the list of the very best tube/foamball rides in surfing history - both in Ireland - his 8'5" on the crazy left at Mullaghmore, awarded 'Ride of the Year' at the 2022/23 Big Wave Challenge award ceremony, and the 7'0" on his psycho backdoor of the right at Aileens. These waves along with his recent slab tour also led to Nathan being awarded the 'Surfer of the Year' at the 2022/23 Big Wave Challenge. The rest of the team also loves the PP in long, hollow reef breaks like Cloudbreak.

The biggest design changes are mostly evident in the front half of the board. To help the board to fit into stepper drops and thread deep barrels we narrowed the nose width by ½ an inch, added extra nose rocker and also thinned out the nose by close to ¼ inch. These changes help to free up the whole front end of the board in more critical situations and add sensitivity while still packing a lot of paddle power into a board for its size. The Puerto Padi also features a pulled in baby swallow tail which increases reaction time off the bottom enough to allow for fast adjustments under the lip.

The next thing you will notice about the Puerto Padi is that we've changed out the stock fin configuration from Quad to Tri-fin. This is something that Nathan felt would give him more control over his speed in the hollow, slabby waves that he had in mind for the board. Many people over the years have asked why we only offer the Padillac as a quad, and the answer is that the 5 fin set-ups just don't fit into the way I have that board designed. It needs to be a quad OR a tri-fin, but combining both options didn't work out correctly to maximize performance and we always felt the quad had an edge in XXL surf. The same is true for the PP, but we are going Tri-fin as the stock set-up since it is made with a different type of surfing in mind.

My team riders have been testing the Puerto Padi for several years already, and their positive feedback made us decide that it would be a nice addition to the Pyzel gun family for everyone to be able to access.