Cabal Skimboards
 

Thanks to Luco shown below taking his kite for a walk at the Jupiter competition last fall, I was finally able to checkout kiteboarding with a skimboard.

http://gallery.kiteforum.com/albums/...9794.sized.jpg

I ran into him at Surf Expo in Orlando a couple of weeks ago and he said he wanted to loan me a skimboard to check it out. Being a man of his word, he tracked me down at Crandon Park yesterday and handed over a Cabal SX-46 for me to demo for a while.

http://www.cabaldc.com/images/SX-46-boards_02.gif
From: http://www.cabaldc.com/

I weigh 185 lbs. and had an 18 m kite up. The wind started to fade just before he came up and it becoming a bit tough to plane even with no waves and a large kite on my 130 cm board. Looking around most guys seemed to have drifted into wind waiting mode.

People have been saying skimboards are great in light winds, so here was a perfect opportunity. I had thought about needing a heavy wax job, deck pad and even footstraps which turned out to be wasted concern. I have poor footwork on boards, am a lousy surfer having grown up in the "land of chop" and despite all this getting up riding was EASY! I was ripping along in minutes at a good clip holding on a line and even going up wind a bit, it was LIGHT. Reversing direction and sizzor tacking was easy, you just REVERSE direction. I imagine you can jibe these but that requires a bit of fancy footwork and I don't have any. When the the wind built a bit I found I had to watch my edging to avoid being yanked off the board. During major lulls particularly during water starting, I would sink the board as I sinusoided, no problem, it just stayed glued to my feet. There wasn't even that much wax on the board. Luco said that folks normally would go out with 14 or 16 m kites with a bit more speed than larger kites. Still, I was able to waterstart and go with a bit of board sinking during lulls.

Well I'm impressed. I was talking to Chris from PR at the beach and he said someone uses these things in heavy waves at Wadell. Looking forward to giving it a go in some fall swells in a few days when a front is supposed to arrive.

http://www.cabaldc.com/images/cabal-home-welcome.jpg
From: http://www.cabaldc.com/

A shot of someone that HAS good footwork.