Heard of the Antix? Of course you have

By now i’m sure you have heard about the Antix, i mean besides Beyonce’s twins announcement its pretty much the biggest thing on the internet right now. But it’s being talked about for good reason. Over the last few years other boats have come out trying to push the downriver play potential, though great boats, were kinda missing one key factor: the PLAY. When the final prototype of the Antix came out and i got to paddle it for the first time on the ottawa. I paddled out onto corner wave which is a small fun wave, i did a blunt, then a backstab. Then i flushed and went to a sick eddyline on the other side and without hardly any effort did a squirt and just held it for a while. Then i went and boofed a fairly large hole and just skipped over it. After that i was like “what the hell just happened”. It was then that i realized what was really going on, i knew then that this wasn’t a slightly more creekable Fun, or a Zen that you can squirt. This was a league of it’s own. It also just started a chaos in my head of just places i couldn’t wait to take the Antix to; The Green, Chile, Mexico, PNW, EVERYWHERE!

I got to take it to Chile this winter and every day in that boat was a good day. I got could blunt and airscrew it on a not very large wave. I was running the classics and doing never ending squirts, running plenty hard runs with big holes and big water, and getting my freewheels back on. It was unreal! Every day was someone different asking me to try it out. Check out the edit from Chile

What I have been loving so much about the Antix is how comfortable i feel on the hard whitewater, and how much more fun it makes the easy stuff. The way i like to put it is; It’s a creekboat in all the places you need it, and playboat in all the ways you want it. I can get it vertical in flatwater, it surfs i think easier than any boat we have had before, i can blunt it, airscrew, splat, squirt, freewheel etc etc. Now thats everything you can do in a playboat obviously. But i think what blew my mind the most with the Antix, i knew we were gonna be able to play with it, but i didn’t realize how good it was gonna be for creeking. I feel 100% confident in that boat on the creeks. It’s SO easy to boof, feels so much faster than you would expect, carries its speed out of boofs, so much fun for zipping around, and just makes all those eddy catches and carves so much better. I know what you’re thinking, “with the small stern and lower hip edges i’ll flip or back ender more”. I have had no problem staying in control and not backendering, but whats cool about the smaller stern, if you start back endering a little, you just squirt the stern back out from under you. I just love the control over the boat.

But there is one more thing i want to add about this boat i realized. You don’t need to be someone that wants to make their local run more crazy and get hphy with it to love this boat. I think it might be our easiest to roll boat YET, so it’ll be a great boat to learn the roll. But it also will be a perfect boat for those that like sticking to class 1-3, but use a creekboat so they can stay on top. The Antix is stable enough and has enough rocker that you will stay on top when you want to, but will make surfing waves on the fly SO much easier. Any paddler from beginner to pro can find a time and place to love paddling this boat.

Everyone has a run that is their “easy” run or a run that they are comfortable on. But is just too easy in a creek boat, and not ideal in a playboat, the Antix will bring a whole new realm of possibilities to whatever run you take it on. TRY IT!!