L. Mike Kelley has been hard at work for a long time creating the Frankenstein of fin systems. Watch this video and imagine Kelley, rocking those sunglasses (indoors, of course) and a Hawaiian print lab coat, lifting the covers off his newest creation in the shaping bay. “It’s alive!”
The Emotion Flow Fin System is this mad scientist’s creation, and it looks pretty wild. Picture the tail of your board split at the stringer. Each side of that split acts as an individual rail that moves up and down with the pressure applied to it on the face of a wave. All this while your center fin rolls in toward the lifting rail (the rail that is raising into the face of the wave). According Kelley, it all adds up to a more efficient lift to drag ratio. To be exact, he estimates about 20% to 40% more efficiency in that department. And for those who took three semesters of spanish instead of learning to speak fluent shaper in school, it just means more speed.
For a more in depth breakdown, imagine your fin as an airplane wing, only turned vertically instead of lying horizontally. Hold is the side force component of lift that keeps you from sliding out on a turn. The second component of lift, drive, is the forward “sucking” of a fin that drives it through the water. When those same components are applied to an airplane wing, we eventually get liftoff. When applied to the center fin of a surfboard, we get Mick Fanning levels of speed. Boom! Mr. Kelley, I want my test run.
A close up of Kelley’s wild fin system. Don’t break this thing on a boat trip, our guess is the local shaper won’t know how to repair it. Photo: emotionsports.com
