Intermediate to shortboard transition...

[fooey]

#4. done.  

now perhaps many can understand why i feel the way i do about the STARTS over at PFSSC. the straps are set at #4 where its guaranteed no beginner will ever use them. sigh.

we are stuck in archaic teaching methods, i cringed recently when i heard an instructor teach a student to tack by shuffling, even saying "shuffle shuffle".

Well it's still beats having only ONE strap for the back foot at the 4th setting on a mistral prodigy board.

It's already great that at least footstraps are provided there to entice the beginners to attempt to reach those levels where slipping in and out of the footstraps would be an easy thing.

It can't be said that "its guaranteed no beginner will ever use them" because I a beginner had an experience in placing my rear foot onto the straps at the 4th setting over the weekend. However I realised that the straps were NEVER used before and so it hadn't been loosened enough for my size 10 and a half feet to enter. But besides that, I believe, seeing those footstraps on the boards really did make me wanna learn much more and at a quicker pace than if there weren't any to coax me.

Now with the monsoon winds kicking in full force, it's  possible and relatively more easy to get on a plane on a 5m2 aerotech sail and even a 4m2 aerotech sail than it was only two months ago. So all the PRODIGYs like me better rush out there to START practicing on any board which has got footstraps!

[yamseng]

In my case, I find I have to be planing at a fairly fast rate of knots before I feel confident getting into the front strap and if you go even faster it becomes quite comfortable thing to slip the rear feet into the rear strap. The important thing is that the front foot takes control of the steering (using the tip-toeing action) during the split second it takes to slide the rear foot into the rear strap.  That's my experience anyway and it has taken me a while to realise that I was not going fast enough to allow getting into both straps.  Hope this helps.