Stuey’s Story–The Penetrator

Stuey Campbell designed and built the Penetrator racing boards, a substantial departure from the design philosophy most racing board builders have been taking. I asked him to tell me a bit about his background and why he built the board the way it is. Here’s the story in Stuey’s own words:

Where do I start? I sit here with a skin full (that’s what we say here In OZ) of Dark n’ Stormys’ a potent brew of Queenslands finest dark rum subtly blended with our best ginger beer. It’s a mighty fine drop which promotes among other things rational and lucid thinking!

How do I begin the Penetrator story? “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” been done before? Damn it. “Man first arose from the primordial muck”, too early? Oh well. How about a 7 year old Stuey Campbell, with hair that never quite sat properly asking his Dad one September morning if he let his 12″ long model square rigger go now, if it would beat the fleet in the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race. “If it gets out into the 2knot southerly set of the East Coast Current, you’d have a fair chance” was his reply as my early craft, built from scraps from the yacht club rubbish bin, blew briskly from the wharf.

“How fast do you reckon she’ll go”? It’d covered the first 50 metres in record time. “Son, her hull speed will be limited to 1.34 times the square root of her waterline length” My young mind grappled with the calculation but I could already see that my small craft was pushing water.

The sophistication of my models marked time with the advancing years but who was gonna let a 10 year old design his yacht? My 11th birthday and all this changed. Sure I loved my 5’3″ Gordon Woods S-deck, it had a really trick yellow and green resin bleed on the bottom but it had a fat, badly repaired round tail. It had to be fixed and maybe I could improve things a little. Out came the grinder, “just turn your head away if you start gettin’ hit” said my Dad as I turned the round into a diamond. Whether my attack improved things is debatable but from that point on I was making my own.

Planshapes, rockers, rails, fins and their interaction with the water became all consuming and school grades slipped in direct correlation to my becoming a straight A student of the ocean. The line outside my shaping room door grew ever longer and I was only 14, there were no mathematical equations or reasons but I seemed to be developing a “feel”. After a short stint at G&S, I was taken on by Terry Fitzgerald at Hot Buttered who was instrumental in developing my “tool use” but all along my design ideas remained my own.

1991 9’7″ triple stringer Hawaiian gun

The ensuing years saw the evolution of the modern shortboard through all it’s twists and turns. More often than not I found myself at odds with conventional “wisdom”, I’d sometimes view the latest innovation and that little voice inside would say NO and it would be discarded immediately. Sometimes I’d just look and that “feel” would just tell me it was all wrong. Sometimes I’d feel like a freak, coz’ I couldn’t even fill out a tax return yet I could just look at something that was supposed to flow through the water and instinctively know it wouldn’t work. All sorts of ocean equipment became second nature whether I rode them or not, shorties, longboards, kneeboards, paddleboards, sailboards you name it.

photo 5- Surfing a swell on a fast 28′ trimaran off Mooloolaba, Queensland

A love of boats and sailing first planted by my Dad had flourished and grown and I’d found myself spending more time on them as the years went on. Small  repairs led to bigger jobs led to building yachts. My brother and I built a 36′ cat, it was way fast and I spent countless hours laying on the forward trampoline, just laying there, watching what those bows did as they sliced through the ocean, watching and thinking. I spent many years drifting between building ultra-fast sailboats, mostly cats and tris and making all manner of surfboards.

The 36′ catamaran that I built 12 years ago with my brother, we covered thousands of miles in this and I learned an awful lot from this boat.

Another shot of “Catscan” on the Noosa River

A little over 2 years ago Woogie Marsh mentioned between paddle building and ding repairs that stand up paddleboarding in Hawaii had morphed into a new direction, distance and downwind. He wanted to get into it, mostly as cross-training for his outrigger work. I was all ears. What were these downwind boards like? How big were they? I could instantly see the potential, I’d been downwinding all my life, ‘cept on yachts, it was the best, most fun you could have sailing and I wanted in! At the time in Australia we had nothing, no one was making them and the biggest available blank was 12’3″. Upon scouring the net all I could find was the early F16s from Hawaii and some Eaton paddleboards from California. I only had limited photos to go by but from what I could see, in my opinion they were attacking it from the wrong direction. That “feel” was talking to me again.

First up, polystyrene and epoxy were the go, anything else would be too heavy. To this end we ordered a massive block of foam. 16′ seemed a good length to start and I hand drew and cut some profile templates for what was to become the first Penetrator. I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted to create but the question remained, will a stand up paddler be able to remain upright without expending too much energy doing so?

1st 18’8″ Penetrator 572 with carbon frame layed up prior to glassing

The first board was built and immediately named the Penetrator, it wasn’t what I wanted and indeed I thought it was a tad ugly but we had to start somewhere. Initial tests proved that stability on this type of craft would not be an issue, freeing me up to progress to stage 2. The next board proved a quantum leap, I pulled in the planshape and rolled the bottom considerably, the improvement being so substantial that board no.1 was renamed the “seaslug”. Stability only decreased fractionally and we were on the right track.

Attaching profile template prior to hotwiring another 572

The idea had always been to design a SUB more along the lines of a racing ski or OC1 and given that these craft as well as the rudderless va’as are the quickest paddle powered craft in the ocean I was somewhat surprised that others weren’t following the same path. Other designers were all engaged in seeking the optimum, more surfboard like, planing hull. I could understand their thinking, I was even skeptical at first as to whether a stand-up paddler could remain upright on the radical board I had envisaged.

photo 4- Bottom of 572, carbon frame, pre-glassing

The thinking I had in mind involved a narrow kayak-like hull that didn’t rely on skimming the surface to attain maximum speed, it wasn’t to be a planning hull at all but what we generally refer to as a semi-displacement hull. It would cut through the water with little disturbance and maximum glide requiring minimal energy to power. Whereas the commonly used planning hull requires a large energy input to perform to it’s optimum (ie. on the plane) which quite simply cannot be done by even the strongest paddler. In fact the only time that the planing SUB will hit it’s peak is when on a runner (riding in a swell), so when not running but operating under paddle power alone, the rider is quite simply dragging an inefficient hull around the ocean. I further reasoned that the superior paddle speed and glide of my design, due to it’s low drag hull, would allow it to not only pick up runs easier and stay on them longer but also pick up runs that it’s slower planning cousin may miss. That was the theory, all that remained was to find out how far I could push the design parameters before stability became an issue.

572 in the bay

If the first of the Penetrators hinted I was headed in the right direction Nos.2 & 3 really drove the point home. These boards were 16’4″x 27 1/2″x6″ and the bottoms were rolled substantially more than the 1st board with little lost in the way of stability although I was still sure I could push it further. I had also increased the depth of the deck concave with the aim of lowering the riders centre of gravity. Shortly after creation both these boards were given a “baptism by fire” as Woogie and Chris De Aboitiz made a valiant attempt to paddle around Fraser, the largest sand island in the world. Even though their circumnavigation was cut short by violent headwinds, the boards proved themselves by handling all conditions thrown at them. It was extremely satisfying to watch from the support craft as the boys nailed 140 miles in the first 3 1/2 days till nature threw in the spanner. Still it well and truly showed what the design was capable of as well as implanting some new ideas and advancements.

Woogie at Fraser Island

After Fraser Is. I made Woogie a new board, another 16’4″ that he was to race in the 16 mile ocean marathon at the Noosa Festival. This time I pulled the width in to 27″ and went all out with the bottom rolling it as far as I dared. I was now happy with the shape as it was real close to what I had originally envisaged. It was light too, glassed with the carbon frame I had been working on which consisted of a central strip of carbon Unis, top and bottom as well as a 6″ wide strip which encased the rails, giving it the perfect amount of flex and longitudinal strength. This was wrapped up with a single plain weave 4oz. bottom and double on the deck although this proved not quite durable enough and we went back to a 6oz. skin. The board flew during the race in unfavourable sidewind conditions and a small lumpy swell with Woogie coming in around 2 miles ahead of 2nd place, the previously unbeaten James “Billy” Watson riding a Vortice XP. The Penetrator 16′ underwent some very minor changes over the following months and Woogie paddled them to another 3 clear victories but I had some new ideas in mind, starting with a significant jump in length.

Woogie bending a paddle

Skimming on flat water

My son Ryans’ fiance Elle paddling a 14′ non-race Penetrator

An order for a big bloke from down south came in and it didn’t take much persuading to sell him on the idea of going 18′+. We had our Guinea Pig and I set to work, at this stage I had a new and undeveloped steering system in mind that I thought would be advantageous, if not essential for a board of this length but the customer was quite happy to go without. The Granddaddy of the fleet, the Penetrator 572 was born and at 18’8″x 26 1/2″x 7″ it required me to draw and cut a whole new set of templates and profiles as an increase of this magnitude rendered the 16′ ones useless, it simply wasn’t possible to stretch them that far.

I also dropped the nose rocker by an inch and pushed it further forward as the 16’4″ hadn’t been making full use of it’s waterline length. The 572 is a massive lump of board though I was pleased to get the weight of the first one down to around 25 pounds (though I knew subsequent models with the steering system would come up on this). Woogie performed a clandestine test-run while the customer remained blissfully unaware in Melbourne before shipping it off to him. The results of this short test proved spectacular with Woogie immediately claiming a huge speed increase, somewhere in the order of 30% over the superseded 16′ model. We’d also used the test run to judge where to place the foot peddle for the steering on Woogies soon to be constructed 572.

Creating the new steering system was a mission in itself as I had to start from scratch and hand-build all the components as well as figure out exactly how I would get it to operate. It’s kind of still a work in progress as I keep improving both it’s mechanics and construction. PonoBills board was only the 2nd one I had made and still houses a bug or two but these are only minor and I’m well on the way to getting them sorted.

Fine tuning the bottom of a new 572

Penetrator 572 with partial c-frame and steering gear installed

Another development on the new 572 was the addition of two channels on the deck which start at the back of the concave and run off the tail, the purpose being to help expel any water that may be trapped in the concave, some of this water is also removed through drains in both the steering peddle well and carry handle which run aft and exit through the bottom of the craft.

One other feature of the Penetrators which differs dramatically from the norm are the rails themselves being virtually an upside down version of what most other boards are running. The hard top edge and soft undercut of the rail shape serves two very important purposes critical to the boards performance. First being that, narrow as the board is at 26 1/2″, that’s at the top of the rail, because of the undercut, where the board actually contacts the water is a very speedy 23″. This, combined with it’s waterline length gives us a length to beam ratio of around 9.3 to 1, well inside the magical 8 to 1 figure around which point seacraft cease to produce a significant bow and stern wave (one of the physically limiting factors for maximum hull speed). Secondly as opposed to a board with a  typical rail shape which is at it’s most stable when in the bolt upright position, the Penetrator, while a little tippy when upright, becomes more stable the further you tip it over, which when you think about it is precisely when maximum stability is required!!!

Since it’s creation Woogie has raced the 572 model in 2 races, a 25 mile relay race which he, along with partner Danny Sheard won by around 4 miles and a solo 16 miler which he won by about the same distance. Between the 16’4″ and the 18’8″ Penetrators they have an unbeaten record of 6 wins from 6 starts and are definitely well on their way to being proven as incredibly fast and an extremely valid design concept.

On a personal note I have never expected to become a rich man from these boards as they are very labour intensive and I build every one of them by hand from start to finish. That’s right, I shape, glass, sand , spray and fit out each and every one of them and it gives me immense satisfaction. My main motivation comes from a desire to prove and show to the world a design of board I conceived, designed and created from scratch all by myself and I am more than happy to share my ideas with anyone who’s interested.