What is a kiteboard rocker?
No, this rocker is not the one who listens to rock music 🙂
Rocker is a longitudinal bend of a board.
What is it made for?
Imagine riding on a flat piece of wood. Any clumsy movement or a small wave will make you swim, but not ride. In this case you will need a rocker - because of it the edges are up so they neutralise all of the mentioned above.
Except this, rocker helps us to save knees and backs during landings, because water resists not the whole surface of your board but only parts of it consistently.
‘Great, let’s save our knees and backs, easily deal with waves, so let’s make the rocker very deep’, - you might say. It all is not that simple…
They say: ‘What is good for a Russian is deadly for a German!’ 🙂
It is quite the same in our case:
Too deep rocker decreases a kiteboard’s ability to approach and go upwind that causes difficulties for newbies (sometimes for any levels of kiteboarding).
On the other hand, for a wakeboard a deep rocker is fine because there are hard landings on a flat water surface. (but the very deep one will negatively affect characteristics, too).
All in all, as you all have already understood, the hardest part is kiteboards’ rockers. 🙂
It is very important to have a balance, so a kiteboard could go upwind, but at the same time deal with waves and help during landings. I would like to mention that there are a lot of circumstances that affect riding upwind, besides a rocker. Sometimes it is like: a board has a nice deep rocker, but is fine with riding upwind and fastly plans.
Actually every good board is a perfect balance of lots of characteristics, that unfortunately are hard to calculate, you can only guess and the perfect balance can be reached only through experiments with boards’ shapes.
Rockers on kiteboards and wakeboards have different variations, this allows them to have different characteristics that affect our rides.
