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H SMALL_DJI_0720

RRD AIRWINDSURF SAIL

22/07/2016
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RRD designer and all round ripper, John Skye, discusses his innovative new rig, designed for portability.

Words John Skye //  Photos  Dave White

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The concept behind the Airwindsurf sail first came into my brain 3 years ago when we were discussing various options for the original RRD Supsail. We were looking at the key factors which were; ease of rigging, price and finally size. As the sail was small anyway, size wasn’t too critical, but whilst brainstorming, the idea of a folding sail first popped into my head. 3 years later and Roberto was going crazy about his new inflatable windsurf board and how we needed a sail to go with it. The board was really impressive with an amazing tuttle box system allowing proper high performance windsurfing, from a board that packed up into a back pack. The rig therefore needed to pack up small as well, but it couldn’t be a simple single batten Dacron design; it had to be a fully functional high performance rig, with 3 key sizes of 7.0, 6.0 and 5.0.

Fitting a 7.0 freeride sail into a back pack gave us a number of problems to solve. The most obvious issue and longest part of the rig was the mast, but thanks to our previous development of the Supsail it was the simplest solution. To reduce a 460 mast meant adding 4 ferrules to make a 5 piece mast. Next up was the boom, which for a 7.0 is typically around 2m. Again a fairly simple solution was to cut the boom in half, add a join and use an additional boom clip in the middle to hold it all in place. Now all we had to work out was how to fold the sail.Taking a standard monofilm sail and folding it in half is obviously not the best idea. Therefore to allow a fold, a strip of Dacron was needed, running straight down the centre. The battens would need to be perfectly parallel and then it would be simply “fold and roll”.

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That just left the battens and the solution to this came during the NWF windsurf festival. The whole family had come along for the camping adventure and as I put together our canvas home, the folding tent poles became the answer to the final piece of the puzzle. Now everything was in place it was time to start prototyping. Taking our 5 batten freeride sail, the Xtra, as the starting point, we aligned the battens, added the Dacron strip and went from there. The first proto needed a number of modifications varying from slicing holes in batten pockets with knives, to redesigning the head reinforcement for easier rolling. In the end the results were better than I ever dreamed. The difference in performance of the 6.0 was unnoticeable from our standard Xtra sail. The sail lifted the board effortlessly onto the plane and allowed easy blasting. As the wind increased further and way beyond the normal range of a 6.0, the sail remained stable and controllable. In fact it was so natural that as the day went on the sail/ inflatable board combo got pushed to new levels. Possibly the first forward ever on an inflatable windsurf board by Alex Mussolini, whilst Hugo De Souza, our freestyle wonder kid, did his best to land a shaka! And all this with a board that was pumped up at the beach and a sail that at the end of the day folded up into a bag just over a metre long. Whether this will end up being the future of our sport, or just a way for people to enjoy the sport who have limited space, remains to be seen. What is clear however is that it is one of the most exciting breakthroughs I have ever seen!

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At time of press, the Airwindsurf sail is so new that final prices have not been confirmed but estimates for the standard version are £899 for the 5.0, and a “pro” version with high carbon content mast should be around £1049 for the 5.0. These prices include mast/boom/sail/base/uphaul/bag.

For more info see www.robertoriccidesigns.com or email [email protected]  

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