Sup Board

watching all the podcasts and hearing the industry stars talk lately, the feeling I get is that sup foiling is over. Seems like the boards are all focused on either winging or downwinding, with sup foil an after thought: "oh and you can sup foil it too". A year ago it was the opposite, sup foils that you can wing or downwind. Obviously you can do them all on any given board, the question is what features are being optimized vs what works good enough.

Convince me otherwise.

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Piros said..
Yeah tend to agree all the Sup foil design criteria is going towards the downwind side especially with the production companies BUT the few Sup guys around where I live are still ripping and continually getting custom newer sleeker designers by DC Foils .

Agreed, buddies are ripping locally on SUP foils too. In the right hands, SUP foil can be pretty much as dynamic as prone foil.

For me, I mostly prone and wing, but I sup sometimes too when the conditions are right. I am thinking of building a new sup foil and being a hack, it's easiest to copy a design that works ... looking around I found it interesting that the big companies don't seem to be advertising for sup any more. EG Kalama E3, one version is the skinny downwinder, the other is the wide wing board. Both say "Downwind/sup" and "wing/sup"....but for both SUP is the secondary factor. I quite like the look of the new armstrong, the FG forward geometry thing looks pretty good riding, nice to have the board's weight more evenly distributed, less feet of board to swing around in front. But that one is also "wing/sup", with winging the main goal.

Being honest, I am a little cynical about board designs for foiling. With most of its riding life spent above water, I have doubts how much the tricked out features actually matter. Enough volume to paddle comfortably, stable enough for the conditions you ride, with both size and volume minimized as low as feasible to still be functional....that's 90% of it. My two buddies who are the best at pumping locally, one prone one sup, are doing it on boards that are impossibly big if you believe what you read online. Their performance would be improved with smaller gear ... but fact is they are making it work. Kind of gives some perspective. Especially for the prone board discussions where people are debating merits of 32L vs 34L ... which brings me back to the potato chip surfboard days, hearing people argue about how 1/8" of tail width is wrecking their snaps when they can barely surf. But I digress!

But back to the OT , i found that a straight tail worked very well for SupFoil.
Better paddling speed ,more stability and the wave really pushes that chunky tail so you slide in easy.

It works great for wingfoil too,for different reasons, but maybe wingfoil and supfoil design has kind of merged nowadays, while the DW boards are going in another direction.

We still make heaps of SUP foilboards and have a bunch in development as we speak to expand the range even more.
What makes a good DW foil board also makes a good SUP foil board and same goes for a wing board sometimes so having a board only made for wave SUP riding seems a little bit like a waste when the others do just as good a job.

SUP foiling is definitely not dying and I see heaps of crew getting a ton of waves and having a great time.

We like to mold most if our boards so do a huge amount of testing before we mold to make sure things are right and the customer is not the test pilot for a new shape or tweak plus we can get our boards lighter and strong which is a sick bouns.

Heaps of crew can't prone or don't want to prone or maybe the waves they foil just suit a SUP as sometimes the SUP foil has a advantage over the prone and other time a prone has an advantage over a SUP.

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Pacoo said..

martyman said..
All right let's hear it-who's making the best boards and shapes? Supfoil.

I owned fanatic, kalama E2, sunnova aviators, and a few customs. From all production boards, Kalama will be my choice, but the man seems to like extremes and then pulls back. A properly design custom for your needs it will be my recommendation.
There is still a lot to do in terms of sup foil design, I tested a 23,5 custom the other day and I had the same stability as my Sunnova aviator 6,0.
Full rails, and as narrow as you can handle will be my choice. The length depends on the size of the waves you want to surf.

I make my own boards so I'm really just looking for feedback on ppls experience with the current generation of shapes and design features. I'm currently leaning towards the newest Kalam with a slightly widened tail, maybe w a single concave

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Pacoo said..

martyman said..

Pacoo said..

martyman said..
All right let's hear it-who's making the best boards and shapes? Supfoil.

I owned fanatic, kalama E2, sunnova aviators, and a few customs. From all production boards, Kalama will be my choice, but the man seems to like extremes and then pulls back. A properly design custom for your needs it will be my recommendation.
There is still a lot to do in terms of sup foil design, I tested a 23,5 custom the other day and I had the same stability as my Sunnova aviator 6,0.
Full rails, and as narrow as you can handle will be my choice. The length depends on the size of the waves you want to surf.

I make my own boards so I'm really just looking for feedback on ppls experience with the current generation of shapes and design features. I'm currently leaning towards the newest Kalam with a slightly widened tail, maybe w a single concave

Yes, the Kalama looks good. But I'm not sure if the loss of stability due to the bevel rails justifies the early lift.

I have the 6 foot E3 and it is amazingly stable.

For me the main difference between a sup foil board dedicated to wave vs dw is mostly the width.

A dw board is made for getting up as fast and as easy as possible, so you want as narrow as possible, it is not made for standing long time or for long paddling, you just need to be stable enough to catch a bump (it is all about compromise).

While a sup foil dedicated to wave riding, you need to have more stability because you will have to paddle more and to wait for the wave, etc...