When on the wave its light weight does it huge favors. It’s a light and simple wing to handle, with the large handle loops making life as easy as possible through transitions and tacks. In the hands, the stiff golden strut feels immediately responsive to pumping, and once up on the foil, the upwind angle performance is noticeably enhanced. As you inflate you can see that there’s sail tension built into the canopy, and in use it feels taut and there is almost no vibration when riding. Shape-wise the wing is relatively flat, and has a subtle dihedral and thin wing tips. The wrist leash is a Dyneema line with shock cord bungee running up inside with a standard constricting Velcro buckle, providing a decent level of security. It has a twin set of horizontally aligned arrow slit windows that provide some vision downwind. It’s supplied in a practical full size backpack with bungees for carrying your pump. Three handles are present as standard and are removable with Velcro, and there is an upcoming carbon bar upgrade. Separate screw-in bayonet inflation points make it simple to get the golden strut up to the required 12PSI and the Dacron front tube up to around 8PSI depending on your bodyweight. Behind the strut is the now ubiquitous profiled section of ripstop, and in the case of the 4m, this isn’t particularly deep. There’s more ALUULA in the trailing edge darts, window frames and wingtips, and a leash line is run the entire length of the trailing edge to prevent any deformation there. The other benefit of the material use is weight saving, with the HL-Series coming in at around 25% less mass than the industry standard.įurther weaving of ALUULA into the design is apparent in the front of the canopy, with a wide band of it in place of the intermediate material (that would normally be Dacron) at the leading edge to canopy junction, which is intelligently placed to decrease stretch and firm up the leading edge. This makes perfect sense to get the strut as stiff as possible, as it’s the most tactile and load bearing part of the wing. With the HL version, they’ve fused traditional Dacron in the leading edge, with an ergonomically sculpted full ALUULA strut. We were impressed when we tested the full ALUULA Glide A-Series in the last issue, so were eager to see how the HL-Series Glide measured up. From rumblings across the marketplace, it sounds like the ALUULA material is going to make a big impact on the wing scene this year.
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