sunsetsailboards said..
thanks for the perspective Craig... always a good reminder that while forums like these are populated with riders from a variety of skill and experience levels, they can also sometimes be overweighted with technical perspectives, and many of the average customer/users out there don't nerd out on the minutia of board widths as much as some of us do. My wife is a perfect example... decent foiler... can get up and ride, jibe, switch feet no problem... is pretty efficient and can flag out and ride swell... she has no idea what foil AR does or why a board would be long and skinny... she's actually a great tester because she has no biases, but is pretty perceptive about performance differences between gear. Funniest gear observation from her ever was when we got our first soft handle wing (we started w/ the OG Foil Wing with boom) she said she hated the soft handles and that it "felt like carrying grocery bags"
Interesting to me that your developemnt/production cycle for the Skybrid was so short. Can you elaborate on the tail cutout shape decision as it's quite a bit different to what is out there now. Board looks great btw....and I had fun riding it.
Glad to hear you liked it. Indeed the cutouts are not a gimmick and have a definite use/advantage, as DWF mentions quite different in some ways between windsurfing and winging in terms of reducing wetted/planing surface for windsurfing (for windsurfing fin boards it typically makes a board feel more free/looser once planing, with a slight disadvantage in getting planing - but this is then often combined with a very wide tail to compensate - there are many variations here, end goal is the same though). Patrik's explanation above is good, even if slightly more relevant for the wind foiling foils/boards, which are way bigger in the tail/longer fuselages/travelling at higher speeds.
But the cutouts definitely have a use, as in windsurfing, each brand has their own theory/approach, mostly with the same end goal though, many ways to get to the same result. But basically it is to reduce the area in the tail for getting up and going, this is also the reason we have the slighty wider looking tail vs some brands, but then combined with cutouts. So like this you get more stability when at very low speed/before foiling up, bu the same advantages of a narrower downwind style tail once you start moving so having less area behind the boxes to reduce drag and be able to push the tail down for the pumping movement- so slightly different to wind foiling.
ha, funny, would say the exact same thing about my wife, who was a boom/slick customer before, hated our Unit hard handles on the first day, by the second day did not want anything else..:-) so often in foiling you get really used to a certain product (sports in general), but then need time to adjust. For someone in R&D like myself, it's a constant issue to remind yourself that the product is not always something I will use/prefer, with such a big variety of boards/wings and foils -this is the reason we often use 2-3 different teams and locations to test our products simultaneously, to get a good balance of conditions and rider skill levels.
