SUPport PROductions will be bringing on-water action to the wonderful annual Mangonui Waterfront festival, scheduled for March 30 2019. This great little festival features local food, wine, culture, art and music, all along the super-picturesque Mangonui waterfront, and the paddleboarding relay event has long been an integral part of the festival, with teams of four battling it out around a short course out in front of the festival area, perfect for spectators. For next year though, we’ll be taking the event to a whole new level, looking to attrct teams from all over New Zealand to take part, all racing on identical boards supplied by us.
Our most ambitious event yet! The 2018 Barfoot & Thompson Triple Crown was a real challenge. Following on from the success of the 2017 event, we decided to up the stakes. This time, be prepared for anything, we told the competitors – we will decide what is going to happen (and where) on the day, depending on the weather conditions. We’d wing it – make sure that we gave the competitors maximum bang for their buck.
Well, the weather gods clearly have a sense of humour. They did their best to make it as challenging as possible for us. Forecasts changing by the minute, and delivering everything from 45 knot gales to torrential rain. It really did test us to our limits.
But we coped. The competitors all went away very happy, with three excellent and very different events completed. And from our point of view, we learned loads more about how to run really awesome SUP events… For more details , results and lots of pix check the facebook page.
When Red Paddle Co asked us to come up with the design for the fastest ever inflatable SUP board, we knew we had a challenge on our hands. Designing inflatable boards requires a very different approach to traditional board design� – a fundamental fact that far too many brands simply don’t get! You cannot simply take ‘solid board’ shapes and design approaches, and apply them to inflatables.
However, having been involved in inflatable board design since 2010,� and able to put our name to some of the best selling models on the planet,� we’ve got a pretty good handle on how it works. We’re not going to give away our secrets here, but we can tell you that there’s a whole lot of ‘Kiwi’ in the 2017 Red Paddle Co Elite 14′.� A comprehensive programme of prototype testing and refinement, using some of the best racers in the country and all our prior experience, led to a shape that appears to go against so many of the established rules of board design.� But we had confidence in it. The question was, how would the rest of the world react?
The SUP Company:� �”Probably the fastest inflatable SUP in the world…an absolute rocketship. We put it head to head against high performance 24.5″ hard boards, and this board keeps up. For an inflatable, that’s just unheard of…”
And plenty more of the same.� Our final prototype won the 8km distance race at the NZ Nationals, against a fleet of nearly 70 other boards, all solid.� This is a seriously design.
