FREEWAVING!: FUNSHORE

A recent purchase of a new freewave board, prompts Finn Mullen to extol its virtues and reboot his view of onshore conditions.

WORDS – Finn Mullen // PHOTOS – Katie McAnena

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The year was 1989 and Robby Naish was on the beach at Marazion, Cornwall, competing. “How much rocker does your wave board have?”, a fan asks. “The full banana man, the full banana!”, said Robby reportedly. For a long time in wave board design, rocker was king, and just getting a wave board going was a feat in itself. Scott McKercher changed the game with his genre busting ‘Evo’, which reduced rocker and length of wave boards to a more user-friendly design that still turned, but didn’t need a force 10 storm to get it moving. Further refinements quickly followed, and the genesis of the modern multi-fin wave board that we have today was born, offering performance and planing in an easy to use package and for the most part is capable of being used in a wide variety of wave conditions.

BLIND SPOT

In tandem with advances in wave board design, has been the rise of so-called freestyle-wave, freewave or crossover boards. Championed by technique coaches everywhere, but maybe forgotten about, stigmatised or even snubbed by purist wave sailors, the concept of a board that can be used in less than ideal conditions and is at home in flat water and surf, is an easy sell, but given how relatively easy wave boards have become to use, they have been a bit of a blind spot in my quiver. Part of this is due to the modern wave board’s wide range, but also due to wings and kites residing in my van – these don’t make me any less of a windsurfer, in fact the crossover skills they give you, I always feel help my windsurfing. If it’s good enough for Robby Naish, Kai Lenny and Sarah-Quita Offringa’s repertoire of skills then… but it does leave a gap in conditions that I don’t windsurf in, principally onshore. And by onshore, I mean bolt onshore, not cross-onshore, diet-onshore or a little bit onshore, I’m talking the full monty! Now as much fun as kites and wings are in onshore, it’s not a perfect world by any means – high tide with no beach to launch from is a kiting no-go, as are squally winds, which Northern Europe has plenty of, and in that sort of weather, being connected to a kite doesn’t seem like such a good idea for life expectancy. As for winging, much as I am an advocate for the art, particularly in poor wave sailing conditions, in any sort of significant onshore surf, getting though the waves to reach deep enough water to start, feels like an exercise in self-flagellation and a ripped wing waiting to happen. With limited times between adult duties for sessions, spending valuable minutes of my life just trying to launch while avoiding financial disaster and a foil tip to the forehead is a non-starter in my book. And then of course there’s F.O.M.O. – Fear of Missing Out! As good as kiting and winging are, they’re not windsurfing and if I’m not windsurfing, I’m thinking of windsurfing. So, in the interests of scratching an itch that was quickly becoming a medical condition, I injected a 95-litre freewave board into my quiver this winter. The result was surprising; I definitely cured my itch, but was left with one other burning question – why on earth did I not do this sooner!

EASY LIFE

Suddenly onshore conditions that are normally testing on a wave board are significantly easier – the effects of current, whitewater or gusty winds are all lessened. Jumping, a part of windsurfing that I love, requires less of an ideal launchpad; the extra speed means little kickers become proper stunt ramps and messy conditions a veritable skate park. That added speed also gives you more rotational height and room off those mini bumps, so landings are drier and smoother. For wave riding I found the extra gear in speed allowed me to ride out of re-entries that would have swallowed me up on a wave board. Turn arcs are wider and less critical than a wave board, but at the same time, the extra speed allows me to actually complete a turn, where a wave board may bog down. It also allows me to not just think about conventionally riding on the way in; one of my favourite things to do in onshore is to slash a gybe onto a lip on the way out and ride clew first. All of this is possible on a wave board too, I just find I have to be more powered up to do it and so the rig doesn’t feel as light as when using a freewave board in the same scenario.

ONSHORE SCORE

Peter Hart often scribes in these pages that the brutal reality of good wave sailing is that most of it is very on and off the plane, such is the price you pay for cross-off winds that have to pass over obstructions on the shore. That uncomfortable truth can lie in contrast to onshore conditions, when uninhibited by anything to block it, bar the size of the waves themselves, there is often a cleaner and stronger wind. The long flat sections between onshore waves can be butter smooth, leaving you plenty of time to build up speed for jumps or tap into your inner speed demon! Such is the case at one of my local beaches, and whilst other spots nearby can be world-class down-the-line, they are also fickle and can often be a real roll of the dice as to whether you score or not. Onshore is way less of a gamble, the risk of skunking is reduced at the expense of scoring that epic session. But to be honest, there’s just days I don’t care about that, I just want to windsurf, hoon up and down without worrying about surfers or how to get back in from out the back if the wind drops.

UPSIDE

A good cross-off day at most breaks in the world means navigating the crowd; onshore, not so much. Dan Mann, one of the world’s leading modern surfboard shapers, whose boards even grace Kelly Slater’s quiver, has an expression for his best-selling onshore grovel board, the ‘Sweet Potato’ – “Keep it in your trunk so that you can always surf it in the junk.” Living in California, he finds the best way to score uncrowded conditions is surf where other people don’t want to – i.e. where the waves are bad. And I subscribe to his theory that you can have a lot of fun in bad conditions with the right equipment, and enjoy the upside of no crowds. As travel at home and abroad becomes increasingly expensive, these boards allow you to make the most of local conditions and spend more time in the water than behind the wheel.

PLANING SAILING

My wave board hasn’t been gathering dust since I got a freewave, it’s definitely still got its place, and I’ll reach for it at the earliest opportunity, but I’ve found myself less willing to drive hours to get a windsurfing fix when the freewave will do the job closer to home. Part of the attraction of kites and wing foils is that you spend a lot of time ‘on the plane’ and I was genuinely surprised at how much more planing time the freewave board offered, and in turn how that gave me more mobility around the break, to bear off, or head up, as needed, to a peak or ramp. At 100kg, I was also surprised how readily my 95-litre crossover performed at my weight and made me feel like I was at least 10 kg lighter – which post the big dinners of Christmas I’m definitely not! In down-the-line sailing, getting out to the wind line or past the break is as much about having enough volume to ‘slog’ off the plane through the surf. In onshore I found volume isn’t as much of an asset as speed, the freewave’s added knots allowed me to skip over whitewater and gain vital ground upwind when needed, and although I was using a board with less volume than I would for down-the-line, its ability to plane and go faster negated its loss of float.

I started this article by stating that I had a blind spot to freewave boards, now my eyes have been well and truly opened – with the right board, onshore is funshore!

 

 

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