Tom Carroll

Tom Carroll, a two-time World Champion, resides on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Australia with his wife and three daughters. Tom has been through the entire spectrum of fin design stages; as a matter of fact he started things off with a pop-out finless foam board. His hard-carving, powerful approach really suited the waves at Pipeline and the Barnfiled single fin he was riding at the time. He didn’t enjoy the twin-fin era too much as he thought it was cheating. The boards lacked the power and drive the he loved in the single-fin. Coming across the tri-fin, via Simon Anderson in ’81, another door was opened for Carroll. In ’87 he rode a very refined tri-fin, a Maurice Cole reverse V, when he did his infamous in the pocket snap at 12 foot Pipeline. At 46 years of age Tom shows no signs of slowing down. In the last few years he’s been experimenting with fin placement, adding a wide variety of plugs to his boards, which give him the option to ride either 3,4, or 5 fin configurations. We met up in Tahiti with him where he rode a range of different sticks, accompanied by Anthony Tashnick, Kyle Ramey and Peter Garaway.