AK Nomad Foilboard – The Foiling Magazine Review
Words by The Foiling Magazine’s tester, Richard Boughton.
“A truly all-discipline, highly versatile board”
The versatile AK Nomad slid gracefully onto the scene last year with some larger DW inspired shapes, blurring the lines between light wind winging, SUP foil and early downwind applications.
It was well received by all, particularly those who weren’t 100% downwind committed but perhaps wanted to dabble, but guarantee themselves a light wind wingboard. With the rise in popularity of the mid-length boards in the last year or so, it makes sense to extend the range into smaller volumes and dimensions, so with the release of the v2 we welcome three smaller sizes starting in 46, 55 and 75l.
Now a true multi-discipline board, the six available sizes of the new Nomad v2 elegantly cross over between prone in the smaller volumes, into wing in the mid sizes and then downwind and SUP foil in the larger volumes. We tested the 55L / 5’8 and 115L / 7’2 versions with a 90kg rider.
Construction is the same on both boards with AK’s Active Carbon construction balancing weight and durability well; with the 115L board this is particularly noticeable.
The deck has a gentle concave and lovely thin gently textured corduroy pad, the same as last year. The foil box position is notably far forward on the board, and long, allowing you to balance plenty of different foil systems quickly. It also meant you didn’t need to shuffle up and down the board too much to move between building speed in flotation and takeoff to foiling. This is an important feature on a longer, narrower board to allow the best fore-to-aft weight ratio and not load either your front or rear foot with excess pressure.
The boards retain that flat rear planing surface from last year which promotes a nice clean release and takeoff; the tail seems to have been chiseled slightly in the newer version and perhaps the angle of the chine is kept straighter at the rear. The volume distribution is very even throughout the board, making it extremely stable considering its narrower width.
With paddle in hand the 115L is two inches longer, and an inch narrower than last year and gave me around 20 liters of positive buoyancy wearing a winter suit, and it was enough to get me into some tiny waves with a 1400 foil.
The board paddles a little faster, and the revised tail design seems to aid release, where it slithers out of the water rather than pops up like last year. As a downwind board, these subtle shape revisions – extra length and narrower – make it feel more efficient through the water than the previous version, and far more purposeful for the discipline, and as a bonus there doesn’t seem to be much compromise on stability.
In a wing context, these efficiency attributes carry over into a super fun full floatation board for lighter conditions. Instead of sizing up to a six or seven meter wing in marginal conditions, you could hop on this with a 5m and probably have plenty of entertaining fun with a more comfortable wing to handle, particularly in some small clean waves.
At pretty much half the volume, the 55L served as a brilliant long-board-style prone board with super easy wave catching and a connected feel to the foil box. For lazier waves and cruisy prone riding it was spot on for the task. We also had the opportunity to attach a Foil Drive system, where it was great as an intermediate board, tracking well and narrow enough to get up on foil relatively early.
Remote signal was also pretty good with it, providing the nose was out of the water. Winging with the 55L was a committed sinker for us, but with positive wind conditions its long narrow shape is as easy as a 55L board gets to release and the strap placements are well balanced and adaptive to a comfortable stance. Couple this with an elongated foil box and it was easy to get everything posi-tioned. The 55L is light, responsive and a joy to ride with a wing, prone or assist.
The second version of the Nomad continues a popular product line. Filling in the low volume extra sizes into a mid-length is a genius move from AK to provide a truly all-discipline, highly versatile board range, in fact, two well-chosen sizes could cover almost every activity you’d conceive on foil.