fenn

Towards the end of 2005 a distinctly different ski made its appearance in Hout Bay in the hands of Tom Thring, and it made an immediate positive difference to his race results… Knysna Kayaks, the ski’s manufacturer, is known more for their river craft, but they seem to have scored a hit with this design.

It’s been a long time in the making. The design was started in the late 1980’s by the late Daniel Conradie but was shelved when he died. Hubby Sandberg took it on and the final result is the culmination of years of iterative prototyping and testing.

 

The new Epic V10 Sport has arrived in South Africa… But wait, it’s just one copy, brought back from the factory by Oscar Chalupsky who has spent the last three weeks in China.

 

(I’m told that the factory is in full production – with a current capacity of 100 boats per month. The first batches of production skis are destined for the US to fulfil a huge backlog of orders.)

 

Yep, it’s official, the new Fenn single ski is named the Fenn Mako 6 (6 for 2006).

 

I was up in East London a week ago and called in at the Fenn factory to find out how production of the new skis is faring.

 

Through the magic of Skype I caught up with Oscar Chalupsky a few days ago. He’s in China at the new factory where the Epic V10 is manufactured and has been inspecting and testing the first production skis.

 

Oscar is combining the testing with training for the Molokai Challenge – surely the first time an athlete has trained for this event on a tidal river (the Fuchun River) in South East China!

Exciting times are with us...

 

I've been talking to a number of manufacturers (Epic, Fenn, Red 7, Knysna Kayaks) and it seems that there's a wave of new model skis just around the corner.

 

Look out for articles on each of these manufacturers in the coming weeks, here's a snippet on each of them...

 

*** Just added a couple more pics - see page 2...

 

At last we have a couple of photos of the new Fenn single ski! We're hoping for a few more soon, but here's what we've got.  They confirm some of the reports that we've had from East London - the single footwell and the curved foredeck.

 

Reports of its performance are sketchy, but I'm told that it's a lot more stable than the Millennium. Along with the Epic V10 I suspect that it will set a trend towards faster, more stable skis that lesser paddling mortals (such as me) will find easier to manage than the current generation of top end skis.

 

Dehydration is generally regarded as a Bad Thing when paddling. So, if a race is likely to be more than an hour long, paddlers take liquid with them - and where to stow it is a subject of considerable debate.

 

For many, the solution is to tape a bladder to the deck in front of the rudder pedals and to run a pipe back to the seat. Others prefer "Tripper" type PFDs that have a pocket on the back into which the bladder can be fitted. The pipe is run through a series of Velcro straps to the front of the PFD.

 

Both of these solutions, by adding weight above the centre of gravity of the ski, lessen stability.

 

This article describes a solution implemented by David Cade who lives in Hout Bay, Cape Town.

 (by Rob Mousley)

Keith Fenn

I love my parents in law (really!) but the thought of spending my Christmas vacation with them was daunting. Why? They live in East London, 1100km from my home in Cape Town... and, having logged many, many hours training for the 2005 Cape Point Challenge I had agreed to play family man and leave my ski behind. Ten days with no paddling...? It couldn't be done.

 

A cunning plan occured to me however - the Fenn Kayaks factory is also located in East London. Could it possibly be that Keith Fenn might agree to lend me a ski so that I could write a review for surfski.info?

The Custom Kayaks Icon surf ski is a relative newcomer to the market having been in production since early 2004.

The fundamental characteristics are:

• Length: 6.42m (21ft)
• Construction: glassfibre sandwich or composite carbon/glassfibre
• Weight (glassfibre, average): 15kg