The boats : were UFO Marauders made by Mega Performance Kayaks,

and were chosen for the following reasons:

#1 realistically we were always going to take Mega, it's the only specialist manufacturer with the resources to help us out #2 Nathan was using one already, #3Malcolm from Mega recommended the Marauder for outright speed #4 Bill thought it looked the nicest on the Mega website!

With the exception of Nathan's boat which had a glass deck (the blue boat) they were all full carbon-kevlar foam sandwich vac-bagged construction... very light (maybe 9kg fully outfitted) and very stiff. More about that later.

We all have very different riding styles. Nathan is unbelievably aggressive, staying in the critical part of the wave with lots of turns, slashes and edge changes. That isn't so evident in the stills but it sure stands out in the video - we'll try to put some frames up here L8r. Steve on the other hand does long carving turns that probably hark back to his Titan days. Bill's style has been described as super-aggressive but that's more the degree of lean and edge he tends to use. His riding actually looks kind of halfway between the previous two. Tim's surfing experience, while extensive, has been almost exclusively in playboats, and by his own admission found it near impossible to adapt his existing style to the Marauder. So he found himself in an unenviable situation - the skills he had wouldn't work, and learning a new riding style takes time, which we didn't have... Luckily necessity is the mother of invention, and the wipe-outs he took in Tahiti weren't really so bad - with one notable exception.

Most of the talk before we went was about speed. Many doubted that any existing kayak would be quick enough for these waves. But that wasn't our experience. Our problem was acceleration, and grip. The Marauders, in common with every similar surf-boat we know, doesn't really go until after a couple of turns. A good rider carving can generate a bunch more speed than someone who just points it down the line and trims. But it takes a couple of top-to-bottom moves to get Vmaxed and sometimes there was the time/opportunity, sometimes there just wasn't... There's no doubt, though, that the boats were quick enough, though starting to max out a lot of the time. In many of the pics you can see that the fins are right at the front of the working part of the hull and the tail really starting to squat. On the biggest wave Bill remembers, he just ran for his life down the (luckily crumbling not barrelling) front, with the boat bouncing like a G-Force.

Check the above pic of Tim. Admittedly he's just coming over the lip of the bowl and his desire not to kill the photographer has probably affected things, too, but you can see how his fins probably aren't helping any more...

In addition, we were all riding with fairly big fins, right at the back of the boxes, and we still felt the way you do when your fins are too small and/or too far forward in "normal" waves. Nathan ran with the biggest Mega fins, the others mostly with modified Motion Research 4.5" outers and swept 5.5" centre. Bill rode some bigger days with just a 9" centre fin, and had a little more grip and less drive, but not dramatically so - which was a surprise!!!

this is the Motion Research thruster set-up >>>

Inevitably much of the trip-hype is focussed on Teahupoo, but we found many of the waves on that corner of the island much the same. We rode a couple of days at Teahup, a day at Vairao (where Bill head-butted the reef for reasons best known to himself - ouch!) and each of the other passes, but many many more days at two "secret" breaks which we were privileged to be taken to by the local surfers. The secret spots were deeper, 3-6' on most parts of the reef. That might not sound very deep, but Teahupoo, Vairao and others were inches deep when the set waves sucked the water away. This raises a few eyebrows every time we say it, but it's true. Go there if you don't believe us. If we tried to run out the front we found seconds later our fins were grinding on the coral. So the idea of being bundled out of control across the reef wasn't a popular one! Flip over, and realistically you're going to get a lot of flesh ripped off. We were EXTREMELY LUCKY at Teahupoo - several times people rode onto the reef, fins got broken, but no one lost control inside. If we got shut down we did at least have a brief (miniscule) window of opportunity to regain control and come out the front right side up, and these waves deliver 90% of their energy in one short slam which means if you do regain you can just about keep it all together.

Having said that, Tim managed to hit the bottom really hard in deep water, actually off the side of the reef. We don't know how deep, maybe 15-20'. But if you imagine how big the wave must have been to be breaking there (gulp)... We're not even going to dignify it with an estimate. Suffice to say it was a bad day at the office.

If we were caught inside, the choices were - get out and run, or wait for a wave and hope to get on top of it and paddle across to the channel before it got too shallow again. Only rarely did we try to paddle out through waves - maybe because we couldn't get up much speed in the shallow water, it seemed hard to handle. Although the Tahitian surfers loved to see us rocket-moving 6' walls of whitewater - as far as they're concerned being anywhere near the reef is nothing short of insanity - they thought it was the coolest thing ever! Yeah, well we think towing in to 20' swells on a board is pretty nutz & cool, and the locals do that with a smile on their faces...

We had heard from many sources that the only way to go in Tahitian waves is be brave, go deep, and maybe you make it. If you're not deep enough you certainly don't make it, because it all catches up with you before you get your charge together. We were up for that, but we expected that the waves would be consistent and hence predictable. In fact, it was very difficult to be in the right place to take off, because they did peak differently every time, and because the swell arrives as a very flat-looking hump, then jacks up too late for us to change position much. So we paddled for a lot of waves we didn't get - not something we're used to anywhere else. By the end of the trip we were getting skilled at reading the currents, which are good (but not infallible) indicators of where the biggest mass of water is coming through on each set. It's fun to paddle as hard as you can for a wave while you can see from the coral below that your actual ground speed is backwards (i.e. you're getting sucked backwards up the face even before the wave is very steep) !!! We also found that fading take-offs (towards the break) were the best because of the way the waves bowl forwards, but that first bottom turn is mighty intimidating!

We expected to get a lot of barrels in Tahiti but were disappointed. Sure, we all got covered up now and again, but the problem comes back to acceleration (see above) - these particular waves go from nothing to barrel so quickly, we found we weren't up to speed in time. And once you're in the tube, there's no room to manoeuvre. So we weren't too successful at that. It probably didn't help that we were a bit paranoid about going over the falls... The few we did get were when we were lucky with the wave, and it was (relatively) slow to start with followed by a barrel section in the middle. Mostly we were charging very hollow sections with the wave pitching overhead, but not actually inside the barrel.

We think if we rode in these kinds of waves again it might be with shorter boats for more acceleration, fins boxes further back, and we'd like to experiment with weighting the boats a little to assist with the acceleration also. Towing-in might be a serious option for bigger days, too.

More to come if we ever have time! So many great places to surf!

Any questions, or anything specific you'd like to see? Email - will@goatboater.com

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