Monday, November 28, 2016

Some New equipment Feedback

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