VIC
5124 posts
Can you comment a little more on the roll stability of the Jack? My 20" downwind board is very unstable in the roll axis and I am looking at a custom Jack as my new board. Trying to stand and pump and wave the parawing about in heavy chop was an exercise in frustration.
I've been looking at the 6' x 22" but also wondering if I can get away with the 5'8" x 21" for my 75kg.
Also, how are you carrying your Jack without a handle? I can get my arm around my 20" but my fingers start to slip pretty soon. I can carry boards with a bottom handle all day with the foil safely away from the wing.
VIC
5124 posts
I have worked out what is happening. I thought I was having to place my feet a long way forward of the mast, based on what I could see of the deck handle and the front of the pad. That made no sense and turned out to be wrong.
I marked on the deck the actual position of the mast, front of the foil and the mid-point of the board. I can see that my feet are pretty much in the same relative position that they would be on my other boards.
The simple answer is the tracks on the board don't allow me to position the mast far enough back.
Further comparison with other boards and foils and I can see points of difference in fuselage mount and foil shape that account for the different position requirements.
The board works fine with hand wing. The power in the wing makes it easy to stand further forward. It's a lot harder with a parawing where I need to stand in the more stable rearward position, and pump more aggressively to get up.
Having position markers on the deck helps with more precise foot positioning. There's other things I can do, including getting a new board with a track that suits my foils.
VIC
5124 posts
I am wondering if any of you can shed some light on a problem I am having,
I can use my daily foil set with a variety of wing boards and it works fine. Pumping up, riding, foiling, all good.
My back foot is almost always over the front edge of the mast and front foot about 50cm further forward.
I use the same foil set on my 7'10" x 2-0" 118 litre downwind board and I have to put my back foot 20-30cm further forward. With my feet in this position it all works well, but it's a long way forward on the board.
If my back foot is a even a touch further back when I pump the foil rears up, stalls and drops down. Sometimes I can fight to push the down and it might continue for a bit, then roll over and crash.
The mast is as far back on the tracks as it will go. The big difference us that on most boards the mast and foot position works, and on the long skinny board the foot position has to be a lot further forward.
The problem doesn't happen if I accelerate on the surface then ease the board smoothly off the water. My suspicion is that the downwind board comes up too easy with aggressive pumping and needs more speed to ride away.
The board is also perfectly happy once on the foil and I can move my feet around.
VIC
5124 posts
How is everybody getting on with their Jack boards? It's been a while and there's not much new information about them.
I'm thinking of ordering a custom and it would be good to get some up to date opinions.
VIC
5124 posts
I am looking for recommendations for a PFD, mainly for parawing use. I'm toying with doing some extended downwind runs and I think a PFD would be good to have when bobbing around way out to sea.
I am leaning more to a "proper" PFD with hi-viz and pockets and all the rest. It seems sensible to go all-in on the PFD side it. The Vaikobi V4 Ocean Racing PFD looks interesting.
I am a bit less interested in impact vests because of the dark colours and limited pockets. I am happy to listen to the advice of people who know more than me. The Forward WIP Kompact 2.0 suggests itself.
I like front zips. My old Neil Pryde PFD had a side zip with a velcro keeper and the velcro wore a hole in my wetsuit.
VIC
5124 posts
How are they different to any other SPF50 leggings?
VIC
5124 posts
The simplest is length x width x thickness. That should come out as substantially more than 80 litres (coz of narrower nose and tail and rocker etc).
Reduce the calculated volume by 10 to 20% and that should give you a half decent estimate of the actual volume.
If you want to go nuts on it. Run some tape down the middle of the board then divide it into a bunch of smaller boxes. Measure and calculate the volume for them and that should give you a more accurate number.
You could do the rough measurement method on a couple of existing boards with known volumes and come up with some rules of thumb to compare to yours.
VIC
5124 posts
My understanding of double skin parawings is you lose bottom end but you gain a heap of top end and better upwind performance.
There's another issue with some double skin wings, such as the Hybrid, that have mesh on the trailing edge drains. If your wing gets swamped in a shore break sand can get washed into the wing but there's no easy way for the wet sand to come out again. There can be kilos of sand inside the wing.
It took me 2-3 days of drying out the wing and manually chasing it out before I got all the sand out. The best way was to shake it all to one tip, reach in and grab that tip holding it bunched, then pull the tip out and dump the sand. Repeat as many times as necessary.
There's two solutions to this problem. One is for the wing to have an open sand/water drain big enough to let out large chunks of debris. The other is to paddle out well away from shore and into clean wind before launching the wing.
