With plenty of time on my hands, my shallow water raceboard, or puddleboard 1.0, has been trialled to see if the project was worth pursuing.
The dream was always to have a board that could be sailed in water as skinny as a kite can manage, and the latest ruling in my end of OZ has been that sailing is ok as exercise in your own village. A lot of my village is tidal sandflats with lots of knee-deep water not really conducive to the big fins on modern sailboards, so the motivation has grown!
You will see in the pics my donor board is an old and thrashed Speed ProAm 250 I bought from a mate dirt cheap for a bit of fun. This was all discussed when I first went a little crazy at
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Windsurfing/General/Shallow-water-crazy-raceboard-fin?page=1
But when I tried to follow that thread the timeline had expired so here we are again. In that discussion there was some really interesting stuff that might be included in 2.0 onwards.You will see I added 4 water ski fins for the first trial in a 5 -8 knot easterly at Shorncliffe SEQ. As expected the lack of foil shape in the fins meant any hard pressure on the back foot would lead to "slideout" of the arse. I chose a 6.2 sq.m. flat sail which worked pretty well on the day, and I have to say that sailing in ankle to knee deep water past people walking their dogs was a lot of fun. Not much centreboard was used because that bigger area forced the fin to slide more. The board overall behaved like a big windsup, but faster. Upwind it actually sailed quite well as a twintip with the windward rail depressed and no centreboard down. Downwind was fun and the hydraulic physics could be felt underfoot. Sliding nicely in a metre of water, and slowing down with drag and stern wave forming from kneedeep down to ankle deep. When the wind freshened a little, deeper downwind in very shallow water she started to get a ground effect like a skim board!
Next iteration is curing in the shed now, a pivoting fin cut into the back of the board..
there's been lots of work into finless surfboard over the last few years because they became trendy.
looking at what your doing I wonder if it's worth borrowing from the finless surfboard ideas and glassing some longer blades along the board.
a little deeper than your kite fins but 1.5m long
What a weapon, would hate to fall and land on the tail.
Thanks for that, closest I was thinking of if I went further down the track was a board like the old Bombora Astro Toy with stepped bottom for lateral resistance. Concerned by lots of drag and that as it goes faster there is less in the water again.
Select to expand quoteGestalt said..
there's been lots of work into finless surfboard over the last few years because they became trendy.
looking at what your doing I wonder if it's worth borrowing from the finless surfboard ideas and glassing some longer blades along the board.
a little deeper than your kite fins but 1.5m long
....Quick to the bat ma board Robin.....
I love all the thinking going on .
I don't think the stepped hull would be enough .
Id go for the long shallow 3" blade along most of the hull. From back to a couple feet from front .
You could attach using fin and CB boxes.
But that's just one of many options .
Most important , lots of pics during the build .
For that style of lightwind, shallow water sailing it's the centreboard that does the work and makes a big difference. A raceboard or windSUP with a centreboard and a 20-30cm rear fin is the perfect "off the shelf" solution. Don't be tempted by getting planing and/or big sails. I've found my BIC windSUP to be a perfect sand flats cruiser with a plastic 24cm dolphin fin at the back, a swinging centreboard and a 6.5m sail. A couple of mates have used/owned windSUP's without the centreboard and they don't perform anywhere near as well upwind.
