Hi
Sorry for the long delay between posts. My time has been split between sailing and
being exhausted from sailing. No energy
for anything else!
Anyway, Raffaello, our Severne agent, arrived with some
awesome new Severne stuff on Saturday (hopefully a Fox in the near future) but
also with some boards (PC2) we have not seen on our shores before. They are by Phil Carbon – the well known (and aptly named) speed-board maker.
Phil has teamed up with
Anders Bringdal and they have produced some very tasty board ranges. Raffi, being a hard core racing man, brought
along a few slalom sizes from the new partnership.
Charl (Karo’s husband/master sailor) and Raffi were
absolutely rocking these machines with Severne Reflexes/Zulu fins. Very impressive.
Charl tells me that the 71 is much easier to
control than Joos’s Manta 71 (which he knows quite well). I would really like to try a PC2 - 75cm
slalom and report back on it. The boards
feel slightly heavy in the hand but not excessively so. PC2 give no weights on their site.
The testers are here and have some really interesting
boards. When they are not at Swartriet, (our
local wave venue), testing wave equipment, they have been testing free-race/fast
freeride boards.
They have Fanatic’s
Blast, Severne’s Fox, AHD’s Freerace, Patrik’s Freerace, Lorch’s Glider and JP’s
equivalent. All the boards are around
70cm wide. Very interesting.
I asked about the Blast and the Fox being the
two most interesting boards to me. They
recon the Blast is an absolute hoot which does exactly what Fanatic claim –
fast, stable, good over chop, fun to jump etc.
They stress however that it is not a freerace board like the
Patrik.
The Fox too performs exactly as
we would expect with blistering speed over all conditions and a cork-like
ability to float through gybes. One
of the guys said that there seemed to be some small discrepancies between the
shapes on the left and right underside of the board when they brought the
straight edge out but that these seem to have no effect on performance. If there are manufacturing anomalies, I’m sure that Severne
will remedy them going forward.
I have been riding the old F2 T-Rex I spoke about a while
ago. The board is taking names! The lightness and length of the thing make it
compatible with a 46cm fin and soft sails down to 6.6m. A miraculous buy which is spreading alarm and
despondency among fellow windsurfers in lightwind conditions.
Very nice!
I have been using camless sails with the T-Rex but a while
ago Joos (Karo's dad as regular readers will know), let me click on Karo’s Reflex 7.8 to see how it would go. I was concerned that the old board shape might not
mesh with modern race sail architecture. The
T-Rex handled things as if it had been specifically designed for the Reflex - no problems whatsoever.
I have to say that the Reflex surprised me
with its lightness and ease of use. I’m
not sure how they are going to improve on this model. If you are considering a 7.8m race sail you
could wait for the version _8 to come out and get a good price on a version _7. You will not be disappointed.
In the next post I will say a few words about some interesting
developments in our sport which we all need to keep an eye on.
Talk to you soon (I hope)
Phil
