Paddling the Dart 14'

dare i suggest you guys are standing way too forward on the dart, it's not a sb ace. its a dw board with rocker at the front. there is no point in burying the front rocker down. stand back and let the board run, same as a sic bullet

I've got a Dart. Your position on the board looks fine to me, once there are bumps. Obviously you are too far forward for pure flatwater, so I can see Laceys point at the very beginning of the vid before the bumpriding begins. The angle of the camera also makes it look like you are further forward than you are - if you aren't very familiar with the Dart then that wouldn't be at all obvious. So his comment is entirely understandable in my opinion.

But the conditions in the vid are about as marginal DW conditions as I'd ever get, and I find that in those situations you need to get the nose pointing as far down into the trough as you can if you want to catch nanobumps like those.

Then the bigger and steeper the bump, the further back you go.

Simple as that, really.

Having not paddled the board so not knowing it's idiosyncracies I would agree with Lacey. You can see around the 2:20 mark when the board is being viewed from behind how little wake it is giving off because the tail is not engaged and more pressure is being put on the nose. But that is just my opinion from watching the vid and like I said I haven't paddled it so it may be a completely different beast to anything else I have ever paddled.

Actually only saw this board this morning for the first time and it looks like it will be really quick in good dw conditions.

yeah, but your back in your vids dj. that's what struck me, we see plenty of your glide in front of the camera- go figure

One the day we were standing in about the right place to catch small runners, if we were further back the tail would have been dragging a little making it harder to accelerate onto runners. Every day and area of waves needs slight adjustments and all boards are different again. Another insight is the GoPro was set to r5, being only 125 degrees angle of view rather than the 170 degrees which could result in a different view to other videos. (r5 - when vehicle or gear mounted, best choice for highest quality in-car filming. 25% narrower field of view (127º) compared to 170º view of other resolutions)
The nose does not seemtowant to pearl easily, sheds water and not affected by side chop. This is still a great board, stable and I think would really fly in big conditions, so try one if you can.

it actually takes a while and patience to get it right. i have a sic bullet, i read up on it, talked to kelly m and a few others. they all said you need to get back as often and as long as possible. watch downwinder in his vids- he is always moving back. mark R for sic recommends this. his theory is when planning the less board in the water the better. it takes a while to get your head around it- the further back you go the faster it goes. i have two friend that have bullets. it took me a little while to get them to come around to the idea.one mate said why was i told this 2 months ago when he got it. the other guy couldn't get his board working. i adjusted his foot pedal just about all the way back and told him to stay back as much as possible. all of a sudden his flying.

i now try to ride back as much as as often as i can on all boards, granted there are certainly times to move forward to.

Yes. I think the correct standing position, and how often you change it, will depend greatly on the conditions. The position shown in the video would be way too far forward if there were e.g. waist-high or peaky bumps. In fact, it would be impossible. The key is not to look, I think, at the position you are standing, but what the nose is doing. It wants to be skimming the water, not sticking right out of it nor, obviously, ploughing.

The correct position for this, and especially, how much you move, will differ hugely according to the conditions and board. In this first vid below, one of my favourites, these guys' feet seem almost rooted to the spot a lot of the time – necessarily so since they are using rudder steering. Long periods go past without any foot movement at all, and when it does come, it is only a few inches unless something very extreme is happening. They can catch the bumps in the rudder steering foot position, which is quite far back on the board.

They are of course pretty much all on SIC boards, in Hawaii. NONE of them move their feet very much. Mostly they can DW extremely effectively just by keeping one position, with their front foot on the rudder.

Contrast that with this video of Ivan in South Africa. Different board, different conditions, and a whole lot of foot movement.



And here is a less extreme example from Cape Town, but still lots of foot movement, and they are generally following the principle of getting as far forward as you can (i.e. without losing momentum, or ploughing) to catch the bumps, and then as far back as you can when riding then (for control and speed; again , how far back is determined by staying on the bump, too far back and obviously you will stall).



I have had the Coreban Dart out both in the tiny conditions shown in the video on this page and also in the larger of the kind of conditions shown in the Cape Town video. In the small conditions I was pretty much forward as shown in the OP vid, and wouldn't move more than a couple of inches back once on the bump – conservation of momentum being everything in those conditions. In the larger (very peaky, white-capping) conditions I was standing to catch the bumps about 30cm (1ft) behind the handle, and then once on the bump my back foot was on the kickpad, right at the rear.

This issue is one of the reasons why ruddered boards don't *always* seem to work so well in the short period DW conditions we get here. They commit you too much to one spot, and that spot is dictated, I suspect, by what works for Hawaii (especially Maliko), not what works for largely locally-wind-generated and heavily tidal chop in very shallow waters. The standard “Hawaiian” position is in particular often too far backwards for the smaller conditions we get here. The footwork of the people in my local area is MUCH more like Ivan's than Andrea's – and that is pretty much true of whatever board they are riding, so I don't think this observation just reduces to a 14ft vs. UL difference.

In fact, it's pretty much all about the footwork around the conditions I have here in the UK. I just don't recognise what Andrea, Mark, Connor etc are doing in the first video as anything like what we are doing in our local conditions. They are catching and riding bumps with need for hardly any foot movement. That just doesn't seem to happen at all for us.

But maybe I'm just doing it all wrong...I swear that there's just a couple of points where I find myself looking at e.g. Andrea and Mark in Bill's video and thinking “you'd have found that easier if you weren't quite so rooted to that steering pedal”. So clearly I am missing something because these guys are the best in the world. You do tend more to “pilot” a UL board rather than “surf” it as you do a 12-6 or a 14, for sure.

So different conditions, different boards, and differences in personal styles dictated by an interaction between the board, the conditions, and physical characteristics, will make a huge difference to where you stand and what you do with your feet, I reckon.

hi dan. the dc's are really good all round boards. i had a in between bark 14' which i dw ed a bit. it was pretty good fun. i would use the displacement to get on or in the crappy bits, but when i was up and away i stood back and used the planning part of the board(bark has big displacement, but goes back flat pretty quick) and looked to get the board to 'float' behind the bump in front. all most like having two different boards in one

have a play with the dc using the displacement nose and the flatter part of the board.

interested to see what you reckon after a few runs

cheers