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Old 04-10-2007, 10:36 PM
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ricki ricki is offline
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Juan and Morgan from The Kiteshop located on Key Biscayne had a booth at Kite4Girls '07 AND brought along some nifty standup surfboards and paddles for folks to demo. Juan and Morgan are shown moving back to shore above.

There were 12' x 4.5" x 26" Mickey Munoz standup surfboards with Pohaku carbon fiber paddles. If you don't weigh all that much and are looking to cruise in the flat water, they work out well. Even if you weight a bit, the smaller boards will give you a workout which is why lots of folks like standup.


TWO kids and the board is still riding high and is quite stable. I saw them try to stack up four on this board.


If you weigh a bit more, note the submerged tail, you might want something with a bit more displacement (larger). The guy could stand more forward to bring the tail up a bit however. The stability and glide of the board are also reduced. Of course if you are paddling into waves to surf, the importance of weight vs. board size diminishes somewhat.


Andrea rides for Viking Surfboards. She hopes that the folks at Viking will whip up a nice standup board for her to promote. Sounds like a good idea to me. Stand straighter Andrea, stooping like that may do a number on your back.






Another light fellow, look how high the board is riding. Also note his foot stance, heavier guys would either have to have well developed balance or have their feet parallel at about should width apart for stability.


Todd with Adventure Sports has a go. Note how far down the tail of the board is however Todd is back a ways. Todd brings a lot of board skill to the water and copes well despite the lower displacement. As a rule for calm water cruising larger boards that can build momentum and glide are desirable. For actual surfing something a bit smaller and maneuverable is more the ticket.





Morgan and Juan were telling me that they do some nice standup trips around Key Biscayne up to Miami Beach, around the island up to Virginia Key, all over. They mentioned it would be good to add a bump pad near the back of the board to assist in kick turns particularly while wave riding.




No end of paddling areas around Northern Biscayne Bay. You can ride wind swells or even hit some waves off the fringing reef to seaward about 900 ft. off Key Biscayne. I suspect this is going to take off in the area sometime soon.


BTW, found an interesting article on standup at:
http://www.surfermag.com/features/on...n/index11.html
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Last edited by ricki; 04-11-2007 at 07:56 AM.
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