Nobile Infinity Carbon Split

If you have grown up surfing – as a few members of TheKiteMag staff have – then one of your earliest traveling memories probably entails the joys of trying to get to your dream destination with a surfboard alongside… Maybe it was even the days before FCS when you had to try and bulk out your fins so these would not get snapped off during transit. Skip forward a few years and we now have FCS and – if we are traveling with kite specific surfboards – these tend to be a lot tougher than their ‘pure surf’ cousins and providing you have a good quality coffin bag you can expect your kit to arrive in one piece. So life is a lot easier. What time hasn’t changed though, is that surfboards are still ‘long’. It’s kind of how they are meant to be… So even if your pride and joy has arrived in one piece, it has probably still managed to take a decent chunk out of your bank balance. Split twintips have now become pretty ‘top tech’ and are an increasingly common sight at local beaches, and not just with riders who travel a lot; for a lot of riders (who aren’t the 1% looking for top pro-level performance) the fact that you can split it and put it more easily in your car or in a cupboard at some point just makes more sense. The merits of also splitting a surfboard are obvious but there is one big problem: the construction. Surfboards generally have foam cores due to the fact that they require more buoyancy, and a foam core simply isn’t split-able. Nobile haven’t let this hold them back though – their Infinity surfboards don’t pretend to be actual surfboards but they take a standard Paulownia core construction and do everything they can to bring this as close as possible to the performance of a surfboard. The Infinity Carbon Split manages to keep the weight down to a pretty respectable 3.8kg, the boards take standard FCS fins (with a good quality set provided) and the shape is a nice looking surf outline – with plenty of width, pulling in to a slightly inverted squash tail.

On the water and the EVA grip feels very comfortable under your feet, with the tapered edges keeping your feet nicely in place and providing you with the grip you need to really commit to your turns. The obvious thing to note with the Infinity Carbon Split is that you need to ride it fully powered, so you need to dive the kite as if you’re starting off on a twintip. Once you have the board up to speed though, it flies along and the fins keep you nicely upwind. On a wave and, again, you need to really keep things powered and then the board turns nicely and you can really throw it around. Overall it is a different style of riding, but once you are tuned in to it (and once you have put up a kite a size or two bigger than the other waveriders) it is a lot of fun.

In a sentence: Ride it powered for some great surf-style sessions, and getting it to the airport and breezing through check in without any excess will be almost as satisfying.