Afternoon session with Grif at Pembroke yesterday. We agreed that it should be a big kites and big boards party, and so it was.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the 5th line system installed on my kites is detracting from their power. I posted up a thread on the kiteboarder forum and there's one guy there who agrees with me. The up side is that, in the right conditions, there's a possibilty that I can fly the bigger kites in a higher wind than I first thought. Concerns for safety, however, mean that I can't just rig up the 15 whenever I please, I'm going to have to continue like this for a while.
Anyway I really liked the big board and it turns on a penny - worryingly saw a large rock revealed by a trough between waves, but the board reacted almost faster than I could think (if that's possible). I didn't really notice any advantage in the upwind, however, but maybe it's the board, the wind or just me, time will tell. It's certainly a different style of riding. The best thing for me was that I got really into riding over medium sized waves, dipping the kite for more power as I went over the edge of each wave - that's where I was losing speed before. I'm also better at predicting when to lean back as the kite pulls while sining, that way I don't lose so much ground downwind.
As for the board, I bought some epoxy today (expensive stuff) in order to bond the ply together. I'm erring towards using the original method of bricks and wedges to get the rocker, after having previously been through all sorts of loony ideas. After scanning through 1000 of the 1600 posts on teh Yahoo kiteboardbuilder group's message board, I keep toying with the idea of glass fibre. One step at a time, I think.
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