50 years old yesterday and surfing great Tom Curren continues to embrace the commercial challenges of making a living from surfing in signature style.

Oh! Product tests… The joys of surfing while working or working while surfing, I forget which way round it’s meant to be. To tell the truth, we’re rarely ever bold over by our dearest surf industry’s latest boardshort model, leash or even wetsuit. So when we were invited to product test a new watch it was a far from sparking a mad office brawl to go to the press conference. However, the opportunity to go trade waves with 3-time world champ Tom Curren, who was there to test Rip Curl’s newly-released GPS watch, was too good to resist.

Once Curren had been briefed on how to use it (nothing too complicated as the GPS sets the time and tides automatically and you only need to hit one side button to set your positioning in the lineup), we paddled out to catch a few waves at Estagnots.

Post session, the GPS technology in the watch allows you to review all kinds of interesting statistics on how you performed. Without going into too much detail, the SearchGPS tracks:

Your exact movements in the lineup, both on the waves and paddling
Your speed and overall distance covered
The number of waves you caught… and much more.

The below screengrab of Tom Curren’s session might give you a better idea:

You’re then able to stock all of this precious data allowing you to analyse your progress going forward, as well as compare your data to friends’ and even Rip Curl team riders’ data to see how you’re fairing on number of sessions, number of waves and actual time spend standing up on waves. Nothing short of a mini revolution in wrist watch technology!

The one point we weren’t quite sure of was whether the watch was able to differentiate between a proper barrel and the ol’ head dip, but they’re most likely working on that…

Available in shops from this coming September for 349 euros, for more info visit: www.searchgps.ripcurl.com