CORE Bolt

The Bolt arrived and, out of the box, this new CORE board looked superb with clean and precise German detailing.

Picking it up and the first thing you notice about the Bolt is its build quality – you can tell that this board means business and you know with that 2-Layer Cartan Carbon, aggressive channels and the Pro-Fix snowboard grind base that you can give this board some real abuse and it will take it on the chin.

A nice touch is that the Bolt comes with two sets of fins, 28mm and 42mm, to suit your style of riding. They also haven’t compromised on the boot inserts – the term ‘bombproof’ is used a lot, but we’d wager these would make it through an all-out thermonuclear war, being double laminated into a reinforced base plate, deep amongst the inner layers…

Getting on the water and the Bolt has really been designed for two things and that’s 1) for true wakestyle, and 2) for hitting obstacles. So it’s no surprise that it comes with a decent amount of rocker – a full 2cm more than the Choice. Consequently, you expect this board to be power hungry and to really suck the life out of your kite… The surprising thing was that it didn’t! It got up and planing surprisingly quickly and it can hold a lot of speed. More speed than we expected in flat conditions.

Then the real monster is unleashed when you pop. The Bolt really lets you have it and the great thing is that you actually don’t even need massive speed or pop from the kite to throw your tricks – it really does just ping up. Then the rocker helps you control even the worst landings. As with the Choice that we tested last issue, we were very impressed with the Bolt, and CORE really do seem to be putting out some great boards at the moment.