The story behind the Witchcraft Trifin

Our Trifin gives a superior planing/upwind performance, excellent control when overpowered AND an amazing surfy feeling, any of these qualities would allready exceed any other fin system. Our trifin gives you more finarea with less leverage. A 13.5 sidefin with 15.5 centrefin set-up will give you roughly the planing and upwind ability of a 25-26cm singlefin. However it will turn and have the control of an 18 or 19 singlefin where a 25 singlefin would feel much stiffer and harder to control (tail walking). On a hard top turn, when you try to dig in the rail, a singlefin will want to push the board flat. With a Tri fin the top turn becomes o so sweet, radical and easy.

The Tri Fin combines the best of Singlefins and Twinsers.

Our Trifin has evolved from Twinsers some 10 years ago. When, after the first hype on Twinsers, everyone went back to singlefins, we have kept on developing them. In the beginning we put them under our high rockered side shore boards and that worked well. The boards became very surfy, and this gave us the opportunity to reduce the rocker to make the boards faster and earlier planing to use them in all conditions. And this was when we ran into problems. With Twinsers in combination with a flatter rocker, the tail sits less deep in the water so it becomes easy for one of the fins to catch air and spin out in a harder turn or a little chop. Leaving you all of a sudden with only 50% fin drive. This was the reason why they disappeared off the market again. We tried everything to overcome this problem, different fin angles, fins closer together (but they would start to interfere with eachother), single concaves to give more rail bite, even deep channels in the tail, all to no prevail. In the end we had to aknowledge that you simply can not outsmarten physical laws. (Now with the new hype on Twinsers, shapes may have changed since then, physical laws have not.)

The solution we found in the end was to add another trailing fin in the centre. Simply by bringing back some of that solid feeling a centre (single) fin gives, we not only solved the insecure feeling but it even increased the positive properties of a Twinser: (better, smoother wave riding with an amazing top turn, control when overpowered (no tailwalking), upwind performance and a huge windrange).

Those who claim "Tri fins are slow" have obviously not tried our boards. Indeed in theory drag is increased a little but the extra finarea actually gives you more speed when you need it most. Also Trifins are not rockerline sensitive, which adds a lot to total performance.
Trifins are angle sensitive but we have done years of research to find the perfect angle and fin profiles as they depend on many factors, such as board and bottom shape. Our vast knowledge of multiple fin systems is something other shapers are only just beginning to understand now. (if at all that is....)
We prove everyday that in nearly all conditions, they are faster than singlefins and surfier then Twinsers.

Boards magazine said on our 2008 74 Wave Series:

" it was always the first board upwind (Ed: it was also one of the smallest!) and this is actually a great quality in a wave board because the quicker you get upwind the more riding (Ed: and jumping!) you can do! "

" It is an extremely dynamic board, fast and exciting, that seems to turn with
extraordinary speed and bite for a wave board allowing very fast clean
carves into waves and amazing jumping "

Another advantage is that you can vary with the centre and side fins sizes to create more singlefin feeling (stiffer, more control) or more thruster (3 fins of the same size) feeling (looser, more manouevrability).

Summary:

• You can get planing earlier
• You can get upwind faster
• You can turn shorter and easier
• You can catch more waves
• You can get more turns on a wave
• You will have more control: When overpowered or in a high speed bottomturn the board won´t start tailwalking or spin out.
• No need to put different size fins according to sailsize. The fins that come with a given board will work with any sail suitable for that board.
• Our Trifin is not just for sideshore conditions, on the contrary, the biggest benefit is in on-shore and/or light wind conditions.
• Our Trifin is not slower, not more than a singlefin with the same finarea would be. Just as when using a bigger singlefin, by having more finarea, on a downwind reach you might be a little slower as a singlefin (with less finarea), on a half wind course at least as fast and upwind our Trifin is faster, which is when you most need it. On spots where there is a rip you will be going upwind nearly all the time. So with our Trifin the average speed will actually be higher, top speed down wind may be a little lower, giving you more control.
• Trifin is better for freestyle than single wavefins and have a lot more planing and upwind performance and control as pure short freestylefins.
• Trifin is not hard to sail, for the less experienced sailor a bigger Trifin set-up will help planing even more and give less control problems due to the shorter leverage (preventing board riding-up)
• Tri Fins do require a modern upright sailing stance with a high boom and driving more of the front foot and mastfoot rather than a outward leaning slalom style.
  
• Adaptability to either more control (stiffer) or more manouevrability (looser)
• You can sail in/through shallower water
• When a fin spins out or breaks you still have 2 more
• For lean back flat water blasting with a locked in stance, you can still change it into a singlefin.

Read the user manual and tuning guide for further tips on fin set-up.

The development of the Witchcraft Trifin

Trifins or thrusters have been around for a long time but were usually used for specific reasons; to give extra grip on the inside rail in combination with wider or assymmetrical boards, to create extra drag for more control in places such as the river Gorge. Those systems are usually in combination with a normal size singlefin and the sidefins completely assymmetric, completely flat on the inside like on surfboards. Even if it did solve the specific problem, there was extra drag and none or very little added performance in early planing or upwind ability.

Our Trifin was revived again around ´96 due to the need of having boards that plane early and go upwind well AND still turn well. Here in the north of Fuerte we usually have around around force 4 to 6 in summer and between 3 and 7 in winter. However wavesize does not depend a lot on windstrength, especially in winter. You can be sailing with a 5.8 in masthigh waves or bigger, which are much cleaner when there is less wind to create some of those “best days ever”.
So to make use of these conditions you´d need enough finarea to get upwind but a big singlefin is just death to manoeuvrability and control charging into a bottom turn on a mast high wave, something very important to be able to have fun on the wave as well.....
In riding spots you simply get a lot more waves if you get upwind better. In some very light riding conditions it has happened people with singlefins could not even get to the peak whereas our trifin boards were ripping one wave after another......

We get asked often that if our Trifin system is so good why other brands do not use trifin. As we don´t know how other shapers work, think and test, this is hard to answer. What we can say is that opposite to a singlefin, options to finpositions, fin profiles, flex and cant and tow angles are infinite, giving a lot of room to setting them up wrong or less than ideal. There can be many differences between one trifin system and the next! Allready a different bottom shape requires a different fin set up!

After surfboard shaper Dean Geraghty from Capetown came out with his 4way fin system (www.4wfs.com) in 2005, this gave us the opportunity to experiment with fin angles much easier and faster. This finsystem is not strong enough in the long run for windsurfing but for a shaper it is heaven; through a couple of screws you can change fin angles on the beach and sail out again. Before you would have had to build 3 or more exactly the same boards, each with different finangles and take them all to the beach.

With this finsystem we could do a lot of testing and finetuning to fin angles to reduce drag and increase upwind performance and maneuvrability even more. It helped a lot in the understanding of multi fin systems we have now.