The UFO Revenge from Mega Performance Kayaks www.surfkayaks.com

Mega have been building UFO hi-performance boats for yonks. They started building the original Randy Phillips designs under license a few years back, but since have been mucking about with the shapes (presumably with permission) to make a variety of boats of different characters. They now come in a bunch of different sizes, and the Revenge is the latest and smallest of the stable. Did I say stable? How inappropriate! This is a tiny boat, only 7'4" and very narrow, so it feels quite wobbly actually. But we love it.

Check out some of the pix below.

dis lil baby rox de house, yeah

It's very fast on a steep face, but maybe doesn't shed water as well as say, a Marauder cos it seemed to get a little bogged down in heavy, unsteep waves. Maybe it's acceleration is compromised by the lack of surface area. Having said that we've never seen a boat use so much of its length so much of the time - this has been achieved by dialing out most of the tail rocker. Certainly the tail doesn't squat at all in these moderately fast waves. Yet our test pilot didn't bury the nose or rail-trip once, despite playing "deepest take-off wins" with a couple of hot shortboarders in 6-8' 16sec period swells and taking questionable angled drops on near-vertical 3' faces like this.

The boat launches itself very nicely off little wedges and lips, yet punches through chop on the face rather than bouncing out of control. Nice...

... but what impressed us the most is the way (presumably because of it's tiny volume) it penetrates the wave so well for late exits, and simply flushes under in a wipeout. A couple of times we thought the tester was gonna get a beating or land on the rocks, he just punched out and appeared behind the wave looking smug!

The other thing not many surf kayaks do is bottom turn right out in front and ride back up the face like a ski, with a sporting chance of an air or an OTL. We're not getting into the whole "turn from the tail" debate but look at this. To be fair our man's 5.5" fins contribute to doing this with a minimum of slip-sliding away, but still it's all good... It took us a while to realise that it doesn't suffer from earlier UFO's tendency to stall if railed over too far, but now that we know there's gonna be some aggressive rail-to-rail action in these kind of small waves, that's for sure.

What else can we say? It's too small to get big feet in if you're over 32" inside leg, and it sinks if you pop the skirt to sponge out. But on the wave it rip-rip-rips, and that's all we care about. Look at it here, going MachX with the whole rail workin' and two fins visibly doin' their thing. Can't ask for more.

Anyone want to buy a Marauder ? - one careful owner ;) only been around the world once!