The maximum length of boats for the short boat class in races such as the Green Narrows river race is now 9ft and earlier this month Pyranha unveiled the 9R at the summer OR show. In all likelihood this will be the length of the next crop of boats over the next few years (A totally Unsponsored prediction).

Now hot of the press is the Dagger Phantom. From Chris Gragtmans:

“You know what I’m excited about? The PHANTOM.

This is a concept (non-production) race boat project that Dagger Kayaks has made possible for the Team. This is version #1 of the boat, and represents pulling out all of the stops… testing and learning with every performance tweak. Mark (Snowy) Robertson is the absolute man, and we love working with him.

Having this boat sitting in my office is certainly helping with shoulder rehab motivation!”

Looking at the images and knowing Snowy I reckon the Phantom sits somewhere just below the magic 9ft number if not dead on. It looks an interesting boat I wouldn’t be surprised to see it in full production at some point.

Many thanks to Chris for letting me share these images on Unsponsored.