Black Project è orgogliosa di comunicare il lancio di una nuova pinna sviluppata in collaborazione con il Rene Egli Center di Fuerteventura per le acque poco profonde, come le lagune. Con soli 21 cm questa nuova pinna garantirà delle performance freeride incredibili!
Who says that you need a massive 40cm freeride fin on your board? Personally I have always wondered why board brands supply their boards with such long fins, I remember growing up, we never needed those massive fins! Equipment has changed over the years (a lot!) and fins have increased in size, what this means for the typical windsurfer is that they are somewhat stuck with a big long fin as standard. This seems rather silly to me, it makes it harder to beach start, easier to hit submerged objects and most annoyingly really easy to cut yourself or damage your sail etc.
A few months ago we were approached by the Rene Egli windsurfing and kitesurfing center in Fuerteventura who wanted a shallow water fin for their lagoon which is popular with freeirde sailors, the only problem (well until the FreeDELTA RE) was that the lagoon is very shallow and a traditional fin has serious limitations there. Working closely with Fran and his team we set to work designing a fin which suit a large range of boards in their rental fleet and accommodate a large range of sails and riders. It needed to be short, about half the length of a regular fin!
The FreeDELTA RE turned out to be one of the most challenging projects we have undergone, the rules which were familiar with us had to be broken and it took several designs and prototypes until we were starting to get close to the level of performance that we wanted, once we knew that we were headed in the right direction it took further time and refinement to be sure that we had maximized performance. We actually ended up with a much bigger fin than we had expected, increasing both area and foil thickness dramatically from the initial designs which keeping the depth to only 21cm.
The result of all this work is a fast, fun, controllable fin which instill confidence in the rider. We think fins should be forgettable, as I rider you do not want to be thinking about what the fin is doing, just concentrating where you are headed and having fun!
FreeDELTA RE 21 (above) being used on a 2015 Starboard Carve 111, versatility was one of our major aims with this new fin, we wanted a fin that would be perfectly happy on a range of boards from 100-145 ltr with a range of sails from 5.5 through to 8.0m. Testing was really fun, we tried everything we could from smaller slalom boards maxed out with race sails to big beginner boards with small sails. While we initially designed this fin for shallow water we also wanted to make it excel in weedy locations and thanks to its optimized rake it will happily shed any weed which comes its way! Durability is extremely important to us and while we discussed other options with Fran, the team and our factory we settled on our G10 construction as this is the most durable option, however it is just the material choice but how you use it.
The first of these fins are heading to Spain and their new home in the Rene Egli rental fleet but if you are interested in getting one of these new designs for yourself (or your windsurf center) there please get in touch.
