Ellis Ericson Feathers Quad

The Greenough Power Glide head, turned into a quad, with a concave foiled into the inside face. Ellis Ericson drew it out of a template he already knew intimately — he had been riding Greenough's Power Glide long enough that its short base and wide, club-like tip had become the shape he thought in.

Where the outline comes from

The Power Glide is a single fin. What Ericson kept from it is the neutral elliptical outline: short in the base, full through the tip, without the rake bias that pushes a fin toward either pivot or drive. That neutrality is the point — it is why the same curve works as a four-fin set rather than fighting the extra fins around it.

The inside concave

The inside face is concave rather than flat. Ericson took the idea from other fins he had ridden; it is not a new one, and by his own account it had been left by the wayside rather than disproved.

His reasoning for bringing it back is the useful part. A flat inside face is just a shearing surface — water passes it without ever really attaching, and the fin ends up feeling inert. The concave holds flow against both sides of the fin instead, and a fin with flow attached to both faces makes lift.

Why that matters specifically on a quad

Four fins in the water is four fins' worth of drag. Ericson's view is that each one therefore has to earn its place, and a set that only holds — without giving anything back when you push on it — has not. The concave is what makes these push back: load the set through a turn and it lifts rather than simply resisting.

Colours

Golden Hour is a 70s-sunglasses orange. Smoke is the grey.

If you want the fin it came from

We stock the Greenough Power Glide 45 — the single fin whose head this quad is built on.