Plastic vs Fiber Fins: Another View
Posted By Sven Anderson on 25 January 2004
When you gather together aficionados of anything, you're going to get varying preferences. If you hang with car guys, it's Ford vs Chevy. Have a friend that bangs nails? Your hammer is better than his. Divers are no different and may even be more adamant in their loyalties with wetsuits, masks, spearguns...and especially fins.
With 30+ years of diving, I've been fortunate to experience and survive most all of the gear available then and now. I'm no different from any other diver, in that fins are the motors that get me there, down and up. Pretty important. So when I get a call from Specialfins saying, "Hey, about trying our fins?", it's not a stretch of my public education to say, "Sure!".
Karma made this happen at a time that members of DeeperBlue.net were buzzing about the qualities of fiberplastic versus plastic blades."This would be a great opportunity to do a side by side comparison", I thought. Like I said, public school...
And so I hit the beach with an embarrassingly expensive collection of blades to thrash. Life gets good sometimes.
My new favorites, the Matrix 30's, were lovingly beside me and the guys at Specialfins (in Estonia of all places) had licked a few hundred stamps and sent four pairs of their blades complete with a very well- designed and good -looking carry bag. The quality was ridiculously obvious when I opened the wrappers on the pairs of their Classic Hard, camouflaged "Kelpie" Hard, "Kelpie" Medium and Hybrid Hard blades. The finish on the blades rivaled the smoothness of my truck's hood, the fitting of the side rails and edging was perfect and free of adhesive drips and they mounted into stock Omer footpockets with zero effort. Zero effort was going to be the ongoing theme with these fins.
I started out with the well-worn Esclapez plastics as a baseline. With a sandy bottom one hundred feet below the float, the 51 degree (F) Pacific was in rare form with nary a swell and calm air. The irony of most fish and abalone being out of season hurt- deeply. The sinuses were cleared and the bottom made in a minute flat. Same ol' stuff.
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