vitoshop wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 1:35 am
Will a Pro Session be good for chop or does anyone have other suggestions?
This is a very complicated issue, and I am just going to complicate it more for you. Best bet is to buy a board and just work with it until you make it work. So you may want to stop reading here.
I do not like thrusters strapped in chop. They can be made to work but have a a different focus from a quad. On a thruster, the direction of travel is, at any point in time, along the center line of the board. This may be a seemingly simple statement, but when the nose (direction the board is pointing) is bouncing around everywhere, so will you. To control and minimize a "zig-zag" course induced by chop, you focus on guiding your nose in a straight line in the chop. When you get good at this with a thruster, you almost don't use the straps anymore for straight line riding. They are there when you jump, or if you hit some nasty chop that you have no hope of controlling the nose of the board in, but you are much more gentle on the board when under control in chop than straps allow you to be. And yanking a board around by the straps on a thruster at this point is not beneficial to you. So your choice of a Pro Session strapless may be a good one - unless you are coming from a quad. In which case, you will need to do some serious learning on how a thruster rides differently than a quad.
A quad's direction of travel is not tied to the center-line of the board. In fact, going in the same direction as the center line of the board is the most unstable direction a quad can be forced to go. A quad "naturally" crabs a bit to the side. Usually the nose points a little upwind of the line you are traveling on. The benefit of a quad is that you have a wide range of how far OFF of the line of travel you can point the board. This means that the nose can bounce around lots WITHOUT you bouncing around with it. So when you get into chop with a quad, you let it bounce around, but try to keep (average) pressure on the fins or rail (if you have an actual hard rail or are going fast enough to combine edging with fin pressure) and you go in a straight line. That is the main difference in focus/skill set, and this is where straps make sense and give much more performance than strapless.
This realization took me lots of time and testing - riding similar or the same board, quad and thruster, back to back inside of multiple sessions. Thus there is a chance my academic explanation may be of no help to you. Pretty much all of kiting is "feel" and you can't get "feel" from words without thinking about these concepts while riding. Even then, you may be applying "suggestion" inside of that instinctual development.
vitoshop wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 1:35 am
I've been playing with a old 5'6" fish style surfboard which is fine in flat
conditions but pretty rough in chop.
Again, if the fish is a quad (likely is), your problem in chop may be due to sheer size of the board. Try a similar shape (hard to find a narrow fish) in a smaller tail width/overall width.
And lastly, if you did read all of that, just buy a board and work through the challenges it presents you at first. You need time on any board to build a skill set for that board, and then eventually you will be able to see if that board is working for you. In your specific case where you lack access to demo boards, that fact may actually be of benefit to you. Disliking a board at first ride is usually only an indication it CAN operate outside of your current skill set.