Piros said..
I tried your forward mast mount last weekend and it is just so much harder.
But I bet you didn't adjust your feet position accordingly (since you didn't have straps to know exactly where to put your feet). Once again, the mast position relative to the rear is not very important compared to the position of the feet relative to the wing.
And I don't want to make people who have one year of foiling experience change their habits. My posts are for the people who are beginning now, not young, with no foiling experience, and I offer them a way to fly much faster than the pionneers that struggled for days. I remember seeing people still struggling with the foil after 50 sessions because they were not using straps. They managed to do it because they have tried it daily for months. Why suffer?
Also, I tend to trust Patrice Guenole that I have known for 8 years so I can compare his advice with reality on the long term. And he started with the mast aft on his SUP boards, and moved it forwards, as well as the straps positions, (but not on the surf foils). So I did not use SUPfoils with the mast back, but I trust somebody who have tested a lot of things in controlled experiments (with the feet position determined), and whose advice I can compare with my own experience.
Also I only speak of SUP foiling. Surf foiling has other constraints, where for instance straps do not help paddling and so lose a lot of their advatanges.