Mako 165 King

Rider: 85 kgs, Intermediate rider ~4 years experience
Style: Freeriding, Surf
Weather: 15 knots
Build Quality: 10/10
Satisfaction: 10/10
Disclosure: (happy to ride anything and give it a go)

My Comments:

Yesterday afternoon I had my first run on a Mako King kindly supplied by Puppet from KSS. This is my first review so please be nice !

The background to this review is I'm looking to add another directional into my quiver, and specifically something for lighter Perth metro days. Im 95% on surfboards and just started to go strapless this season. Ive ridden the Mako 140 and 150 as TT's and been waiting to try the King for comparison.

So yesterday afternoon looked ok so I headed down to South Trigg. The King was set up as a mutant - 3 fins at one end, 1 at the front, with the footstraps in the rearmost position. First impressions with all the Mako are that they are a really nice product - straps are great, really nice solid feel to the board. The King has a deck pad running 3/4 the length of the deck, which the smaller Mako's don't have. The wind was a bit fickle initially - just me on a 12m and another guy on a Reo 10 w/ a Wam (i think) and he looked to be just holding ground. Immediately I found the footstraps were way too far back to be useful - the board just sank, nose at the sky. Ignoring the straps and standing in a pretty central position, I found the board easily planed and flew upwind. The ride is typical of the other Makos I've ridden smooth - nice and soft over the chop, not much spray. It carves really well, and was easy to gybe and switch stance.

A couple of runs later I decided to head in and remove the straps as they were interfering with where I wanted to stand. The deck pad is nice and grippy - never slipped or lost my footing - and the experience of riding it strapless was great. It feels really flat in the water - not much noticeable rocker, and this makes it fly upwind and fast to accelerate. It's also seems really stiff, and being relatively small (compared to a surfboard), it felt like standing on a small plank. It's a blast in the small waves on offer - never came close to nosediving it and you can really chuck it around. I did a couple of big triangles - tacked upwind to Scarborough (say 700m-1km upwind ) and then ran downwind back to the start. In the shore break this thing is quite similar to a surfboard - you can carve it really hard, slide the back out off the lip, heaps of fun but then when you need to head upwind again it's back to TT mode - stand in the middle of the board, lean back and get all the upwind angle you need to do it all again. So it' a proper Hybrid in that sense. I must have kited for a couple of hours, and really had no complaints whatsoever

Could you ride it as a big TT in flat water ? I suppose, but I found riding backwards (i.e. 3 fins first) it was pretty squirrely and not ideal. So I was left with the impression the King is 1) a smooth riding directional with 2) the benefits of a TT for getting upwind and 3) the looseness and carving of a surfboard when you want it. I didn't get a chance to catch anything more than knee high, but in the small stuff it was lots of fun. Highly recommend giving it a go.

I've never ridden the Mako so I'm not trying to take away from the board at all, but have you tried the North 5' Nugget? Everything you describe in your session, wind strength, swell size, Trigg upwind to Scarbs - I do the same trip regularly on the Nugget and it never stops amazing me how good the Nugget is for those specific conditions.