Good morning people,
I recently brought the new Alpine foil pocket board, and thought I would share my experience. I have owned the alpinefoil VR5 board, XLP wing and 3 different aluminium masts ( 60 / 75 / 90 ), and have found them to be amongst the best quality, versatility and performance that you can get from a foil manufacturer. The speed range I get out of the XLP wing is around 10 kts to 27 kts, with a top speed of 33 kts, on the aluminium mast using a smaller speed front wing. When I learnt they had made a board using the same process they use to make the foils I was intrigued.
Fast forward and I just so happen to be on holidays an hour away from the Alpinefoil factory, and decided to give them a call to see if I could take a look a their product and the factory. Damien - the owner was more than happy to oblige, and gave me a full tour of their factory, and chatted about some of the product lineup and design history.
The Pocketboard is made using a composite construction with carbon fibre on foam, as many other boards are..... However this is high tensile pre-preg carbon, and these boards are compression cooked in gigantic heated press machines, the same way that they manufacture ( and a lot of other foil manufacturers ), manufacture their foils / fins - but I have never seen a hydrofoil board manufactured this way. The resulting board is unlike anything I have seen or felt on the market. The weight is under 2kg, and it looks to be mainly under 2 cm thick with astronomically unbelievable stiffness for how thin it appears and the weight it has. I've ridden other boards that are thin like this, and I do not like the flexability in the boards, which detract from the connected feeling on the foil. This board - feels like it has absolutely no flex whatsoever.
On the water, it floats foil and flat, and does not have a big bouyancy level due to the volume being so low. The connection through your feet is instant, and it feels like you have one less thing to worry about when foiling, as it is effortless to turn the board around, with it having very little inertia or windage of it's own. I did touch down a couple times, and clip the rails - none of which caused any crashes. The double concave bottom seems to do a good job at maintaining direction, and cushioning any accidental impacts with the water. The other elephant in the room here is the size. This thing is tiny - smaller than any twintip I've seen. It's so small you could load it sideways into almost any car on the planet, and carry it down to the beach without worrying about where the other end is. Great for travel.
Damien then convinced me to upgrade to their latest designed wave 950 foil, with the sales pitch that an extra 10 or so years of R & D had produced it, and it would do everything my XLP could do, and significantly more. Not knowing what I was missing, I took his word for it and I'm glad that I did. Visually, the Wave 950 is a monster sizewise compared to my XLP ( in orange ) , and so I was thinking there is no way this thing is going to even have the same wind range - since it's both thicker and, about 30% more surface area. Boy was I wrong.
Launching with the pocket board and wave 950, I was foiling before the kite even got to the bottom of the power stroke. Infact, I don't really remember the pocketboard actually moving through the water at all. I think I lifted up as the mast rotated up. The bottom end of this must be around 6 kts. It is incredibly low, and I felt completely stable at that speed with none of the pre stall buffeting that I was used to from the XLP. So far I have only take it up to around 22kts, but there was no indication that the extra 30% surface area or thickness was causing any issue at all. Infact at that speed, it felt exactly the same as it did at 14 kts, and seemed to be giving an extra level of ... steadiness when compared to the older XLP. The XLP typically is very stable from about 10 to 20kts, Above 20 up to 28 it progressively gets more difficult to control for comparison sake. At 23 kts on the wave 950, there was no such tapering yet, and it did indeed "feel" very controllable.
The foil turns sharper, and is more manoeuvreable than the XLP, and with the very low bottom end, was very easy to hit 360 upwind turns effortlessly...... which are a problem on the XLP if the speed dropped below 10 kts, or kiteloop power didn't compensate for the speed.
All in all.... no need to ride the XLP again, and I've just gained another stellar performing foil and board combo!
WAVE 950 left, XLP right
