Coupled with Tighe’s enticing post of his ride on the Cabrinha Race board http://www.lakawa.com/lakawa-chat-f1/fu ... 13686.html...
and Mike W's comments in a later post...
and finally this videoTighe, thanks for posting about your experience on the race board. I considered picking one up a while back, but what stopped me was the big fins. Those boards are designed primarily for course racing where the competitors have to point really high upwind-- that is part of the reason for the long fins. The major disadvantage of a board like that around here is that during our summer light air season we have lots of weeds, at least on local lakes. Two things kept me from buying one: 1) memories of snagging weeds on a formula board and 2) the fact that I don't need to point high upwind. I think that for light air around here there are better options. My $.02. I would love to ride one in the right conditions though.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flVyxyILbT8[/youtube]
I thought... somehow I've got try one too!!!
So I checked with Nate Borer to see if he might have access to an Airush Sector V2 I could demo. Bingo! A couple of weeks later he had a V2 60 for me to try (as long as he could get it back for the Mille Lacs Challenge this weekend).
I got three sessions on it before I handed it back today. You'll see it at the Crossing. Yes, it is fast. It’s WIDE (60 cm – probably too wide for me at 170#, 5’ 7”… I think the 52cm version in the video would be more my size), but comes around on a jibe suprisingly well if I step my back foot a little over the center to leeward on the turn. The video shows a guy on the V2 52 (52 cm wide) doing great toe-side with both feet still in the straps… but I couldn’t (I can’t do LOTS of the stuff that guy was doing on ANY board
). It's not a full on race board. It's designed to be a recreational board that pulls in race board concepts.With the volume, width, and fins – same as Tighe found – Wow! It takes almost nothing to get it going. It's a cool feeling to get so much for so little.
My first session was in super light wind at Ramsey (walking with the wind I couldn’t feel it at all – was that 4-5 mph? Maybe 6. Why even try? Nobody there at all.) I hot launched my 16M from the grass to get it in the air. In the water the board was a firm platform and I was able to pop up right away and made a few passes with sloppy turns. I felt my biggest problem was not so much the board, but my kite barely making through the turns without going too wide. Predictably the kite went down for lack of power and I lucky landed it on the TE so I was able to eventually hot launch again. Soon I decided to come back before I dropped it poorly. I came away that day thinking that because the board requires so little punch to get going and works so well with apparent wind I may have been better off using a smaller kite that I could maneuver better in the turns… but I was out of time.
Next session: Waconia on the awesome 9/12 session we all just had. I was flying my 11 and having lots of fun on my 5’ 5”. As the wind started switching from SW through West before the ‘Norwester’ it really backed off for a while. I was repeatedly struggling. Instead of bumping up to a bigger kite, I decided to try my smaller kite hunch and grabbed the V2. That was fun. Solidly ripping, popping off wave tops, playing with the troughs. I fell off a few jibes as I worked on getting my timing down. This ‘lull’ session had better wind than the previous Ramsey calm, but still pretty light. It was very easy to get into the straps without bogging down the tail. As the wind started to come back I went for a few jumps. The 13 pound board was a kind of a stone coming off the water but if I tilted nose up into the wind it was wide enough to ride up on the wind and the extra weight pretty much disappeared (when I was able to do it right). I enjoyed the speed.
Today: Wildwood WBL. WAY GUSTY 5-20mph at Noon. Started on my 14 and 5’ 5” and failed to survive the lulls. Bump up? Let’s try the V2. Not so good. Again in the bad lulls 14 was not coming through the turns well and I fell off a lot. I bet a smaller kite would have done better. When the wind turned on, it was FAST. I can imagine this could be a killer board to ride on in the Mille Lacs Challenge Race.
Oh yeah... weeds and the deep fins. Of the three sessions, I only picked up weeds at Wildwood. I don't think I went through any at Ramsey. At Waconia I saw the strands floating around, but they never caught. Maybe the sharp fins were just slicing through them. At Wildwood it was easy to drop them by popping off the next available wave when I had some wind. So the fins did catch weeds as predicted, but it really wasn't the hassle it used to be when windsurfing.
I gave the board back to Nate today. He said he'd have two at the Crossing if anyone would like to give it a try between races.
