Great review, love to see a similar review on the new Starboard 8”2 Spice

Looks sweet, you were shredding

I've got the 8'0 5 in 1 Hypernut. Brilliant board. Use it for WindSUP over the summer, and it was excellent in the mushy waves. Have tried to get it planing, fastest speed so far 18 knot!

I have a 2021 8’ Hypernut 5 in 1, mostly because the 2022 8’ 5 in 1 model is impossible to get at the moment and the 2021 model is heavily discounted. The shape seems to have changed slightly but overall the concept is the same. I am quite a bit bigger and heavier than you at 190 cm tall and with a winter wetsuit, hood, booties, gloves and paddle I am around 110 kg. The board is 133 litres. That gives me a gild factor of 1.21. The board is super stable on a wave and amazingly fun. I can chuck it around and do floaters, slashes, and off the top turns over close out sections like you did in the video, but obviously they don’t look as good. The board feels lively and fast, because it’s so easy to drive it down the line, even in weak waves. I mostly agree with the review, except for the stability bit when waiting for waves. Lateral stability is not much of an issue for me, but perhaps due to my height / weight fore-aft stability is challenging and I have found that I need to always stand in surf or semi-surf stance quite far forward to not fall off the back - my front foot needs to be near the top of the deck pad and the rear foot is normally around the carry handle. Perhaps it’s my lack of talent on a SUP since I’ve not been doing it for that long, but I do have nearly two decades of surfing and skateboarding experience. To be fair, I did stop surfing for about 12 years and got fat when I moved from tropical and consistent conditions to merry, old England, but that’s a different story for another day. I’ve had 8 or 9 surf sessions on it (and 2 foil sessions) and getting used to staying on the board whilst waiting for waves was a big challenge, especially so in windy / choppy conditions. I can handle those same conditions on my other surf sup (a Starboard Wedge). By windy I mean 12+ mph onshore winds and swell from 2 or 3 different directions. I tried to take out the Hypernut in solid 4-6 foot Putsborough with 25 mph crosshore winds on my second session and managed to get out, but the less said about the rest of that session the better. The tradeoffs once you get onto the wave are very much worth it compared to my bigger Wedge that I use on flatter days, however the more stable I feel when hunting and paddling into a wave the better I’ll surf the wave. One last thing to mention is that it is not an easy board to paddle, especially in windy conditions and one needs to paddle into waves more as if they are on a surfboard, i.e. timing is critical, rather than brute force and speed - something that one can get away with on bigger surf sups. I am now waiting for my carbon Spice that is due in March. I am not sure if I'll keep the Hypernut once I get it. Funny enough, it’s also the board that has made me realise how much I miss surfing on a shorter board and has tempted me to go back to prone surfing, so I have ordered myself a surfboard for xmas. I am not sure if my old back will handle the pop up, but I’ll never know if I don’t try…

Nice review. What paddlell length do you recommend, if I want that direct turning and crispy style? Usually my paddle is as long as my height. Would you go a bit shorter in paddle length?

Volume increase from 2019 nut @104L to 114L???