What a lovely day out on the water. It's getting clear the combined Tribal/S2efforts to create gear for normal weight users are starting to pay off big time. Eventhough the 5.6 was on the very small side 90% of the time, I felt it was super easy to maintain speed. Serge Beumer, Art Szpunar, Barry Spanier and yourstruly are in deep contact on our open water speed test findings and I feel we are making huge progress in anticipation of very interesting things to come.
Michel and I set-up a nice testing regime for the day and the anticipated sail response was there as expected.
Furthermore I cannot point out enough just how insanely good the Tribal carbon asy is functioning. It's hands down the best fin I ever sailed. Really nothing comes near in terms of useability and neutral behaviour. The fin is simply magic. I leave it to every single rider to judge if this is pure advertisement or not but I can guarantee you will never feel more at ease on chop than with these swept asy fins. The speed is mindblowing and the shape extremely suitable for people not weighing as much and/or being as long (an thus lacking the leverage) as the giants of gps-speedsurfing. Unlike many other fins you don't need to massively load them to get the best out of theTribal Asy. As soon as you hit a gust, accelleration is instant and when paying attention and understanding how the fin works you can glide for seconds through a lull without even noticing the wind dropped as long as you adjust the sail stance to the lack of wind. The fin simply carries the speed through the lull and at the next gust the board jumps into the next gear. I had many, many runs today in which I normally would have stalled but to my surprise in the extremely narrow bands of wind I could jump from gust to lull to gust and one 70+ run followed the other, also when the wind was way too light for my 5.6.
The fin tracks upwind like crazy as well, so no problems getting back without unneeded energy loss. THE most interesting aspect of the fin is the fact it keeps the board so neutral that it feels as if there is no chop. Serge Beumer proved this big time end of December when everyone else was simply surviving and he rode his board as if no chop was there. I truly believe the speed I set today -eventhough some of the monsters of speed might and probably would have gone faster- was beyond what I could reach with any other fin I know off. Ok..enough advertisement for one day but a happy chappy sometimes just needs to cry out loud.