This history of how the Explorer came to be starts with our team player Teemu Nissinen and his vision of having a straight fairway driver.
Teemu is today working for Latitude 64° as a salesman and is also in many cases involved in the development of our upcoming discs. He has really good technique and can be very accurate when testing, which he showed me when testing the Explorer. Anyhow, we felt that he was right about the fact that we didn’t have anything in that particular fairway slot, we mostly had overstable or slightly understable fairway drivers at the time.
I designed the mold based on what he wanted and then we made a small batch of test discs. Teemu came to Skellefteå for a test session and we tested the Explorer as well as a couple of other new molds. Teemu made a few shots on the driving range of our local course and was really enthusiastic saying:
“Now I’m going to throw a slight hyzer that flips up straight and lands straight, now I’m going to hyzer it into the basket (snugged the chains on a practice basket 110 meters away), this time I will make an anhyzer that holds the line all the way”, etc etc.
His accuracy and control that day was incredibly impressive. We also played a practice round and Teemu showed what the disc could do on a lot of different shots. On the last hole he once again showed me his and the Explorer’s accuracy almost aceing with his “prototype” as you can see in the movie clip below. If you know Teemu you know he can talk for hours about discs and how to throw them. Perhaps needless to say the rest of the day was an incredible monologue about this disc.
The naming of the disc came later and if memory serves me right it was Ricky Wysocki who came up with a list of names, Explorer being one of them.
After the release I was really happy to see so many players of different skill levels throwing Explorer. The “2018 Disc of the Year” award from Ultiworld Disc Golf was some nice icing on the cake.
Speed: 7 Glide: 5 Turn: 0 Fade: 2
Tomas Ekström
Design and Product Manager, Latitude 64°
