Sunday High Noon - 22 September

The high tide peaked around noon today at +2.0'.  Marlon had music practice so I pulled a solo session.  Brought out the 5'6" with the Iwa - the swell was supposed to be a hair smaller than yesterday and the wind was light.  Bolting this foil on and getting my first rides, I can confidently say the Go Foil is more forgiving than the Slingshot.  The Slingshot is a lot more sensitive to position in the tracks, while the Go Foil allows you to compensate for suboptimal track position with body weight shifting.  When you get the position optimized on both of these foils, they both work awesome - but on a consistent basis it has been easier riding the Go Foil - but I'll only do that on a high tide (to take the dings and chips out of the equation).

Here's where I set the foil in the tracks today -

And since I was feeling confident, I was pushing the foil a little harder today - nice rebound turns off the approaching section, some steeper take offs on green waves, and a couple of lean back bottom turns.  Those last two were the problem today.  In both attempts, my front foot seemed to be off center and I wiped.  On the second to last wave, the board went back toward the wave and I went flying towards shore.  My right shin hit the board.  Looked like I got scratched.  I got back on, paddled back out and caught a super long ride with several turns all the way back to shore.

When I was lifting the board out of the water to head to the shower, I found my missing skin and some leg hair.  Ding repair time.

The 5'6" catches waves so easily - but it does stick to the water if I get close.  I've got two blanks on the rack right now - a 4'10" and a 4'6" - both will have a more rounded bottom rail on the front half of the length to help alleviate the stickiness, but it'll have the full back with sharp 90 degree rails to the back to help with catching waves.  With the high tide hovering around the middle of the day, I may use the next few days after work to fix the ding, skin the blanks, fair in the volume distribution, rout out the track reinforcement blocks - basically shape the two new boards.  We'll see how the week goes - at some point the tide will start to go high in the mid to late afternoon.