Goodboards Amnesia Pro

Established for a decade now, Goodboards is a German brand with crossover into wake and snow products as well as kite gear. They are a proudly European operation with two production facilities in the Czech Republic, which brings an artisanal feel to the product.

When you’re first presented with the outlandish wavy outline of Amnesia Pro, you are not sure what to make of it. Ride it and prepare to cast your initial assumptions about the beautifully crafted rails firmly aside, and enjoy the massive performance benefits.

‘This board cuts through chop like a hot knife through butter’ is a quote you will hear in many a marketing blurb from kite brands, but in this case we can assure you the claim is absolutely justified. The wavy rail grips spectacularly through even quite dense chop, and genuinely minimizes fatigue. Pop and release is very clean, and the rails seem to herald little change in directional stability. In a way it makes perfect sense. You only need to open your cutlery drawer and wield a bread knife to find examples of serration being more effective. Lib Tech have used Magne-Traction edges in their snowboards for years with decent performance gains, particularly on mixed surfaces, so why shouldn’t this apply to water? Anyway, I digress.

Rails aside, the bottom shape is also very refined, with a total of eight differing channels doing a great job of further smoothing out chop and holding water before you load up and pop. They take the sting out of hard landings, where the board recovers well tracking downwind with speed. It perhaps has more of a fun and freeride application than out and out wakestyle handlepass suitability, but that only means it will suit 95% of the kiting population. It has some reinforcement built into the inserts to give the option to bolt a couple of wake boots on without worry of stressing the board too much, and in this scenario, if your spot is notoriously choppy this could well avoid a trip to the knee surgeon.

The Amnesia Pro is not a board you’re going to forget in a hurry. It is light, forgiving, easy to load for Big Air, and is produced in Europe, which should be celebrated. If you’ve perhaps fallen out of love with twintips of late and found yourself in a cycle of hydrofoil and surfboard use and abuse, this unusual looking German stick may well revitalize your love of the more traditional kite craft. It has produced nothing but big grins all round from us, and there is nothing more satisfying when that comes from a less mainstream brand and a uniquely designed product. Good is an understatement.