Kona One - Thoughts and Views

Arguably the Exocet produced ‘Kona One’ started the longboard revival which has seen a number of other manufactures follow. The Kona has quickly gained popularity and momentum as an all weather cruising board and as a One Design Class in its own right. LBWS thought that it was timely to investigate the board and take a quick look at a few opinions from various users of the board. Please feel free to add your experiences in the comments below.

Review by an anonymous LBWS member

“For those who want an all-wind recreational board”.

Some think this board should have been named the

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Windsurfer One Design Australian Nationals

With perennial men’s and women’s champs Dennis Winstanley and Karen Constable taking this year off, the 2008 Windsurfer One Design championship on the Gippsland Lakes was always going to be hotly contested. The only problem was the Victorian government, which put up “no windsurfing” signs and warned of dangerous algae. Locals, other government scientists and windsurfers didn’t encounter any problems with the water quality, but sadly the adverse publicity certainly impacted on the number of contestants.

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F2 Race 380 Review

In the last few years the windsurfing industry seems to have come back to the joy of longboard windsurfing. There is a whole crop of new longboards including two new Raceboards. The Exocet Warp X and the soon to be available Starboard Phantom 380.

The decision to design and market these boards seems to come from a clear recognition that while the experiment with hybrid boards was interesting, and perhaps essential for the industry, that they are not all that they were made out to be.

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Light wind wavesailing

How much wind do you need to go wavesailing?
Big surf in light conditions is adding a new dimension to longboard windsurfing. Simply, there is no waiting for those big wind fronts or seabreezes. LBWS was sent a few photographs from the legendary Brittany, France. The shots were taken last week and are very worthy of a mention. The rider is Patrice Belbeoch carving it up on a Kona 11′5 in only a wind range of 7 to 12 knots.

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Longboard windsurfing in Finland

A Couple years ago the future of longboard windsurfing looked really bad here in Finland, as it probably was around the world. New Olympic Class was too expensive and perhaps too technical for hobby racers, nobody produced the 380 boards etc.

Same thing with sails, all we could use was Formula sails, and for 9,5m2 Raceboard Class you couldn’t find sail at all. So most of RB competitors sailed in the Open Class, which meant that your size or amount of sails was not limited in anyway and you could also use formula hull if you felt like it. That created situation where RB class was the most expensive class to compete in and rules were too complicated. Just the opposite what we originally wanted and we lost lot of competitors to other classes.
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