WS322janfebHarty

Issue Issue 322 320 - JAN - OCT FEB 2012 2013

FINS 窶連 I N T W HDUCK AT T HGYBE E Y U S E D TO BE THE

PETER HART TECHNIQUE Spin-out was once an unfortunate way of life. Vastly improved fins have reduced the epidemic but it’s still out there. PH slip slides away in the early 90s.

Words PETER HART / Photos Hart Photography

PETER HART MASTERCLASS FINS ‘AINT WHAT THEY USED TO BE They can change, corrupt and improve your style, increase speed, enhance manoeuvres and render others impossible. Their design confounds the brightest theoreticians, but Harty reckons you under-estimate the role of the fin at your peril.

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MULTIPLE CHOICE

Three fins, a 32 cross over, a 26 wave and a 20cm freestyle fin all useable with the same 103 freestyle wave board and all inspiring different set-ups, different trim and totally different moves and lines on the water.

Changing fin can be one of the best ways to force you out of a technique rut.

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BLAST or TURN

Improving comes partly from looking at your kit and above all the fin and then adjusting the way you trim and turn accordingly.

(Hart Photography) One board but three fins to encourage totally different sailing styles.

was giving a talk a while back. I’d just got back from a Speed World Cup in Fuerte during the height of the ‘speed era’. Fins were the hot topic. The Brits had been doing pretty well. I’d been working a lot with Steve Cook of F-Hot fins and very, very stupidly, having barely scraped an ‘E’ in my Physics O-Level, began to think I knew what was going on down there. I talked about our trials with ‘blade’ fins, declaring that the narrower chord seemed to create less drag than the traditional short and wide speed fins – OK so far. Then, idiot, I plunged right in and began talking about the rake angle saying how we were matching it to the natural planing angle of the board. By increasing the rake by 5º the board rode more ‘nose up’ which was faster. And then, yet more stupidly, I said that we found fins worked like sails and, that with a little flex in the tip, they twisted off and dumped the shock loads that cause spin-out - especially off the wind. It was then that a hand rose in the audience, attached to which was a gentleman with a beard, sandals, a Masters in Hydrodynamics and the intention to expose me as a charlatan.

“Surely increasing rake will reduce lift and drop the nose? How do your foil percentages change from baseto-tip? Because on the MiG fighter jets…are you talking about torsional stiffness or overall flex because …?”

Suddenly I was that beginner climber on the North Face of the Eiger without a rope, with chronic vertigo and so hopelessly out of his depth that the kindest act would be to jump and put everyone out of their misery.

The following winter took me to Australia. Still smarting from my humiliation and in search of true knowledge, I travelled up to Byron Bay on Australia’s east coast and sought an audience with John Gudgeon, MD of Multifin, the then leading fin company. John was an engineer and his designs and method were surely underpinned by hard scientific fact. On his wall hung some of his most celebrated creations, ‘the kangercock’, the ‘football’, the ‘fenced football’. So like a lost soul before the Dalai Lama I sat before this uber-guru on the verge of eternal enlightenment.

(Hart Photography) Some fins are designed to offer lift in a straight line, some are designed to drive you through a turn. No prizes for guessing which here.

“So John”, I said, “how do you go about creating a new design?”

“Well mate, I make a few that look kinda right. Then I give them to the boys to test. They come back and tell me which one they like and then I make up a reason why it works.”

more obvious causes like “I’m crap.”

This subject is so vast that I’m already getting agoraphobia but here, taken from experience in the field, are examples of where, changing the fin for a bigger, smaller or different design has either helped cure a technique problem or actually forced people to sail differently – in a good way.

Back home the following year I found myself at another But let’s start with the most acute fin-related performtalk. And when another beardy asked which fin I would ance issue. favour for a 38cm wide speed board in 35 knots of wind on a tight 90 course, I stayed right within my comfort HOW DO YOU KNOW? zone and confidently answered that the black ones Some of you may have enjoyed the TV program ‘Walkseemed to work best. ing with Dinosaurs,’ a virtual wild life documentary, which with the help of some amazing CGI, aimed to Theorists re-create the world of our long defunct ancestors.

If you’re looking for a detailed scientific account as But as the Attenborough-esque voiceover describes to exactly how the latest fins work, I’m afraid you’ve in minute detail the daily mating and maiming rituals come to the wrong place. I don’t care how they work. of various raptors, are you not tempted to shout out at There are some very clever scientific brains involved the screen: “how you know that?!” in this field but even they would have to admit that There’s only so much factual information you can at some point hard science yields to ‘seat-of-pants’ extrapolate from 60 million year old bones and fostechnology. The forces acting on different parts of the silised pooh. So a lot of it has to be guesswork. foil are infinite and immeasurable. Even if you could It’s what I’m also tempted to say when someone, no measure them, you only have to add a little more ‘V’, a matter how knowledgeable, starts explaining exactly little less rocker, etc for the water to strike the fin quite how fins work. differently and then factor in things like a bit of chop, a bit less downhaul, a bigger sailor, a heavier back foot, a 1 SPIN-OUT lesser standard - to produce a completely different set It’s the performance malaise we instinctively blame on of forces. the fin because that’s the bit that has suddenly stopped It’s impossible to offer absolute information. For working, although often it’s the symptom not the cause. example, take a quad board – it would take a compuSpin-out was once a disease of pandemic proportions. ter the size of Wales to work out how the various fins In the early days of planing, the fins were mostly to interact with each other depending on their size, shape blame. They were too soft, badly conceived and often and placement in the boxes. came out of the moulds looking like a relief map of the All we can do, is keep trying and trying and eventu- Pennines. Spin-out occurs when the water detaches ally we will say, it seems to work best like this … itself from the foil. Bumps and flats accelerate that The very positive thing about fins and windsurfing process. Add to that full, tight-leeched sails, which development in general, is that we no longer stray too didn’t breathe and produced huge lateral forces and far from what we know works. The fins given away with you’d created the perfect scenario for sailing sideways. boards these days are, on the whole, very good. Like Today, thanks to more precise shapes and reactive sails sails, they handle a vast range of conditions. which soften the shock loads and create more forward The trouble is that they are so good that we tend to drive (and less sideways drag), it’s less of an issue - but forget about them. When we plateau, we look towards it’s still there. There are 2 sorts of spin-out.

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PETER HART TECHNIQUE FEELING THE HEELING (or not)

Your stance and the angle you trim the board is shaped by the size of the fin and how much lift it’s generating. And for speed disciplines, you choose the size of fin according to which speed you want to feel the fin working. For course racing, upwind you need maximum lift at low speeds, hence the massive fin. For outright speed you never want the feeling of fighting the fin and only want to feel the lift at high speeds. For free-riding you just want to be comfortable on the reaches. In all those 3 situations you sail the board flat or with windward edge up controlling the heeling with heel pressure. The freestyle approach is totally different. With minimal lift and resistance from the fin, you apply little or no back foot pressure to the point of sailing with the back foot out of the strap, and ride windward edge down for grip upwind.

Formula style. Keith Atkinson using an F-Hot 70cm prototype. Maximum lift to rail and point upwind. That’s where the race is won and lost. But then it’s all about surviving the speedy reaches where only considerable leg strength and grit can hold the board in the water. At this level it’s all about controlling maximum power – NOT very relaxing.

Bob Cunningham speeding at Torpoint. You only want to start feeling the fin as you get up to full planing speed. If ever you feel you’re fighting it, you’ll be on the back foot and going slow. Hence for speed sailing you want to power off both feet.

Pic Dave White Cruisy free-riding on a 140L board and a 48cm fin. There’s plenty to push against and make the board rail but you choose the fin size so it’s comfortable across the wind where you do most of your sailing.

Pic Hart Photography And by total contrast for freestyle the fin offers so little lift and resistance that it’s back foot forward and windward edge down.

1. Low-speed stall

2. High-speed spin

Fins generate more and more lift and resistance the faster they move through the water. So stalling comes from simply over-loading the fin with too much lateral pressure, usually at too slow a speed - so you just drive it sideways through the water.

It can stem from clumsy, lazy technique - like getting into the back strap too early, being too close to the wind and/or simply hoofing too hard with the back foot too soon. Note the style of modern freestylers, who use titchy fins, as little as 19cm on a wide chunky 100L board. They only put the back foot in when they’re fully powered or about to do a trick. Much of the time they sail with the back foot forward to avoid over-loading the fin.

Cutting the perpetrator some slack, they may have a rig board imbalance – too big a rig for the board and fin. Small fins can work with huge sails (e.g. speed setups) but only when they’re going very fast.

In terms of tuning, any aspect of your set-up which places you on the back foot and increases the load on the fin could be a cause. For example, bagging the sail out with minimum down and outhaul, placing the mastfoot back in the track, or locating the fin right under the back foot. Placing harness lines too far forward will make you pull on the back hand and direct that load into the back foot. You get the idea.

When planing, if you break the seal between board and water, you invite air to travel down the board and attach itself to the fin. And if at the same time, you deliver a sudden kick to the fin, off it skids in its bubble of air. Hence jumping provides the perfect spin-out arena. When you land it’s hard not to trap air; and if you land into wind, it’s almost impossible not to deliver a kick to the fin. So there’s a jumping hint – try not to land into wind.

Nearer the to the ground it just comes from bouncing around; hence any aspect of your kit choice or set-up that leaves you unbalanced, defensive or that makes you sail badly can be a cause. Badly adjusted footstraps prevent you from trimming the board properly. A badly set sail, wrongly placed harness lines will stop you sheeting in efficiently and directing a constant source of power into the board, which in turn means you kangaroo down the street like a learner driver slamming on and off the accelerator.

To sum up the massive spin-out subject, here are some points to consider * A good fin will still spin-out if it’s badly maintained. Nicks and bumps cause turbulence. Sand them off. * Too much pressure is less a cause of spin-out than sudden pressure. * Too big a fin is just as likely to cause spin-out as too small a fin.

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BIG FIN SYNDROME

Big fins help you plane early but they also teach you that power comes from the back foot. Too much fin lifts the nose and encourages you lean back and get defensive – hence gybes tend to start and end on the back foot. Learning to plane by bearing away rather than hoofing the fin means you can get away with a smaller fin, which in turn encourages you to drive forward and use more of the rail when gybing.

Pic Hart Photography The big fin tends to lift the nose and drop the sailor onto the back foot – and that’s where the gybe begins and ends. With the entire rail out of the water in the gybe, there’s an increased danger of over-loading the fin and spinning out.

BIG FIN SYNDROME

Who knows where we’ll be in 5 years time but I have a suspicion there may a resurgence of the single fin wave board. The precision, the feeling of something to drive against and the speed are qualities most sailors cherish, especially in less-than-perfect wave conditions.

Pic Dave White Even on big kit, the aim is to use all the rail in the gybe. The right size fin allows you to bear away up to full speed without blasting the board out of the water, which in turn allows you to drive forward and drop the nose in the gybe.

They’ve cut their teeth say on a 140L board with a 50 cm fin and an 8.0 sail. The issue lies in the way they get planing. They rely chiefly on a big fin – powering it up at low speeds and relying on it to convert all that sideways pressure into lift and popping them onto the plane – and it does. In the end their whole set-up and sailing style is shaped by the fin. Many hire centres around, notably in Freeride spots, pander to that style - big kit for the conditions, low boom, short lines, outboard straps, BIG fin. With that set-up, as soon as they hook in, they engage the back foot and the fin. Even at slow speeds the fin resists and lifts and, assuming there’s enough breeze (they’re usually is as they sail over-powered), off they go.

It’s not wrong as such, but as soon as they try and move down from say a 140 with a 50cm fin to a 110 with a 32 cm fin, the technique doesn’t work as the smaller fin just doesn’t react to pressure at slower speeds; and they experience the abovementioned stall.

In truth, whatever kit you’re on, bearing away and using the rig’s power to release the board before heading up, is the far better technique.

FINS and GEARS

Pic Hart Photography Harty flying high on his favourite single fin 94 in Jeri.

SPIN-OUT TO ORDER I was teaching a big bloke who was spinning out for Britain and crashing often quite horribly. Because he was big, he assumed he was pushing too hard on back foot. But when he tried to sail on tippy toes and be all subtle like, the problem got worse. So I got the camcorder and told him to spin-out just as he got to a buoy about 100m from me. In he roared. He couldn’t spin-out for love or money. As soon as he got to the buoy, he suddenly took off and screamed upwind like an Olympian. He thought his problem resulted from too much pressure. It didn’t. It was from inconsistent pressure. As he got to the buoy he tried with all his might to push the fin out but the pressure was constant so off he took. Lesson learned.

I’m looking at a 120 cross-over board here. I could use it with sails from 8.0 down to about 6 with the ideal being about 7.0. It comes with a 44cm fin but I’ve also got a 50 and a 35. Obviously you try and match sail and fin but there’s more to it than that.

The bigger fins also represent lower gears – i.e., more acceleration at the expense of top speed. Inland, where it’s gusty, the reaches short with little room to hit top speed and where it’s a struggle to stay upwind, you need the lower gears. Going for top speed on big open water in a sustained breeze, you need the higher gears and a smaller fin. Remember the lift from a fin depends on its size and the speed the water is flowing over it.

Keeping the car analogy going, there’s also a point at which the top gears just don’t work because there’s simply not enough power. If you fit a 30cm race fin to your 130ltr Freeride with a 50cm wide tail, no matter how fast you go, that fin won’t produce enough lift to level the board out. Instead it’ll ride windward edge down and drag through the water at half the speed.

In general, a very good exercise is to try riding with ever smaller fins as it encourages you to sail faster.

FEELING the HEELING

A major alternative to traditional board trim has arisen in the last 5 or so years.

High performance, speedy windsurfing has always been about controlling the lift from the fin so we find that perfect compromise – enough board out of the water to The most populated plateau in windsurfing is the one occupied by those who are reduce drag to a minimum; enough board in the water to remain in control. stumbling around the odd carve gybe but never fully in control and never planing In general we look to exploit that lift so we sail the board dead flat; or if you’re out. They see it as a technique issue but in my experience it’s the kit. The set-up they on certain racy kit with a big fin (or with a daggerboard), we try to ‘rail’ the board. need to get planing is not the one they need to control a fast gybe.

That is to say let the fin lift the windward edge slightly, so the leeward edge bites for

BIG NOT ALWAYS BEAUTIFUL

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PETER HART TECHNIQUE THE FREESTYLE THANG

Freestyle has totally transformed the stances, styles and trimming techniques of a whole generation. It’s tiny so sailors can initiate spins and keep rotating with the smallest of pops. It does offer enough grip to allow you get up to speed but never do you hoof against it as a way to get lift and plane.

Bubble Chambers using the new C4 freestyle fin, which creates extraordinary grip for its tiny size. But for most of the moves it’s involved in deliberate spin-outs.

And actually spends a good portion of its life completely out of the water.

SINGLE or MULTI

The truth surrounding race fins or the top end of wave set-ups is that you have to be very good, sail on the edge, get into some crazy places and find some pretty wild angles to really feel the difference. But once you get to the standard where you can feel how the fin is helping or hindering at all stages of the arc, then it’s really time to experiment.

When banked over really hard, there’s not much of a single fin left in the water – and if the tail is narrow, that’s when you might notice a lack of drive at the end of the turn. more resistance, and also so the fin gains a better angle of attack.

For cruisy free-riding, board trim is about ‘feeling the heeling’, letting the fin lift the windward edge and then using heel pressure to control it and find the right angle. If you’re over-finned, you can’t control it and the board skips and tail walks (Formula racing is all about having the leg strength to resist that massive lift).

If you’re under-finned you have to use loads of toe pressure to keep the board flat and it never really releases. As for your set-up, you aim to sail with the weight either spread evenly between both feet or slightly favouring the back foot.

But then … along came modern freestyle. To be a good trickster these days of the new school variety (popping, spinning, sliding), you basically learn to sail without a fin. You need one to keep you straight as you get up to speed – but as you start your trick, the smaller the better. There are young sailors I’ve encountered 74

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It’s when you begin to tighten turns up and get fruity with the lip that you really benefit from the grip and drive that a Quad or Twinser can offer. The single fin here throws some spray but breaks out (the rider would say deliberately!) and loses a lot of speed. who never in their life have used a fin longer than 22cm.

Hence their whole style and stance and the way they trim the board has been shaped by getting no lift or grip from the tail of the board. With the fin providing minimal resistance, you get your grip from the edges.

Completely opposite to regular free-riding, you ride windward edge down. And to keep pressure away from the fin and the tail, you favour the front foot and aim to hold the board in the water. It’s a fundamental difference between driving the fin and driving the board.

A WORD WITH an F-Hot DESIGNER Steve Cook’s F-Hot speed and slalom fins dominated the scene in the 90s. Now he’s back making championship-winning race fins. I asked him what’s changed in the last 15-20 years?

“It’s a lot more technical. We now have the software to make the perfect foil and the aluminium moulds mean the fins come out perfect every time. Before I was

It’s also about confidence. Once you’ve felt the extra grip of a Quad, you feel better about flirting with the lip. grinding them by hand so if it looked right, it was right!”

But there’s still so many variables you can’t quantify.

“Absolutely. It’s a nightmare! A fin that works in one board will, due to different rocker etc, be totally different in another. The main variable is the flex. Grinding the fins from G10 we could only change the flex by altering the thickness. But with carbon we have control over it. But to get it right takes loads of trial and error with one sailor and so lots of prototypes and lots of money.”

But you’ve got to be good to notice the difference?

“That’s right. The last 2% of performance that wins a race can only be felt by expert sailors. All in all fins are very good these days.

As for the importance of getting the right fin, he’s in no doubt.

“These days even your average board is like an F1 car.

And using the wrong fin is like fitting a bad set of tyres.”

FINS for TURNING

The shape of the fin has to determine the way you approach a gybe and above all the shape of the arc. A race fin has ‘take it easy buddy’ scrawled over its upright flanks. You can bank it hard but it doesn’t like sudden changes of direction, so make the entry to the arc long, smooth and fast. And because it resists turning, you need to stay sheeted in and use the sail to drive the rail round. The whole thrust of the smaller wave fin design is that it encourages sharp steeply banked turns.

You can take an upright fin to steep angles but get there gradually and make the entry to the arc long and smooth.

Fins and the wave board (too small?)

Take your gybing to the next level by seeing how hard and suddenly you can initiate turns.

The advent of multi fin boards has complicated the fin size issue. With single fins it’s easy. 25cm is big, 20cm is small. But when you invest say in a Twinser with two 16s, does that mean in old money you’ve got the lift of a 32? Or if your Quad has two 14cm fin and two 12s, does that mean you’re effectively packing a 52? Seemingly not. It’s confusing, which is why many budding wave sailors who plump for a multi fin board (because they find there’s barely a single fin board on the market) surrender themselves to superior knowledge. “I’ve no idea how this works so I’ll go with what I’m given.”

The initial reaction of most riders moving onto a multi-fin board from a Freeride board or even a single fin freestyle/wave is that there’s nothing there to push against. That’s the idea. Despite the area you don’t fly up on the fin(s). The boards ride lower in the water, which means you can get away with a bigger board and stay in control in wilder conditions.

Like for freestyle, you have to adapt your stance.

Get off the back foot, ride more between your feet with the back heel up and use the windward edge. But then, when you do all that and still feel you’re driving a shopping trolley, then it’s OK to change something. Your board may well have been developed by a Pro who grew up sailing tiny fins. If you decide you feel happier having a little more under the back foot, then change them.

By changing the 14s for 16s, I saw one rider’s emotions flip from hate to love, because finally he could actually sail the thing. If you go too big, you’ll negate the whole design but ultimately YOU have to like it.

It’s ridiculous to say that big upright fins don’t gybe but lets say the best make it look easy despite the design rather than thanks to it. A straight fin to some extent resists turning. And because of it’s power, as you put the board on its edge, like a hydrofoil it tries to make its way to surface and can make the board skip, or even turn over.

Hence the slalom style of gybing is about exploiting speed, easing the board into a long arc and using a lot of rig power to drive the board through the turn and hold it down.

It’s a fully committed manoeuvre and if you back off and sheet out in mid-turn, the board tends to straighten out and trip. And if you’re overly aggressive and initiate too hard, too soon, at too great a speed, the water hits the tip of the leading edge at too steep and angle, separates and out you spin.

As you step onto boards with ‘wave’ somewhere in the title, the curve of the outline is matched by the curve of the fin. The whole idea of curved wave fins is that you can make sudden changes of direction.

Bank steeply and the water stays attached to the fin and holds the tail in. While the upright fin resists tight turns, the wave fin (and curvy wave board) is much happier and more stable when banked steeply. By contrast, if you go for a long arc with the board barely on its edge, the board tends to slap and twitch.

As you’re carving or wave-riding, you should develop a feeling for at which stage of the arc the fin(s) are helping or hindering. If you understand what’s going on you can change either your technique or the set-up to suit. Here are 2 examples.

Fins for turning

Thin Pin

Turning at speed remains the Holy Grail for most windsurfers but I’m not sure how many associate their ability or inability to achieve in that area directly with the fin. Some fins are designed to drive you fast in a straight line (big and upright). Some are designed to offer drive and control around carved turns (small and curvy) and others are designed to do a bit of both (straight with a bit of curve in the tip).

You’re on a traditional wave or ‘FSW’ with a narrow pintail and a single wave fin. On a wave or on the flat, the advantage is precision and directional stability so you can enter the turn very fast and hold an edge at speed.

But when the board is steeply banked, most of the fin is out of the water. So that, combined with the narrow tail, means you get little drive at the exit of the turn.

To plane out therefore, don’t tighten up too much. And avoid sinking the ‘pin’ by carrying that speed from the

Add the swept fin to boards with curve in their plan shape and the board carves around that rail with little help from the rig – joy! entry and making the exit a little wider. In wave-riding the criticism of the single fin is that you tend to break through the lip and stall if you go for tight, slashing top turns (although if you saw Josh Angulo ride his single fin at Punta Preta you might change your mind).

By contrast with the multi fins, you still have a lot of fin in the water as you carve which combined with a wider tail mean you get a lot more drive at the exit.

Style-wise you can go for a tighter gybe, or a super tight top turn in the knowledge that as you drop onto an edge and push, you’ll get a reaction and be turbo boosted out of the turn or down the wave.

On the pin you go for a faster, wider arc, on the latter you keep it steep and tight.

Confidence But the one ingredient that over-rides all when it comes to fins, windsurfing and sport in general, is belief and confidence. If you get a fin in which you think is good and in which you have confidence, you will sail like it works. And if you drop down a big wave worrying that you’re going to spin-out, you will sail like you’re going to spin-out and you WILL spin-out. I was having a terrible time at Ho’okipa one year, losing grip all over the place. A certain megastar on my same team lent me a proto G10 fin with his logo on. What a difference! I ripped (in my own way). It was only back on the beach that I discovered it was exactly the same as my own one. It was all in the head.

When you find one that works, look after it and stick with it!

Harty’s 2013 clinic places are selling like very hot, hot-cakes. If you fancy joining the original guru on one of his legendary clinics, check out www. peter-hart.com or email him for his monthly newsletter on harty@peter-hart.com www.windsurf.co.uk

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