Innholdsfortegnelse for #39 i TheKiteMag

Not content with following the well-trodden path to Cumbuco, Brazilian strapless freestyle champion Sebastian Ribeiro got out his map and compass, and plotted a route further south. We couldn’t possibly divulge the exact location, but wish we’d been there for the après-caipirinha… During challenging times like 2020, I find it important to change our mindset. As a professional athlete, being creative is key to maintaining my health and training schedule. I decided to face the challenge head-on, viewing it from a different perspective, and found a great opportunity. After lockdown in southern Brazil, I finally discovered a place that allowed me to keep my goals alive. I have been traveling to different places around northeastern Brazil for a few years now, and knew that the rainy season had just ended…

YOUR LATEST SURFBOARD RANGE LOOKS GREAT, A MIXTURE OF SOME CABRINHA CLASSICS AND SOME NEW DESIGNS. We’ve given the whole surfboard line an overhaul with all new constructions, and some shape and outline tweaks. We’re also offering the Spade and X:Breed models in a new ultra-light pro construction. We’ve switched up the fin boxes to a Future style fin box to give a more positive feeling and more security. Furthermore, all our surf and foil boards now ship with Flexi Hex packaging to reduce plastic use. GIVE US A QUICK SUMMARY OF THE MODELS AND THEIR INTENDED USES. The S:Quad is the classic down-the-line surfboard. When the waves are firing this is the go-to board. It’s Keahi de Aboitiz’s main board for powerful waves. It’s a quad setup for speed…

WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE BOOOMTAG? Many of us have experienced the scenario where you’re having a great session, when your board comes off your feet, then you can’t spot it in the waves. You body drag back to shore and after searching for ages, you go home without it, feeling sad. If you’re lucky an honest person finds your board and calls the phone number you wrote on it. That’s if you wrote a number on it, and if it is still readable… Since there are so many boards lost in The Netherlands and endless lost and found messages on social media, Harlem founder Alex Morgenstern and the Booomtag founder Rogier Dekker brainstormed to solve this problem. The idea was to find a better solution to keep track…

WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHANGES FROM EARLIER VERSIONS? This is our fourth version of the board. During the development of the new Bolt we focused on improving the overall performance and riding comfort, even though it’s a pure wakestyle board. The result is new features like the Tucked Under Rail, the Beveled Deck and the Katana Channels. TELL US MORE ABOUT THE KATANA CHANNELS. For the perfect combo between flex and stiffness, we’ve continued the same contours of the bottom tip channel into the top deck, so it now resembles a Japanese Katana sword! The new contours add tip stiffness to store and release the energy better than you generate when loading the edge. THE NEW RAIL DESIGN LOOKS RADICALLY CHANGED. HOW DOES IT COMPLEMENT THE CHANNEL DESIGN? The Bolt…

TELL US ABOUT THE BOARD, IT LOOKS LIKE A REFRESHING BREAK FROM THE NORM. We are super excited about the Super Natural. It is a multi-functional freeride twintip with a six-fin configuration, designed to give maximum grip and drive to help boost and throw buckets of water! It’s a mutant style board that is fun to use directionally without compromising riding in both directions. We have had amazing feedback from our team so far in all conditions from waves to flat water. HOW DOES THE SHAPE AND DESIGN HELP IT PERFORM IN MULTIPLE DISCIPLINES? The deep molded channels provide a huge amount of grip, and the outline gives a surfy locked-in feel when laying into a carve, whether you’re on flat water or a wave. The longer length and flatter…

ALL-ROUNDER TEST The Dash has been a mainstay in the Naish camp and sits alongside the Torch as a modernized freestyle-oriented performance kite for higher level or aspirational and unhooked riders. Season 25 from Naish has let them indulge in a little graphical nostalgia with the kite range, with the Limited Edition (LE) Dash sporting a massive skull and crossbones on a black canopy, harking back to the early Naish Series 25 years ago. If you don’t remember the original Sky Pirate directional, look it up – it’s a lesson in aquatic badass. People will automatically give you preferential right of way on this kite without a second thought. Construction-wise, it’s easy to get distracted by the striking limited edition graphics, but all the usual Naish bells and whistles continue…

FOIL BOARD TEST FOIL TEST The Hover 112 is an exercise in freeride foil minimalism. It’s small but tough, and has quite an aggressive deck grip, leaving no risk of slippage whatsoever and complete control of those hydrofoil-essential fine motor skills. The edges of the board are nicely rounded and feel comfortable when handling, and aren’t going to hunt you down in the water if you stack it. The matt Durafinish paint job survived a few weeks in and out of the sandy van without so much as a scuff. A set of foot strap inserts set out in the standard Y shape are well positioned, and boosting with the tiny Hover is super fun with a low swing weight, particularly with a fast foil. The low volume means you…

2019 Kite Park League and 2017 Triple-S champion Ewan Jaspan was stoked to contribute to the development of his first signature pro board with Naish. The Traverse Ewan Jaspan Pro is a bold variation from the ubiquitous twintip formula and draws inspiration from various board sports to offer something delightfully different… It was great to be involved in the development of this board. I am very passionate about R&D, keen to gain more knowledge, try more equipment and strive for the best possible product. Working with the team at Naish is great because they really take on board feedback and love collaborating with the team riders to improve the product line. The longer I have been with them, the more involved with the gear I have become, and it is…

Misty Cliffs near Cape Town is a well-known and much-loved spot amongst proficient wave riders, consistently providing generous mountains of water in Cape Town’s summer. However, when Covid-19 forced RRD International rider Carl Ferreira to stay at home during their winter, he discovered that it’s not so bad then either… It has been another cold and wet winter here in Cape Town for me. Last year I blew the meniscus in my knee at the end of the season and was unable to travel, and this year the Covid-19 restrictions made it almost impossible to go abroad. This forced a lot of the South African kiting community to stay at home for the winter, and discover which spots work at this time. In summer the wind predominantly blows from the…

HOW HAS THE CARVE SURF / STRAPLESS FREESTYLE KITE AND ITS PERFORMANCE EVOLVED THIS YEAR? I BELIEVE YOU’RE USING SOME NEW LIGHTWEIGHT CANOPY MATERIAL. For 2021, the Carve has a fresh evolved design with a more playful feel, primarily due to construction and bridle changes. It has a much wider wind range, better depower in strong winds, more power control when riding waves, and a noticeably better high end. We wanted to maintain the surf tough construction but keep the weight down, so we’ve replaced the Dacron panels with a new 75g heavy-duty canopy reinforcement material. This reinforcement helps to protect the lighter inner main canopy body, while allowing the kite to be more responsive in the steering and depower, with a much smoother and cleaner entry. The new lighter…

TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY AND WATCHING THE COMPETITION ALIGN THEMSELVES… 2013 marked the time that harnesses would be looked at very differently – Coleman Buckley, Ride Engine founder, made his first custom hardshell harnesses for other people. His goal was simple – to make a harness that solved issues like lack of support, pressure points and movement on the body. The other harnesses out there were trying to address fit by over-building and adding more padding and robotic-looking shaping. Coleman decided a simpler way was to form a hardshell that would lock the harness into the ergonomics of the body. This initial design and engineering shaped the philosophy of the product that we make – minimal, simplistic design that is 100% about pure performance to the…

SURFBOARD TEST F-ONE have always been a brand led by their hyper-talented team riders, and strapless freestyle has seen a huge evolution in the last few years with the GKA pushing the discipline in competition. From a performance perspective, this has meant higher jumps, more powered freestyle-derived moves, and the inevitable hard landings that come with that. Feedback suggested the discipline was beginning to demand a board that is quite far from a traditional surfboard construction, their design scope and intended use. The riders asked for a more compact shape, far slimmer, lighter, and with more pop for flat water take offs, and more comfortable for hard, powered landings. The Magnet Carbon is F-ONE’s extremely concise answer. It comes in two sizes of 4’11 and 5’1, with a rider weight…

FOIL TEST In the brave new world of foiling, it is very difficult to produce a foil that you can genuinely say is relatively ‘future proof’. There is such rapid development and foils head in such a huge number of different directions in terms of design that – to anyone just starting out in the world of foiling – if you lined up all of their options, it’s pretty likely their head would explode. RRD have acknowledged that and want to make your life simple: they have their Universal Foil. Which – helpfully enough – can also be used for wing foiling and surf foiling. It’s a Universal Foil, get it? Aside from its adaptability, the price point is also a big selling point. You can get up and riding…

TWINTIP Alongside the Kev-Pro, Reedin have produced the Super-E as a more accessible board for mere mortals. A similar outline and channeling system have been implemented but with a different flex pattern for more of a focus on ease of use and comfort. Reedin are producing the Super-E in Poland, and the European production standards are immediately apparent. In the hands it feels well detailed, particularly in the finish and it is extremely light for its size. The base has a full concave divided out into three defined channels running right out to the tips. This is designed to get as much grip as possible under your back foot. There’s also an additional edging channel running along the inside of the rail. The board’s tips are relatively thin, with more…

WHAT ARE YOUR FIRST RECOLLECTIONS OF THE BEACH? I remember arriving there for the first time and being surprised because I didn’t know there was such a great spot like this on Bora Bora. The spot is located on a ‘motu’ (little island) so you need a boat to reach it. It was sunny and the wind was a bit light so I just enjoyed the moment with my friends but I couldn’t wait to have a perfect session there. CAN YOU REMEMBER ANY OF YOUR FIRST SESSIONS? Yes, the next time we went there the wind was still a bit light, so I decided to take my foil out. It was a bit sketchy because the flat-water zone is really small, and close to this you have some coral…

Dutch brand Lieuwe have been producing beautiful custom kite boards for ten years in their own specialized production facility at home. Crystal Veness headed over to Lieuwe HQ to check out their factory and to catch up with Lieuwe founder Florian van Rije… HEY FLORIAN. SO, WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION TO START A KITE BRAND? My main motivation was to build machines. I’m a mechanical engineer and building a kiteboard was a good excuse to build a lot of interesting machines. There is so much technique involved in the production. I wanted to make the best board on the market and build whatever I could. I’d achieve one thing then be motivated to build better and better boards. They sold well so I thought it had potential to expand and…

WHAT IS THE ADVANTAGE IN HAVING THE TWO SEPARATE CONTROL SYSTEMS? Both front and back-line trim currently have a place in the sport, however for the vast majority of riders, back-line trim allows more access to the entire sheeting range of an SLE kite and the new reality of precision tuning performance from their kite with macro adjustments. Back-line trim wins for freeride, wave riding, strapless freestyle, foilboarding and Big Air, because it allows a massive sheeting range. Front-line trim is great for handle passes and unhooked moves – the trim line can be sheeted in rapidly, just prior to initiating a handlepass or an unhooked trick. If handlepassing isn’t your thing, the Shift back-line trim will deliver much more overall performance for all wind ranges and riding styles. So…

TWINTIP CORE have never been shy of producing a top shelf twintip, and the Choice sits in the range as a board that lends itself to a multitude of disciplines, hence the name. Boots or straps, freestyle or Big Air, it’s designed to give you a decent option for all of it. Build-wise, V4 has had quite a rethink but continues to integrate luxurious Cartan Carbon into the build, which is a material mainstay of their sister brand, Carved. This sandwiches a familiar Paulownia wood core. All-new Katana channels are present, visible in the tips and resembling the infamous Japanese sword. These help increase and control the flex and release in the tips, and improve water flow into the channels in the base. It is mirrored in the deck of…

FOIL BOARD TEST Here’s a fact: CrazyFly love creating things to put your feet on and get powered by a kite with. They live and breathe board technology and we could tell right away that the Pure board was something that – even with all their experience – they were pretty stoked about. So, what do we have? Well, when it arrived at TKM HQ we thought maybe it was some A1 promotional materials we had been expecting. Tiny box, weighing nothing… When we opened it, what emerged was one of the stealthiest and most insane looking boards we have seen. At 88 x 43cm the Pure weighs in at 1.58kg. And that is with the deck pad, which we’d guess has to be 250g or so. It’s all black…