Freeride vs Freestyle
Zendavian
of boards, the handeling and design characteristics.
Thanx
sailquik (Roger Jackson)
>Kind of a stupid question buy what is the difference between these 2 types
>of boards, the handeling and design characteristics.
There is a significant difference in "concept" between FreeRide Boards and
FreeStyle boards!
FreeRide is a term coined in the last 3 or 4 years for a class of boards that
are designed to have a somewhat larger range of use (ie good on flatwater, but
handle chop well also). They are user friendly in that they are easy to sail,
and easy to learn new moves on. They jibe well (as in easily without requiring
super technical jibing skills).
Kind of an "all around board". Some examples are the Mistral Flows, the F2
Rides, the F2 Xanthos line.
These boards can be characterised as having a lot of volume, multiple footstrap
positions, usually quite a bit of flip to the nose, and fairly soft rails
especially up forward. Some, like the 277 Ride, are fairly fast when setup for
slalom, (but not as fast as a hard railed race board), but quite turny and easy
to jump when set up for B&J or lite wind waves.
Freestyle boards are a relatively new category of boards designed to do lite air
"freestyle" moves, like jumps with midair jibes where you turn the board in the
air and sail away on the nose (a Willie Skipper) and many other moves that
the pro sailors on the PWA do at lite air venues like Lake Garda in Italy.
These boards have some very different design characteristics so they can plane
up early and be driven thru a series of big tricks and exciting moves in about
12 knots of wind.
Good examples are the F2 Air (and Style) 260 and the JP Freestyle 270.
Since this is a new discipline on the PWA tour, most of the board manufacturers
have designed something for their team riders to use at these events.
They are usually quite wide so the plane up early, very lite so they can be
jumped in lite air, but they are not particularly fast.
Hope this helps
sailquik (Roger Jackson) US 3704
Cert. Lvl 1 WS instructor
F2/MPB/Sailworks/Tectonics/True Ames/Speedtech/
DaKine/Chinook/Kokatat
Phones: So. MD (301) 872-9459 (Th-Sun)
Avon, NC (252) 995-3204
sail...@ameritel.net sail...@interpath.com
Jakob Kobbernagel
I belive that the difference must be something like this:
Freeride: boards (or sails) meant for all us "ordinary" sailors. The
equipment is built to be userfriendly, fast, easy to gybe, waterstart,
e.t.c.
Freestyle: boards (or sails) meant for use in the new freestyle category
events. Usually this means sort of upscaled waveboards that can perform in
light winds with big wave- (freestyle-) sails.
The freestyle boards therefore is a specialized product, where the freeride
boards are very much allround boards.
Hope this helped.
Jakob Kobbernagel
Zendavian wrote in message <7Rgl2.711$5I.13...@news.abs.net>...
>Kind of a stupid question buy what is the difference between these 2 types
>of boards, the handeling and design characteristics.
>
>Thanx
>
>