Comparing Old vs New

Posted on 4 December, 2014 Neil Greentree

I see many boards as I travel around sailing with different people but after a local sail with close buddy Frank Titlow we came back to the beach car park and layed our boards side by side. Mine was a 2015 fanatic Freewave 86 Textreme, a board that is at the pinnacle of design and technicalogical engineering as far as windsurf boards go, and Frank’s was a 2007 Tabou 3S 107, a board in its day described as ‘The Ultimate Allrounder’.

Now looking at them you see just how ahead of its time the tabou really was with the shoulders (the rails 1/3rd of the way back from the front) being the fullest width of the board giving great control with the tail wide but chamfering off to keep as much volume at the back as possible. The boards really do look very similar which just goes to show you don’t have to spend £1000’s to get the latest shape in boards.

That said what you cannot acheive with an older board is the technology you get in a modern board. The Tabou is made from wood sandwich construction – layers of wood over polystyrene with stringers to stiffen the shape up. All very good but weighing in at around 7.8kg its a little portly!!. The 2015 Fanatic uses carbon extensively replacing wood sandwich with carbon inegra (carbon/kevlar mix) which stiffens the shape up significantly and reduces weight to 5.75kg……….thats a third less!!!!

So there you go!!!!!

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