Swim Missiles

[Admin]

A friend just texted this image from down in Baja. I had sold him the two original swim missiles, and one of them ended up with this fellow. Reports are that he's killing it proning with hand paddles for downwinders. So stoked that it's going to good use :-).

[PonoBill]

You were ahead of your time. Yesterday's downwind foil Maliko race was solid Kalama-style boards, AKA swim missiles.

[gneve_foil]

No video or photographic evidence, but I was able to try the 7'6" swim missile with the Unifoil Progression 140 out in the surf this weekend. While my intent for the board is to eventually try and prone DW, I wanted to see how it rode once up on foil.

Observations:

• paddle speed is pretty good but I hadn't prone foiled in months so I'm not in the best paddling shape
  
• when catching waves, if the board starts to heel in one direction, the board will start turning in the opposite direction (just like a small sailing dinghy). somewhat hard to recover when this happens
• once standing, the length helps keep the speed and you can almost adjust your feet before trying to get the board up on foil
• at 17" wide, foot placement is critical
• the board pumps better than expected (again, I'm not in great foiling shape at the moment)

In addition to prone DW, I think this board is going to be great for a few scenarios:

• REALLY small, barely breaking days where you just don't have the depth to catch anything on the inside
• breaks where it peaks up on the outside only to break like shorepound on the inside

Here are a couple of tracks from two of my better waves. I think Dawn Patrol is pretty terrible but it's the easiest app I've found to track prone foiling that doesn't require any editing afterwards: