Why Spin out?

Spin out happens when your fin loses its grip due to air flowing down the fin when you are planing, thereby causing the board to skid sideways.

Most common causes of spinout are:
- pilot error (incorrect stance, rig setup, etc)
- weed etc caught on the fin
- crappy fin that doesnt match the board.

Pilot error:
- the most common cause is too much weight on the back leg. you should use equal force on front foot and back foot. Leaning back onto the back leg causes too much weight to be loaded on the fin. Once you learn how to sense the loading you can use a very small fin without spinning out.
- bad rigging: a sail with too much back hand pull may cause you to inadvertently load your back foot while struggling with the sail. Correct it by adding downhaul & outhaul.

You transmit power to the board from the sail via the mast foot, your front foot, the harness hook and your back foot. If you are standing square to the board and leaning out correctly, the power will be "balanced" between these points. If however you lean back with your front leg very straight and your back leg very bent then you are increasing the load on the fin.

Prevention is better than cure and 90% of the problem is sailor technique; assuming the fin is reasonably well matched.Read the fin selection article on our technique page.

What do you do if you spin out,how do you recover?
- easiest way is to turn into the spinout, ie push the bow in the direction of the spinout and pull your back foot in, ie you use a kind of scissors movement.
- another method that works is take the back foot out, load your weight on the harness hook and push down with your back foot, almost stamping on the area just in front of the rear sraps.

Very experienced sailors tend to be fussy about fins because they are able to "sense" how much pressure they can apply on a fin before it spins out. Usually though, technique is the biggest factor.