I am wondering if any of you can shed some light on a problem I am having,
I can use my daily foil set with a variety of wing boards and it works fine. Pumping up, riding, foiling, all good.
My back foot is almost always over the front edge of the mast and front foot about 50cm further forward.
I use the same foil set on my 7'10" x 2-0" 118 litre downwind board and I have to put my back foot 20-30cm further forward. With my feet in this position it all works well, but it's a long way forward on the board.
If my back foot is a even a touch further back when I pump the foil rears up, stalls and drops down. Sometimes I can fight to push the down and it might continue for a bit, then roll over and crash.
The mast is as far back on the tracks as it will go. The big difference us that on most boards the mast and foot position works, and on the long skinny board the foot position has to be a lot further forward.
The problem doesn't happen if I accelerate on the surface then ease the board smoothly off the water. My suspicion is that the downwind board comes up too easy with aggressive pumping and needs more speed to ride away.
The board is also perfectly happy once on the foil and I can move my feet around.
Have you winged the long skinny board?
There's likely some angle set in the tracks. You could figure out what the difference is in angle of the tracks vs angle of other boards that you like and then baseplate shim the long skinny board to get the behavior you're used to.
I have worked out what is happening. I thought I was having to place my feet a long way forward of the mast, based on what I could see of the deck handle and the front of the pad. That made no sense and turned out to be wrong.
I marked on the deck the actual position of the mast, front of the foil and the mid-point of the board. I can see that my feet are pretty much in the same relative position that they would be on my other boards.
The simple answer is the tracks on the board don't allow me to position the mast far enough back.
Further comparison with other boards and foils and I can see points of difference in fuselage mount and foil shape that account for the different position requirements.
The board works fine with hand wing. The power in the wing makes it easy to stand further forward. It's a lot harder with a parawing where I need to stand in the more stable rearward position, and pump more aggressively to get up.
Having position markers on the deck helps with more precise foot positioning. There's other things I can do, including getting a new board with a track that suits my foils.
