Influential Twin-Fin Evangelist Discovers That Being Called a Messiah Creates Certain Expectations

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

SAN CLEMENTE, CA — Torren Martyn, the Byron Bay-born surfer who has spent the last decade making films with his partner Ishka Folkwell, surfing on twin-fin mid-length boards in ways that make other surfers reconsider their equipment choices, and accidentally becoming one of the most influential figures in a sport that contains millions of people who believe they are immune to influence, has released a new film called “Southern Edge” and is reportedly doing fine with the messianic branding, even if it wasn’t his idea.

The Mid-Length Revolution Reaches Southern California

Southern California, which has always had a complicated relationship with surfboard design innovation — simultaneously leading it and resisting it — has spent the last several years quietly assimilating the mid-length movement that Martyn and a small number of other surfers, shapers, and filmmakers have made visible. The results are evident at every break from Malibu to Oceanside: boards between 7 and 8.5 feet, sometimes with twin fins, are appearing in lineups that previously contained almost exclusively shortboards and longboards, with very little territory between.

“It’s the Martyn effect,” said one San Clemente surf shop owner who has watched mid-length sales increase steadily over three years. “People watch his films, they see what’s possible, they want to feel what he’s feeling. That’s a pretty direct line from film to purchase, which is good for me and good for him and good for anyone who makes those boards.”

Martyn himself, who told Surfer magazine that he didn’t read surf magazines growing up and had no surf family mythology — he just went surfing — represents a particular kind of influential person: the kind who had no interest in being influential and therefore influenced people more effectively than anyone who was trying to.

The Film: “Southern Edge”

The new film, released by Martyn and Folkwell, continues the aesthetic tradition of their previous work: slow, beautiful, carefully composed footage of Martyn surfing waves that are not particularly famous, in places that are not particularly famous, on equipment that prioritizes flow over performance metrics, edited to music that sounds like it was recorded by people who understood the film before they wrote it.

The films work, which is not a given — plenty of surf films exist and most of them work on nobody — because they manage to communicate something that is genuinely hard to communicate about surfing: what it feels like from the inside rather than what it looks like from the outside. Most surf media optimizes for the spectacular. Martyn and Folkwell optimize for the experiential, which is a different thing and apparently what a significant portion of the surfing world had been waiting for without knowing to ask for it.

Southern California received the film with the warmth typically reserved for content that costs nothing and delivers emotion. Multiple screening events were organized at beach venues between Malibu and Encinitas, attended by people who range from professional surfers to beginners who have only recently discovered that surfing contains depths beyond getting to your feet.

The Equipment Theology

The twin-fin mid-length, which is the board Martyn most closely associated with, has become something of a theological document in California surf culture. Its adherents — who are many, growing, and occasionally insufferable in the specific way that converts to any belief system are occasionally insufferable — speak of the board’s capacity for flow, its rejection of performance-surfing’s values, and its alignment with some older and more authentic relationship between surfer and wave.

Practitioners of this faith can be found at most California point breaks, riding with a loose, drawn-out style that prioritizes the sensation of the ride over the accumulation of maneuvers, occasionally in the way of people on shortboards who want to do maneuvers, which creates a politely unresolved tension in lineups from Ventura to Encinitas.

Martyn’s own comment on the subject — that he didn’t think surfing was a real career until his mid-20s, and even then wasn’t sure — has been widely quoted by people who find it either inspiring or suspicious, depending on whether they have career concerns of their own.

The Stab Magazine community and the broader surf media ecosystem have spent considerable energy debating Martyn’s influence, his board choices, and what it means for surfing that someone with his aesthetic values has become as popular as someone with a more conventional performance approach. The conclusion, to the extent that online debates reach conclusions, is that surfing is large enough to contain both, which is either a comforting observation or a slightly disappointing one, depending on how invested you are in the theological dimensions of fin configuration.

For more on the ongoing debate about what surfing is for and what boards best express that purpose, The London Prat maintains a desk dedicated to equipment theology and its geopolitical implications.

Further surfboard philosophy: Betoota Advocate and McSweeney’s.

The Twin-Fin as Cultural Object

The twin-fin surfboard, which Martyn has helped make visible to a generation of surfers who grew up in the era of the thruster, is not new. Bob McTavish and others were experimenting with twin-fin designs in the 1960s. Mark Richards made them iconic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, winning four consecutive world titles on twin-finned boards and then watching the thruster arrive and render them temporarily obsolete. The mid-length twin-fin’s current renaissance is a return as much as an invention, which gives it a certain historical resonance that the marketing around it sometimes acknowledges and sometimes doesn’t.

What Martyn brings to the twin-fin is not the design itself but the film language that surrounds it: the way his videos make the board’s particular qualities — its speed in trim, its looseness through turns, its tendency to fly out of the back of waves if the surfer isn’t paying attention — visible as aesthetic rather than merely technical. Watching Martyn surf a twin-fin mid-length on a small-to-medium wave, you see not a surfer constrained by equipment limitations but a surfer in genuine dialogue with a specific set of physical properties, and the dialogue looks good. It looks, in fact, like what most surfers feel on their best waves and rarely see represented in their media.

Southern California’s relationship with Martyn’s work is in part a recognition of that feeling. The breaks from Malibu to Encinitas that his films favor — point breaks, reefs with long walls, anywhere that rewards patience and trim over explosiveness — exist up and down the California coast, and the surfers who spend their lives on them recognize what he’s doing and find it validating in the specific way that seeing your own experience accurately depicted always is.

More surf equipment theology: Betoota Advocate and McSweeney’s.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/