Of course testing a whole new range of boards means that we need to ride the sizes that we usually wouldn’t, but in order to get some variety in the riders’ style and body weight we roped in Agung, a local guy who’s worked many years on cargo ships and travelled the world – including my beloved Italy and Portugal – and who was an absolute ripper with his almost 100kg of weight. He could still ride the 7’8” comfortably. With a crew like this, we managed to test the whole range from 9’6” to 6’10”.
The new fin set up – with the smaller 3.7” fins in the rear – combined with the refined tail shape, the straighter outline and the thinner rails proved to deliver a much more exciting ride, making the board looser and allowing much more radical turns than in the past. It was totally amazing and so inspiring to see Agung shredding and killing it on the bigger models in solid surf as he was riding a much smaller board! The Hypernut really offers the stability from a larger board and performance of a much smaller board. Agung was a massive help with testing. He is a very good SUP surfer; it was good to have him testing the bigger boards while Ollie and I fitted more to the smaller sizes.
