Black Project Hydro FlowX: Review

IT CAME FROM MAUI!

The Black Project Hydro FlowX sounds like a name for rocket fuel. It looks like it fell to the ocean from a rocket launch and also looks like a paddle within a paddle. I had purchased my NSP Sonic SUP last summer as an alternate to spending money on travel during the pandemic, but was only able to purchase a very cheap and very heavy adjustable paddle from a sporting good chain to get me started. I was also spending more time in my Nelo Surfski and my go to Puakea Kahele outrigger canoe, and the SUP was getting neglected. So, I decided to sign up for a clinic with April Zilg at the Cayuga Lake Cup Race in the finger lakes region of upstate New York in August. Nothing like knowing you will spend a couple of hours with a world pro to get a paddler salivating for personal improvement on the water. But was I really going to go with a paddle that weighed as much as my SUP? (At least that’s how it felt to my shoulders).

I downwind paddle as much as possible. I picked up the brace stroke from Oscar Chalupsky for surfski in 2018 and immediately applied it to outrigger paddling. Spending more time on the surfski this year, the brace came automatically, and when I got back on the SUP this summer, I found myself throwing the paddle out to brace in the surf for stability. My NSP Sonic is a downwind board, and usually I paddle against the wind or surf then turn around to zoom back to shore. Not that I have much of an idea what I’m doing, but my local waters do get considerable medium sized surf and breakers, which are fairly optimal for a novice surfer such as myself. This is a long preamble to how I discovered Black Project paddles in the first place.

Yes, I’d followed Quickblade’s SUP series and also Hippostick’s, but these are made by crossover athletes who also make outrigger paddles. I own a QuickBlade V111 that I absolutely love, especially for downwind (and upwind). I was also familiar with ZRE’s SUP, and I also own a 10oz ZRE outrigger paddle. But when I searched for SUP surf paddle, I was coming up empty. With all price points at $500 USD, which of these carbon beauties was I going to buy? After a series of searches I came upon some minimalist SUP thread where someone suggested Black Project for surf. Since Black Project does not make paddles for outrigger, the brand was not on my radar. Well, it is now. There isn’t any spectacular footage in the video, it’s just my first time out with it. What a difference. If your eyes are glazing here, and you just want to know if the Hydro FlowX shaved a minute off my paddle time, then the answer is yes. Sure. This paddle feels like it weighs nothing, the side to side transfer is a weightless breeze, the power is incredible, and the steering agility was surprising. Love it.

The rest of this article will get rather technical and speculative. Read on if you dare…

A few years ago I decided to 3D print a paddle blade. Or 1190 days ago according to the internet record on SimScale, where I uploaded a model of my blade design and attempted to simulate what happens to water flow around the paddle blade. I’m a better technician than I am a paddler, and while overthinking water flow can certainly distract from the beauty of paddling in my local ocean, we wouldn’t have rockets if people didn’t overthink how to technically overcome gravity. I had not set out 1190 days ago to invent a rocket paddle. I was actually curious about how much of a spoon shape could be incorporated into a paddle. I was thinking about webbed feet and wondering if a webbed paddle might be a logical solution. I also think the days of carbon lay-up are in the sunset and 3D prototyping and printing on a larger scale will be here faster than you can say “internet.” And I did indeed 3D print my paddle, which was called, 1190 days ago, the Brooklyn Paddle, since I lived in Brooklyn and paddled on the Hudson River and in the New York Harbor.

I spent countless hours learning to model the complex inner and outer curves of a paddle blade (using Fusion360 if you’re interested). And this is where the technical design of a paddle really gets into, let’s call it, flow. As a downwind paddler, I spend a lot of time paddling upwind also, so I need a blade that can really pull the boat (or SUP or surfski) past the blade. The blade must also be very quick in and out of the water on the downwind attacks. (Ducks are no longer my model here because as much as they might upwind, I’ve yet to see one actively surfing). Yet it was the ducky V-indentation on the QuickBlade V111 that first got me interested in that paddle, along with its flatter bottom.

Pictured above are the conditions I love, and the ones I aim to graduate to with my SUP. The indentation in the Hydro FlowX (or DPS “deep power scoop” as Black Project calls it), immediately reminded me of the QB V111 indentation as well as my early attempts to make a paddle with a flatter bottom edge and deeper spoon. But what is really amazing is how small the blade is. How in the world can I be so far from the blade and get so much power out of it? How in the world did I suddenly get a steering paddle in such a small package? Enter the paddling and engineering duo behind Black Project of Chris Freeman and Tom Hammerton. As soon as I landed on their website and was able to scroll through line after line of technical data about the different paddles, I was hooked. I went through their step-by-step how to choose a SUP paddle guide and really felt I had the information I needed for sizing. However, at this point, since SUP is what I spend the least of my paddle time on, I thought I would go with the Lava, an all around paddle with a slightly lower price point. However, the clinic with April Zilg was pending, and I knew I had the option either to relegate SUP to hobby or to take it to where I take the rest of my paddling: the surf!

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“Paddle=Board. Both are equal.”

— a Geek

Really, why have a fancy downwind SUP and not go all in with the paddle? The paddle is half the sport isn’t it? I read every single review I could find of the Hydro FlowX (which were maybe two total) and reread them. The more I scrolled through the data on the Black Project website, the more I realized this was a truly engineered project. These were geeks like me, in love with the ocean and willing to apply math and physics to it. Below is an image I got trying to model flow around my 3D paddle concept before I printed it.

You can basically see how the paddle slices into the water and some volume flows up past the blade and over the top. The hole is where the handle connects. If you add the ridge and peak onto the top of the handle, like Black Project did with the Hydro FlowX, that is going to change. The water is both going to flow up and also be held like ice cream in the scoop. Does any of this, stroke by stroke, need to be visualized to make us faster paddlers? Maybe. Like nature we need to be master adapters. If, when we put the blade in the water, our body is more comfortable, we have more power and more steering agility, then the technical analysis pays off.

Black Project hails the Hydro FlowX as the first 3D paddle. Of course all paddles are 3D, but this one has volume, which means the water is getting displaced while the blade slices in, and the water is flowing into the scoop in that instant of forward thrust. And this is great food for thought, but as I ran my credit card through for the Hydro FlowX, I thought it best to send a query to Black Project. After all, what do I know about SUP paddles? I was also anxious that the paddle get to me on time for the clinic with April Zilg. I got a call from Maui not long afterwards, and the next day Chris Freeman and I spoke. He suggested I take a look at his article Smaller, Softer, Shorter, which you can read by clicking on that link. I was already aware that downwinders could benefit from a smaller paddle, and Woo had a small paddle for us to try at downwind camp in 2020, just before everything got shut down due to the pandemic. I think we may have tried this one, which they sell as an emergency paddle. Let’s focus now on smaller. How small could we get?

SMALLER

So how is it that I am so far from the blade on a SUP, yet have so much power with such a small blade? Why are SUP blades smaller? Possibly there remains the mentality that bigger is better. I can definitely state that my coaches are all in principle agreement (that is the ones like Guy Ringrave and, as I’d find out, April Zilg) that a long stroke is not necessary. And yet you hear the chant all the time in outrigger paddling: long and strong! I’ve literally had a SUP paddler call out to me I should try a bigger blade. As I paddle more and more downwind, blessed by conditions from tropical Atlantic Ocean storms, my QuickBlade V111 starts to feel sluggish on the catch. The waves are moving so fast, I can literally feel the canoe slowing down when the blade enters the water. Subsequently I don’t bother trying to bury the blade or even stroke from my toes to my hips. It’s more of a knee to thigh explosion to position the bow at the bottom of the wave trough. This same explosion comes naturally with the Hydro FlowX. For surfski, with its two-blade wing-spoon, a couple of quick powerful grabs are required (and I’ve a long way to go at that!). But the surfski blades are also small. Why is the outrigger blade so big by comparison? All I can say is I wish I had another $500 to gamble and to have Black Project make me a super short, outrigger length version of the Hydro FlowX so I could find out.

Be safe, and see you on the water!

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Downwind Paddling: On Becoming a Downwind Paddler

It is March 2021, and I have spent more seat time in my Puakea Kahale than ever, in large part due to the need for social distancing. My local club started going out in our 6-man canoes late last summer, and several of us had been going out together in the smaller 1 and 2 seaters, but for a number of reasons I am still adhering to strict social distancing guidelines and not participating in any group sport activities or races. And while I miss the camaraderie of the big boats, the wind and waves and I have gotten quite close during the pandemic. If you want to get good at downwind, you have to paddle downwind. Solo. As much as possible.

In January 2020 I attended the Woo downwnd camp for the third year in a row. My skills had improved greatly, and I paddled the Woo Outrigger, French-made Feline as much as possible, as it was similar to the Kahele in length and volume. I did not huli once, no matter how tempted the Feline was to flip me, and I found some considerable speed and reasonable consistency on our daily runs.

My French coach Alain remarked that both my paddling and my French language had improved. There is no better way to stroke a paddler’s ego than to notice something they suspect: improvement. I recognized, however, that I would do much better on a Kahale, principally because it is lighter and has the improved steering with spring return rudder.

At the airport in Pointe-de-pietre in February 2020, as paddle camp wound down and we all returned to our home countries via this small international airport, I saw my first notices about travel restrictions into the USA due to coronavirus. A flight headed toward Miami earlier in the day returned a passenger who would not be allowed to depart there. Passengers who had been to inland China had to get rerouted onto New York bound planes, like mine. By the end of February I felt like I had a virus, though the news was not very clear as yet, and while I noticed the strange symptoms of the virus, I thought little of it until later. Within a few weeks restrictions increased, and the local club’s future went into limbo. I went out into the Atlantic Ocean by myself and started getting to know it quite well. For the duration of 2020 until now, my local waters are my university.

It had been a couple of years since I had started reading and then rereading WAVES by Fredric Raichlen, and while I got the basics I had not ever really seen my local waters as a system I could study. Having always paddled along with the bigger boats in the club, where surfing was seldom our focus, I tagged along regardless of wind conditions. But on my own I began to study the wind direction and tides. Soon I recognized the telltale signs of downwind runs, the curling horsehead waves running in the same direction. In my local waters sometimes these wave train patterns are only a couple of hundred feet wide or even less. Within these conveyor belt systems I discovered I could do 1 kilometer runs over and over again.

There are about seven small breakers in this image. A dark line behind me and closer to the horizon is another breaker. The further out I go, the bigger the swell. Closer in, the waves bunch up on the shallow sand.

I live on Long Island Sound, where on any given day, as long as I have 10 knots or better wind, I can downwind north, south or west. 16 knots is optimal for solo downwind. But approaching 20 knots, solo paddling is ill-advised. East directed waves will push me out to open water, so despite the temptation, I never downwind away from the shore even if the windspeed is below 15 knots. One of the key insights to downwind is that the waves actually don’t need to be big. As long as wave trains are moving in generally the same direction, even small bumps are surfable. In the video below, I am teaching a friend how to catch the swell rolling to the north. I can see the low bumps ahead, and I know more are coming behind me. So I keep a steady pace, and when I feel the stern lifting behind me, I pick up my stroke to match the speed of the wave. When they are the same, which is something you basically can both see and feel, you can let the momentum of the wave puch you. In this way, downwind paddling technique is more of a high intensity sport. You will cycle through speeds with intermittent bursts of power. This might look like flat water to you, but it is not. The swell bumps have a direction and a speed.

In the next video, from 2019, I have stronger swell, which a decent app like Windy will give you in Kj or kilojoules. At this stage in my paddling I knew the basics of what to look for and my timing was improving. Later in 2020, however, I found I had the ability to really hammer the paddle blade in and pull myself onto the face of a wave just so, to drop ono the incline like a surfer on a surfboard. The only way to get the feel for this is to go out in any kind of swell, even if it seems tiny, and try to ride it.

To close out this brief blog on downwind, the power is in the wave, the ability to catch that power takes immersion. Study your local waters for the telltale signs of downwind conditions, and even if they are small, go after them. It will make catching waves of all sizes easier. And once you really get to know your local conditions, you will know what to look for in other conditions, as well as what the bathymetry suggests by the waves above it. Basically, the top waves are travelling in circles, like a conveyor belt rollers, with their patterns often suggestive of what the sea floor looks like beneath them, as they roll against the sea floor and bunch up. These patterns will change with tidal height and flow. In this last video, the water is brownish from the silt churned up by a storm. The swell was quite strong, and I timed it just right to ride a single wave for about 30 seconds.

So, how do you know you’re going from beginner to intermediate downwind paddler? Maybe when you go from not even knowing what downwind is, to having your friends remark they are amazed at your ability to catch a 6” (15 cm) tall wave. Mostly it comes from the first person point of view, where you are running with the wave trains, feeling it - and seeing your average speeds creep up over time. A smartwatch helps with that. I use the Apple watch. Stay safe, and see you on the water!