| | | Fastest Fins 1. Mares Avanti Superchannel (full-foot) (2.4 mph) 2. Mares Avanti Excel; Oceanic Caribe X (2.3 mph) 3. Apollo Sports Bio-Fin Pro C-Series, Atomic Aquatics Smoke on the Water (2.2 mph) Thrust Test Champs 1. Atomic Aquatics Smoke on the Water; Mares Avanti Superchannel (full-foot) (41 pounds) 2. Apollo Sports Bio-Fin Pro C-Series; Mares Avanti Excel; Oceanic Caribe X (40 pounds) 3. Aeris Mako; Mares Quattro Excel; Cressi-sub Reaction (38 pounds) Slalom Course Champs 1. Mares Avanti Superchannel (full-foot) (55 seconds) 2. Oceanic Caribe X (59 seconds) 3. Mares Avanti Excel (62 seconds) | | |
| | | THE BEST NEW DESIGNS FACE OFF IN OUR EXCLUSIVE REVIEW. Have you ever dived with a really bad pair of fins? It's the worst. Your legs and ankles ache, you huff and puff your tank away and you get nowhere. Worse, you just don't have any fun. No doubt about it: Bad fins suck. Which is why ScubaLab invests such considerable time, effort and money into our fin tests. No diver should have to dive with substandard fins, not when there are so many excellent choices, many of them priced very reasonably. Since our last fin review in 2005, a number of interesting new designs have hit the market. In order to help you find the pair that's right for you, we took 18 new models, 12 test divers and five test supervisors to Capt. Don's Habitat on Bonaire (see "Our Thanks to," p. 73) and conducted the latest round of the industry's most thorough evaluation of recreational dive fins. Our test is comprised of two phases. The first phase involves objective performance measures of speed (as measured by digital underwater speedometers), thrust (as measured by calibrated scales) and maneuverability (as measured by time on a slalom course)—these are reported here with each individual review. The second phase is what we call our ergonomic evaluation. During open-water reef dives, our team of multiple test divers evaluates each fin in 10 areas of performance using a 1 to 5 scale (5=Excellent, 4=Very Good, 3=Good, 2=Fair and 1 = Poor) and records their comments on waterproof scorecards. At the end of our week in Bonaire, we then asked each test diver to rank the fins from best to worst. The fins that got the most No. 1 votes have been awarded the additional honor of a Testers' Choice rating. When you add all the data up, as we have in the following reviews, you get a pretty good picture of what you can expect from a pair of fins. (For complete data and a detailed description of all the tests, see In Depth, p. 106-107.) Good news: When we sat down to review the results of this year's test, we found most of them up to the task, with only a few performing below what we would consider average. And you don't necessarily have to pay a lot for a good pair of fins—some of the top performers also earned our Best Buy recommendation. Here are the reviews in alphabetical order by fin style. | | |