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Sizes Available: Custom
Sizes Tested: 4’0” x 18 1/4” x 2”
Website: www.fcdsurfboards.com/

TKB Says:

While this board is traditionally considered a tow foilboard and you won’t find its description on FCD’s website, we nabbed one of these for our 2021 gear test because it falls on the edge of our comfortable waterstart limit and curiosity got the best of us.

Custom-shaped and built strong but light, FCD’s Tow Foil with its compact dimensions feels incredibly light in the hand. The bottom shape features a double concave in the nose that flattens out into the tail section and its rocker feels pretty straight with some minor scoop in the nose. The Tow Foil deck has some really minor concavity in the deck and because it’s for towing, it comes with G10 self-tapping inserts that feature five forward and aft positions for both the front and back foot. The rails are fairly thin by prone foilsurfing standards with subtly rounded edges up front that transition into harder lines toward the back. The Tow Foil gets a subtle chine on the rails that wraps around to its trailing edge. While you can always get a pop-out production board, there’s a unique high performance feel you get with a custom board that puts the highest level of performance on the table.


The Tow Foil foilboard works great for wingsurfing when you have your sinker waterstarts on lockdown and a generous amount of power in your wing. If you normally have an internal combustion motor yanking you up onto plane in tow surfing, to bring this board into wingsurfing you need to be really efficient in waterstarting, making this the province for advanced wingsurfers. Once you get the board up to the surface, the concave/spine in the nose helps break up the surface tension and allows you to pump/release the board from the water and get onto foil plane. With its compact shape, the Tow Foil feels super agile and is incredibly fun to ride waves, easily laying into hard carving turns without constantly stabbing the rail in the water. The few times the rail did make contact with the water surface, the subtle rail chine did a good job of deflecting our error without catching the rail and throwing us off balance. The Tow Foil’s short outline makes the board super responsive to pumping, allowing all your energy to transfer to the foil, helping you find the drive to make it to the next wave. The Tow Foil felt super flickable and with the thinner deck, it felt like we had better control over the hydrofoil in the water below. Sometimes when we take a wingsurfing board and crossover to kite foiling the volume feels a little bit burdensome for kite foiling—not so with the Tow Foil as it felt like a great compromise that gave you enough volume for wingsurfing, but not too much for kite foiling.

If you have the advanced skills to waterstart in a wide variety of conditions and you have plenty of wind power at your disposal, the Tow Foil or a slight modification of its custom dimensions is something worth considering for high-level wingsurfers.

 

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