Van der Waal it’s a a clear non-skid alternative to wax, easy to install and with almost no maintenance. It’s clear (white transparent) witch means that your board will always look like new. The grip doesn’t melt, so you won’t have wax on your sock, boardbag, car, wetsuit etc… It also doesn’t get sticky or dirty, so your board will always be clean.
I have decided to put the grip on my 5’10” Fat Fat, a chubby round nose high volume board that I surf in the Mediterranean when the waves are small and weak. Which is very often :). So first I needed to clean the board of all the wax and then it was time to put on the Waal grip.
Wall grip comes in hexagon stickers that you can/must arrange on the board to suit your need. You can get as many stickers as you want and you could theoretically cover your whole deck in stickers, you can even cut them in half to reach all the places you need. But that would be a waste of grip, 25 stickers that came in the box covered a huge general area where my front foot is usually placed and I haven’t stepped of it yet.
Now to the most important question – does the grip work? Yes, it does. When it is dry it does not feel as sticky as regular wax and when you jump in the water and start to paddle the board doesn’t stick to your belly as good as with regular wax but after a few minutes when it gets wet the grip improves and when I stood up and rode a few waves I could not feel any difference in grip between Van der Waal stickers and regular wax. There is one more test it needs to pass though, right now the water temps around here are in the thick booties, gloves and hood range, so I’ll have to wait to test it without booties (I’ll post an update when this happens).
Thanks to Van der Waal for the test piece & thumbs up for great produc, you can get your own set of hex surf grip stickers on Waal.co.
PS: there is another benefit of using Waal surf grip… “Hey, can I borrow some wax?”, “Nah, I don’t use it, sorry mate.”