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The Big Island Jimmy Lewis dealer (which is probably making it's money doing Kayak/SUP rentals and tours) hasn't been answering the phone or responding to voice mails. I ended up ordering a 10' Whopper Limited from an L.A. vendor. Spent about a hundred more than I was hoping to pay. Should be at Kona Airport Monday.

Hopefully the Limited version will be stronger with the "T" stringers it's supposed to be built with. Thanks for all the help guys.

I have looked at that board, and it might work for me I suppose. If I lived on Oahu, I could probably try one out. I'm weighing about 195# these days, not much older than you at 70, so I guess I can't use that as an excuse for my weak SUP skills. I'm a bit taller at 6'2". When I transitioned to the Whopper from my 9'5"X32 Fanatic Allwave (also 170L like the Whopper but thick and "corky"), the change was substantial—can't turn the Whopper very well, but I was catching way more waves. I think I only managed to catch one wave on the Fanatic? It felt fine on the wave as I recall, but I took the Fanatic out again after I buckled the Whopper, and I still feel very uncomfortable on it—It's a struggle for me. I also hate the Allwave's rough deck pad. I have neuropathy in my feet, and the Allwave's deck pad is really uncomfortable compared to the Whopper's, which has a smoother leather-like texture.

I'll check out the 9'8 Destroyer MP. Jimmy is actually a friend of a former schoolmate of mine who lives on Maui. I'm interested in the idea of downsizing slightly. I have a 9'5"X 32"X 170L Fanatic Allwave I took out yesterday. It has a "corky" unstable feel I can barely deal with, and a really rough deck pad I don't like. Might work well for someone heavier and shorter—I'm weighing about 195 pounds currently.

Thanks for the responses guys. It's a great help.

So I buckled my 10'0" X 34" 170L Whopper yesterday—in relatively small surf—while trying to paddle back out over a wave that had broken. I think that my feet weren't sufficiently far apart in a proper surf stance, and the board bounced off the whitewater and smacked into my chest really hard. When I had a look at the board after this blow, it had buckled, apparently the impact alone was too much for the Lite Tech construction. I've been surfing on the Whopper for about six years, so it's been beaten up a bit, but I was surprised that it didn't survive this (minor IMO) incident.

I believe my board was one of the early versions of the Whopper "Lite Tech." It had some minor issues (the deck pretty rapidly sank in slightly where I stood when paddling. Not a serious problem, but a sign that the deck skin was not very sturdy). Still, I loved its stability (I'm 6'2" and 70 years old) and began catching waves pretty consistently after buying it.

Currently available Whopper Variations; (Starlite, Limited, Lite, Blue Carbon, Rhino...):

https://sup.star-board.com/paddle-board/hard-paddle-board/whopper/

I guess I'd like to hear opinions on which of these would be a good compromise in price/durability/weight. I'm hoping to pay no more than $1500.00 with shipping to HI. I'd welcome any guidance from forum members, including information about alternative brands that might have the same sort of forgiving qualities that made it so practical for me to enjoy SUP-surfing.

So I buckled my 10'0" X 34" 170L Whopper yesterday—in relatively small surf—while trying to paddle back out over a wave that had broken. I think that my feet weren't sufficiently far apart in a proper surf stance, and the board bounced off the whitewater and smacked into my chest really hard. When I had a look at the board after this blow, it had buckled, apparently the impact alone was too much for the Lite Tech construction. I've been surfing on the Whopper for about six years, so it's been beaten up a bit, but I was surprised that it didn't survive this (minor IMO) incident.

I believe my board was one of the early versions of the Whopper "Lite Tech." It had some minor issues (the deck pretty rapidly sank in slightly where I stood when paddling. Not a serious problem, but a sign that the deck skin was not very sturdy). Still, I loved its stability (I'm 6'2" and 70 years old) and began catching waves pretty consistently after buying it.

Currently available Whopper Variations; (Starlite, Limited, Lite, Blue Carbon, Rhino...):

https://sup.star-board.com/paddle-board/hard-paddle-board/whopper/

I guess I'd like to hear opinions on which of these would be a good compromise in price/durability/weight. I'm hoping to pay no more than $1500.00 with shipping to HI. I'd welcome any guidance from forum members, including information about alternative brands that might have the sort of forgiving qualities that made it so practical for me to enjoy SUP-surfing.

I went for a swim with part of a coiled leash still attached to my ankle, holding my hat, throwing my paddle, and getting dragged down by my hip mounted water pack. Good thing I only had a 100 yds or so to swim.

Don't have a raceboard, but I did break a leash in good size surf. I was lucky a nice guy grabbed my board and met me on the way in doing the paddle throw/swim. It only occurred to me later that I could have tied the paddle to the remnant of the leash and probably made much better progress with both hands free. I'll try it next time.

Bill's advice about warming the parts with the heat gun worked for me. Working time with hot glue is mighty short with cool parts, and a weak joint will result. I used a strip of foil "speed" tape cut down to about 3/4" width to wrap the joint and resist torque. This worked and lasted, hot glue alone on my werner failed at sea.

Signed. Hope more will participate and help ensure that attitude/lineup behavior are understood to be the real issue in question. Seems to me the guy who proposed this bizarre restriction is the real wave hog.

...I think it's mostly because you pull the rail down but it might be because you're sinking the tail too.

I was told the same thing by a more experienced guy. He believed that pulling much aft of the feet after the shaft and blade face pass the vertical produced a downward or sinking force that wasn't desirable or effective in moving the board. Sounds like your end of stroke aft isn't about producing forward thrust TD, but more of a follow-through and paddle extraction. I've evolved a shorter stroke that ends abeam or maybe just aft of my feet with my top hand scribing an inward arc toward the deck while the lower hand remains fairly fixed like a fulcrum as the blade exits the water in an outboard slice and then feathers with the thumb pointing forward as I rotate the paddle into feather in the recovery. Dunno' how great this procedure is. It works for me, but I haven't been trying to share it with strangers in the water who may have longer strokes that work fine for them. Many of these long-stroke style paddlers seem to catch a lot more waves than I do.

It's tough to talk about the aerodynamics of a blade since they operate in stall. That's inherently an unstable flow condition.

I think this is right. Wings depend on "laminar" flow to generate lift:

You're kind of missing the point, it's not so much about direction of travel as pressure differential. The way you are seeing things is looking a little too much at Newton's laws but forgetting about Bernoulli's principle (which basically explains how pressure differential causes lift). In fact the vortices that cause problems in aircraft wings ARE actually travelling perpendicular to the direction of flight (which is a pretty amazing feat in itself considering the speeds involved, but it just goes to show how much pressure differential there is...and of course has to be in order to generate lift).

Again the paddle may work great, but the winglet analogy is inaccurate. The direction of the flow around the paddle (or wing) is absolutely crucial to the nature of the vortices they generate. The large surfaces of wings, in normal flight, both have air or fluid of some sort moving roughly parallel to their surfaces from the leading to the trailing edge, not directly from the lower to the upper surface of the wing in the vector which air would move through the web of a tennis racket. A paddle is moving with it's large surfaces perpendicular to the flow of water with the fluid hitting the paddle's power face like it hits the leading edge of a wing, or the nose of an airplane. In normal flight the air separates at the leading edge of a wing and flows over the upper and lower surfaces to the trailing edge with a small component of the flow drawn outboard along the bottom surface laterally to the low-pressure (upper) surface around the wingtip where the vortex is generated (this is right there in your video—no vortices are forming along the leading and trailing edges of the wing, only at the wingtip). In the case of a paddle, the flow from the high to low pressure side of the blade flows around the entire edge of the blade's face to the trailing side of the paddle blade. If winglets installed on airplanes were anything like this paddle design, they would be formed along the entire length of the wing as they are on this paddle. They are not, and occupy only a small area at the wingtip where the vortices form. So, unless you're speaking of a VTOL like a Harrier which briefly climbs and descends vertically in a vertical takeoff and landing, with the airflow striking the large surfaces of the wing directly during this transitory phase of flight as they would a ping-pong paddle, the flow around a paddle bears little or no resemblance to the flow over a wing.

The tone of the discussion on the two pages or so I could stand to read on the surfermag forum was incredibly and uniformly venomous. Not a moderate voice in the posts I saw. They seem absolutely determined to villify all SUP-ers whatever their equipment, etiquette, or capability may be. I would expect any contrary post to result in an instant pile-on, they sound like eight-year olds.

I've been wondering about this too. Shaped several Clark foam PU blank boards back in the sixties-eighties when they were available. I've wondered about the new EPS blank workability. I suppose these blanks are not like the packing material-type EPS I've seen, but I assume it cuts and responds to surforms and planers differently than the old Clark foam blanks which shaped, planed, and sanded pretty nicely and without too much tearing or separation of cottage-cheese type chunks that I associate with packing foam.

Though the paddle may work terrific, their notion that the "winglets" are analgous to a modern airplane's winglets seems misguided. The catch and initial pull of a paddle doesn't have much in common with the slicing action of a wing, rotor, or propellor; all of which pass through air or water edge-on. A paddle is more like the blades on an old paddle-wheel river boat or a fully stalled wing during most of the stroke, though I think my stroke finishes with an outboard slicing motion resembling the arc of a propellor blade. I think some call this a "J" stroke? Maybe "sculling?" Even so, for a "winglet" to function on a slicing paddle motion like this it would have to be on the low pressure side of the tip of the paddle, not the long edges, and one of the long edges of the paddle would be the "leading" edge, the other the "trailing." In the initial part of a normal paddle stroke the large faces of the paddle are perpendicular to the direction of its motion, not parallel, or nearly parallel to what aerodynamicists call the "relative wind" as with a wing. None of this theoretical stuff may alter the Konihi's utility or value of course, but it seems like they have a pseudo-scientific explanation for why it works.

Top-bearing pattern bits can simplify cutting mortises with jigs because the bearing and cutting edge are flush so that you don't need to do any math when cutting the jig opening which should match the dimensions of your fin box pretty precisely. Sometimes there is a tiny discrepancy between the size of the bearing and the bit, but it's usually not problematic. I think they may cost as much as a full set of guide bushings (25-35 bucks?). They present two problems: 1.Their depth of cut is limited by the length of the cutting edge, the thickness of the jig, and the amount the shaft can project from the router collet. Spacers of some kind can be placed under a jig to reduce cut depth, but maximum depth isn't easily increased with jigs. 2. They generally have to have 1/4" shafts so a bearing can fit the shaft—1/4" drive bits can chatter when hogging out harder material, and depth of cut can't be reduced (to reduce chatter) more than the amount that permits the bearing to still ride on the jig opening's edges. This probably won't be a problem for routing a board with a foam core though.