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philn said..
What traits do you see as most important in a board for DTL waveriding in very onshore conditions (e.g. like Pozo or Witsands)? And how would you adjust that shape to work in the same wind direction but much lighter wind strength (6.0 instead of 3.7) and weaker waves?
It would depend mostly on the rider and the preferences. Pozo tends to involve blaasting on the way out, so if that is a priority I would use a rocker and bottom shape specific for that. But if wave riding is a priority I'd say both Simmer production boards or something similar works and I would recommend a twin setup for that. Onshore in super high wind is kind of hard and there is not a whole lot of things you can do about it as far as boards go. Perhaps I'd keep rails a bit extra soft so that the boards can slide around rather freely in turn exits. Lightwind onshore is a different thing. Anyone interested to really vernture into that should think about investing the time in learing to ride the kind of large fin forward shapes I show in the video. You can really develop a kind of flowing style onshore riding with such a setup, which is hard to do on regular fin setups. I used to ride big sails in waves before sometimes and had some good 5.5, 5.9 and even 7.0 when I was on Hotsails. I don't anymore, becaus I prefer to be on pretty small boards, but it is not that hard to design a good waveboard that carries a 6.0 and still turns well. In fact, the surf style fin setup I presented makes also super fast rockers turny, so you could make a convertible style board that with a twin or regular thruster or even single setup was a super lively freewave board but transformed into an onshore riding specialist board with a surf style twin+trailer setup (with the price of also transforming to a board that feels sluggier on the wave up, but still with good upwind performance though).