Looks like it's built very well with very high quality materials....price not too bad when compared to other high end sports equipment......when is your order do in?

very cool. love to even try one.

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SWIM FIN INSPIRED BY DOLPHINS: Lunocet users have already hit about eight miles (13 kilometers) per hour, nearly twice as fast as Olympic Gold Medal swimmer Michael Phelps at his speediest.

The human body does many things well, but swimming isn't one of them. We're embarrassingly inefficient in the water, able to convert just 3 or 4 percent of our energy into forward motion. (Even with swim fins, we're only 10 to 15 percent more efficient.) But a new, dolphin-inspired fin promises to fuel the biggest change in human-powered swimming in decades, putting beyond-Olympian speeds within reach of just about anyone.

Culminating decades of research, engineer and inventor Ted Ciamillo, an inventor and engineer in Athens, Ga., who made his name (and fortune) building high-performance bicycle brakes, created what he has dubbed the Lunocet, a 2.5-pound (1.1-kilogram) monofin made of carbon fiber and fiberglass that attaches to an aluminum foot plate at a precise 30-degree angle. With almost three times the surface area of conventional swim fins, the semiflexible Lunocet provides plenty of propulsion. The key to the 42-inch- (one-meter-) wide fin's speed: its shape and angle, both of which are modeled with scientific precision on a dolphin's tail.

These sprinters of the sea can swim up to 33 miles (53 kilometers) per hour and turn up to 80 percent of their energy into thrust.

"The mechanism functions like a wing to generate a lift force," which is directed forward and turned into thrust, says Frank Fish, a marine biologist at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. "This propulsive mechanism is extremely efficient compared to conventional rigid marine propellers." Fish, a specialist in the swimming morphology of marine mammals, provided Ciamillo with data from CAT scans of dolphins' tails that he used to design his fins, which went on the market last year for $1,800 each.

Lunocet users have already hit about eight miles (13 kilometers) per hour, nearly twice as fast as Olympic Gold Medal swimmer Michael Phelps at his speediest.

Using the Lunocet, some swimmers are close to being able to breach completely out of the water, like whales. Ciamillo envisions a new high-speed, free-diving community of swimmers united around "hydrotouring": long-distance swimming expeditions using Lunocets to cover dozens of miles a day, with participants carrying streamlined, waterproof packs containing only a global positioning system (GPS), satellite phone, and enough food and water for a few nights on shore.

As with any new technology the price is set to recoup the R&D and high cost of custom production of the original series of the gadget. With increased popularity the price will surely drop and there will be cheap Chinese knock-offs available too, that quickly disintegrate in water.

No order for me on those. I like to keep my speed on top of the water so I'm working up an order for a kitesurfing rig.

I'm afraid I'm extremely sceptical. Over the years I've tried most of the new inventions that are supposed to displace conventional fins as relics of the dark ages, and every time people rush out to buy them. Yet after a while their use drops away and people drift back to the tried and tested designs of fin.

What we have here may be a very efficient method of converting work into movement, but you never get anything for nothing. I suspect the work expended would exhaust most people very quickly, so they would have to discontinue the activity. Fins give a pretty good balance, so most people can use fins for hour after hour (if they need to). An interesting innovation for purely speed testing, but I doubt if it's any more than that.

Peter you just need to get in shape!

Can't wait until they start replacing boat propellers! haha

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