STYLE PRO
Our freestyle sail – the Style Pro – originally took shape around 7 years ago, actually starting with Adam Sims when he was riding for us. Originally we had the Super Style, which was a classic old style freestyle sail, which meant a 5 batten powerful wave/freewave sail, which has since become our infamous Move. At this time it gave the best balance of power to get moving quickly, speed, manoeuvrability and control, with the control mainly meaning stability. Most of the moves were sliding based at the time and speed was really important. This sail is still the best go to sail for 95% of riders, especially those that sail onshore, or bump and jump style conditions. However after testing he found he actually preferred our pure wave sail for freestyle because he preferred to sacrifice some power in order to gain control for the ducking moves. The direction of freestyle at the time was that ducking was the most important feature, so we went back to the drawing board to make something completely new. I pretty much took our wave sail and then tried to work out a way to put a tonne of power in it, without adding any shape. At that time the way we did it was mainly to increase the width of the luff tube, to increase the amount of material at the front of the sail. This meant the sail was totally flat when sheeted out, but when you sheeted it in, it filled in like a balloon. Since then it has developed massively and thanks to the use of varying amounts of Dacron we have been able to create a similar amount of power, whilst reducing the luff tube width and therefore increasing the control, particularly when overpowered. The dacron has much higher stretch characteristics than most of the other materials in the sail, so by making a wide and stretchy panel right at the front we could create a similar balloon effect, but keep it a bit more controlled. It allowed us to modify the width of this panel and the number of layers to control the amount of stretch much more accurately through the sail, thereby allowing us to be much more specific where we wanted this boost of power to be positioned. The reduction of the luff sleeve width meant that the reaction from the sail was much more direct and also controllable.