Anything better than being a kiter and having a Monofoil to ride?
Having TWO Monofoils
……… and as they are monos, they will still fit more easily into your car trunk as one stabi foil
The big high AR is more experimental, than for all day use and also less showing the core idea of monofoiling, which is riding save with out pointy wing tips. But having riden this and others new monos a few times I learned:
Even high AR wings are rideable,
but it is still the advise to never try to start with them monofoiling, as learning will be pretty close to impossible. But if experienced and once you made the start it is impressive how "easy" and "stable" also these wings can be. In some ways they are even more gentle as lower surface means less agressiv lift, if pitch is to high for a moment. Also speed window was wide enough to easily do 360, flying landings, flying tacks, etc.
But I still expect speed window in contrast to stabi foils will still be better on the low AR wings.
- Kitejunkie-Monofoil-Speed-Window.jpg (53.33 KiB) Viewed 3256 times
Lessons learned, also for normal stabi foiling:
I am now sure also with a mono you can go beyound 40 km/h, so even faster than many beginner stabi foils, as with the small one I had serveral uncounted spikes over 40 km/h and serious values till 38 km/h.
I think I was wrong, that the personal boarder is the brain and reaction time, I now think, it is much more about a good board setting:
In my experience similar as also for stabi foils, Vmax is very much about a compfortable riding position with both legs nearly straight at the highest speed.
As with any foil and especially low AR foils you have to reduce pitch a lot to keep the higher current causing more lift at the constant level of your weight pushing against. So the faster you go, the more the nose comes down.
If you start to have a uncompfortable position at your personal top speed with your back leg angled hard this will cause the lack of control that will lead to a wipe out, there is not to much to do against by only using a foot positon more back or a strut more to front.
What you have to do is shiming inbetween strut and wing or as I did with a plate inbetween strut and board. Both is the same as long you additionally compansate foot or strut position.
If doing so the only question is how much shimming: I am at 2,5° actually, depending on board and its angle inbetween lower and upper deck, loking to find the best compromise inbetween a good high speed and low speed shim as if exaggerating with the shim you may start to have an uncompfortable low or normal speed position with an angled front leg. On the other hand by shimming you will also influence your mean compfortable cruizing speed.
So don't set up your body position and style to your foilboard, but the other way around.
… and last about going back to stabi foils:
In the last time I used stabi foils for close to 10 days, especially as I wanted to redo the nice 360 galactical manouver and so I also learned again to ride stabi foils
, which was a bit hard at the beginning
and my jibes are maybe still better on the mono
… but apart from galactical, sitting and for sure the canery man, I don't miss anymore anything on the mono and therefore will keep one stabi, as I kept my twintip for many years without using it. But there is no doupt that I will never go back apart for a short occasion.
Saying this, I still just want to motivate all experiended foil kiter to think about:
Twintip -> Directional -> Stabifoil -> Monofoil …. could be the way to go,
if you start being tired of foiling.