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gvogelsang
Joined: 09 Nov 1988 Posts: 435
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Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014 10:23 am Post subject: |
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d0uglass wrote: | Passive planing style, 8.5 max sail, and 210 lbs put a limit on your light-wind planing threshold that a new slalom board probably won't raise. In fact, the shortness of the new slalom/formula boards (~240 cm compared to ~270 cm for your old formula board) actually makes them less compatible with a passive planing style.
That's not to say that a new slalom board won't have a faster and friskier ride once planing.
But I'd say if your goal is to plane earlier, a 9.5 and a more active style will make more difference than a new board. |
That is probably very good advice. I like to tack my old-man Formula broad, which I can because it is 270 long.
I guess the only upgrade that would make sense would be the larger of the two JP Super Lightwind boards.
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coachg
Joined: 10 Sep 2000 Posts: 3549
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sl55
Joined: 03 Aug 2007 Posts: 112
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935
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Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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Aren't Formula boards very demanding of technical skills? Is that the kind of sailing you want in a spontaneous evening session?
We watched a guy in the Gorge rig a TEN METER SAIL yesterday and hook it to some kind of board about 4 feet wide and not much longer with a comparably arrow-straight vertical fin more than half my height. The dang board was, relative to the usual Gorge board, a three-dimensional rectangle, one of the weirdest watercraft I've ever seen. During the hour it took him to drag all that crap out, rig it, schlep the parts down to the water's edge separately, plug them together, and walk out to chest-deep water so the fin would clear while he climbed aboard and uphauled as he drifted into shallow rocks, the wind had picked up enough that other guys were sailing 5.0s to 6.0s. He tried for a long time to get it to plane, but never did. Dang; we were hoping to see an UPSIDE to all this hard work, such as infinite speed, flying on just the fin, pointing straight upwind ... SOMETHING. His skills just weren't up to the challenge, and as far as I could tell he missed out on the next 4 hours of marvelous, classic, Gorge 4.2 to 4.7 swell/B&J sailing.
I think all he got out of all that was literally a BALE of weeds, which our 22 cm wave fins were snagging all afternoon, some of them like hitting mattresses as we flew over the handlebars if we didn't spot them in time. And spotting them didn't help in the weed growth zone at the chest-deep level; we must walk through or power-slog through a 50-foot-wide, completely choked, swath of them, slog to clear water, jump in, and remove softball- to football-sized clumps of weeds from our feet, tiny wave fins, booms, hooks, etc. I can't imagine the weeds his 80(?) cm vertical reaper picked up.
Here's where this gets relevant to this thread. I found out later this board was made by some fast dude named Zwieback or something, out of the Bay area, so I Googled it. I was stunned to realize what you guys have already surmised: THIS IS THE FAMOUS MIKE'S LAB BOARD(S) you coasties keep raving about. Here I thought those were small B&J/wave boards. I can't imagine a board like that fulfilling the stated "easy to ride, passive planing, rarely pumped" criteria, but stranger things have happened.
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dllee
Joined: 03 Jul 2009 Posts: 5328 Location: East Bay
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Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2014 1:21 pm Post subject: |
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Formula can be any kind of sailing you want.
Use a 6.5 meter sail, cruise around in 15-22mph winds no stress.
Use a 11 meter sail, stress around in 15-22 mph winds, lotsa stress
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