Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i Foiling Magazine

Hi Mikaela. So what can you tell us about yourself? I recently turned 12, and I live in Fernandina Beach, Florida. It’s a small beach town as far north east in Florida as you can go, just across the border from Georgia. I have lived here my whole life. I was really young when I first went surfing. My dad would push me into waves when I was only a couple of years old, and when I was five when I competed in my first surf competition. When did you first see a foil, and what did you think? It was probably about two years ago when my dad and I went over to our friend Steve’s house. Steve had just gotten a foil and was starting to learn how…

Mid-January this year, there’s a lot of chatter as Cyclone Tino is forecast to head down from Fiji and pass east of New Zealand heading south, generating some very welcome and potentially huge swell on the east coast here after a relatively dry spell. On January 20th I get a message that everyone’s heading south to Whangamata, just south of the Coromandel Peninsula, for a couple of days. So I pack my camera gear and make the two and a half hour drive down from Auckland after work. I arrive in the dark, but it’s not difficult to spot the house, with 4x4s, jet-skis and foil boards covering every inch of free space on the drive and front lawn. I’m greeted by Aaron Candy who I regularly ride with, Jeremy…

You just got out of the water from a foiling session, right? How was it?! I was out today at Small Reef here in Le Morne on the south side of Mauritius. It’s the wave I foil the most since it works at low and high tide and the bottom is mostly sand in the channel which works perfectly for the foil. Today was my first time ever using straps besides kitesurfing on a twin tip! I loved it so much. Normally when I’m kiting I really dig strapless – that’s kind of my thing – but I decided to give straps a go. I made them from old windsurf straps, actually. I took out the hard plastic molds, kept the soft foam looped over some bits from a kite…

THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING HOW TO BIG WAVE FOIL STARTING OUT Big wave foiling, or tow-in foiling, the key things you have to prepare yourself for is that you’re going to be going fast – really fast – and having experience in bigger waves is key. Managing fear is probably the key thing you’ll have to face when you want to start out and you’re thinking about going to ride these bigger waves, because sooner or later you’re going to get hit by a big wave, and you’re going to have to deal with taking it on your head, and that alone can be horrifying, but having a foil near you is even more terrifying. So that’s the first thing you have to consider – whether your mind can…

So tell us first what the main characteristics are that mark the Phantom apart from the Gravity… CB: The differences are all in the shape. The Phantom wings have more span (+20%), less chord (-10%), thinner sections (-25%) and a shallower arch (ft view curvature). The Gravity wings have an earlier and more progressive take-off, they offer a lot of lift but in a controlled way to make them easier to handle. On a Phantom, you can trigger the take-off a little later, but the lift is immediate. Once in the air, it feels like you will never touch back down on the water, you can keep flying for way longer, which gives you time to find the next slope that you’ll ride. The amount of lift you get from…

RIDER Dylan Wilcoxen PHOTOGRAPHER Russell Ord LOCATION Kandui Resort, Mentawai Islands Russell: Dylan’s Instagram account name, @alldaydylan, is the perfect reflection of who he is and how he lives his young 10-year-old life. Dylan lives in an area rich in quality waves; surfing used to take up 100% of his daylight hours in amongst a few hours of schooling, and now foiling is finding its way into his ocean time. According to Dylan, foiling is not only a perfect partner to his surfing, it’s opened up so many more waves in and around his home at Kandui Resort, giving real meaning to the area known as ‘Playgrounds’. RIDER Daniel Dingerkus PHOTOGRAPHER Hanno Dingerkus LOCATION Sardinia, Italy Daniel: As a water addict, who is living in Germany, you always got to…

Somewhere north of Los Angeles, this pristine wind zone has been windsurfed and then kiteboarded since the early 80s. Then came kite foilers. Now the latest craze has turned all the kiteboarders and kite foilers into wing foilers! Deer have been seen on the beach, elephant seals breed there in the winter and are so thick on the sand you can’t even get through them to the water in late winter. The surrounding area is like God’s country, so much open space, craggy coastlines, and home to many native species. Seen here are local sailors Treve Jones (on the outside) and Donny Baxter. Two guys who seem to have grown gills, spending countless hours daily in the cold water doing what they love!…

FOIL CONNECTIONS Life is comprised of countless connections; one of the most paramount is our relationship and bond with the ocean. Being immersed in the elements with nothing between us and Mother Nature is a freeing experience that awakens the senses. But everything is amplified ten-fold when we implement tools and toys to link ourselves to the elements; when we put something between ourselves and nature in order to better harness her power. All of a sudden we feel more than just the wind in our face; we feel the ocean swell and the current beneath our feet, we feel the pull from our sails, we feel it all, as we glide over the water on our foils. With a wing or a kite and a foil, an invisible chain…

SIGN UP FOR 4 ISSUES FOR AND ENJOY A 10% DISCOUNT! ENTER CODE: GET10 FOILING MAGAZINE COMMUNITY Find us on Instagram and Facebook: @foilingmagazine You can also sign up for nothing but good news from us at thefoilingmagazine.com INTERESTED IN CONTRIBUTING? We’re always on the lookout for new writers and photographers. Drop us a line with examples of any previously published work to hello@thefoilingmagazine.com WANT TO ADVERTISE WITH US? We welcome all advertising enquiries, and have some pretty appealing packages available to those in the hydrofoil business. Drop us a line to advertising@thefoilingmagazine.com THEFOILINGMAGAZINE.COM…

“I WAS HAVING FUN BUILDING THESE HULLS FOR FRIENDS AND HAVING A GREAT TIME DOING IT. I GUESS NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED ALL THESE YEARS LATER.” Hi John. So let’s kick it off from an early age… What are your first memories of the ocean? My first experiences in the ocean started from birth. My first memories were camping in my father’s VW bus on the beach in Mexico and San Onofre in California. My dad was in the San Onofre Surf Club for many years. Needless to say, I spent many hours and days on that beach playing in the shorebreak, and later, playing in the surf. I was also lucky enough to visit the Hawaiian Islands as a very young child. My cousins lived on the beach on…

Hi Mario. So firstly, what’s your background and how did you end up in the foil design sphere? In 2009 I took part in the first European Kiterace Championships in Douarnenez/France where I saw the first kitefoilers. Marc Blanc impressed me a lot with his easy and effortless riding style. I got hooked immediately and started riding foils right after that event. But the foils which were available in those days (there was just one brand) had a poor hydrodynamic design and very limited performance. I felt that there was a lot more potential in this new sport. So I dug into the physics of hydrodynamics and started building my own foils. As it turned out they worked a lot better, so I got even more enthusiastic on designing and…

First up, can you give us a brief history of Unifoil? Unifoil was started in 2014 initially as just a bit of fun. Clifford is an avid kite-surfer and had his own a CNC machine to play around with. Naturally he started tinkering around with some kite-foil designs and testing them in the waters of the Jeffery’s Bay on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Even though the first few Unifoil models were kite-only foils, it didn’t take long before a few local surfer friends asked Clifford to build a surf-foil version and it has built from there… After years of R&D and refining his designs, word spread and top foilers from Hawaii, Brazil, Europe, and Australia started asking for Unifoils. Clifford was struggling to keep up with demand working…

Hey guys. Firstly, can you give us the lowdown on the history of the Taaroa brand? Taaroa is a hydrofoil company created in 2012. We started by designing a racing kitefoil named the SWORD and then expanded into windfoiling, and more recently SUP and surf foiling with the UP collection – which is our most modular and easy to use foil. We are a team of enthusiasts living between Lausanne (Switzerland), Biarritz (France) and San Francisco (USA) with varied backgrounds who share the same goal: pushing the limits of maritime mobility by using our experience to imagine new products, to develop increasingly more efficient foils, and to create innovative technology mixing hardware and software. So there are some pretty exciting rumours doing the rounds about this. In a nutshell, what…

• For four years now – since that day Kai connected multiple waves in one single ride – several new frontiers of water sports were revealed, where riders are not limited to large waves, single waves, crowded line ups, or waiting for the wind. That day Kai generated two concepts: the concept of linking waves and riding open swells without limits, and the concept of maximizing the number of sessions and practicable spots that would not be interesting for regular surfing. With Wind Wings now adding to this, the only boundaries are your own imagination. It’s like riding a spot in 3D, switching between using the wind to go upwind to join the peak, and coming back using the wave by surf foiling. • For the last four years, steady…

Hey Kai. Congrats on the multiple records! Are you the first to foil all three of those challenges? When those races happened in 2018 I wasn’t the only one competing in foiling for the Maui to Molokai or Molokai to Oahu but for the Napali Coast run I was. That season had incredible conditions every day and it really made those races special, exciting and fun. Especially with the Napali Coast run, it is notorious for no wind at the end. That day however it was the most perfect swells to the sand. How much did your crossing times shave off the records previously set? Quite a bit, the year before during the Molokai 2 Oahu race in 2017 I paddled my unlimited SUP in a time of 4:07:41, on…

Since the movie Step Into Liquid, it’s gotten pretty famous to surf waves coming off of ships. In surf mags and on the web, you can read endless stories from people trying to surf these waves, mostly without success… Those spectacular scenes of the tanker surfing in Texas definitely look perfect: long waves with rides that are many minutes long… essentially a dream for every surfer. But it’s not as easy to surf these kind of waves like they do in the movie. I’ll let you know why it’s not so easy, and what you need to do if you want to go surf them… When you watch Step Into Liquid, it looks like the guys surf these waves in the open sea, driving there with a speedboat to catch…

1 SIGNATURE STEALTH 200 / 1290 We featured the Signature Stealth 175 in the last issue, but along comes the ‘big brother’: the 200, angled towards the, shall we say, stockier surf and SUP riders amongst us… Performance-design and built to handle high speeds, it’s full carbon and brings Signature performance to the masses. 2 STARBOARD X AIRUSH WING Airush Kiteboarding (the flying side of AK Durable Supply Co) and Starboard have kept their powder dry for a while but have now joined engineering forces and released their wing surf weapon into the ever-growing wing market. The FreeWing is an accessible wing for all riders in all conditions and with the healthily sized window you can get your wing-groove on without worrying about what’s in your way… 3 FLITEBOARD AIR…

Hi Adrian. AXIS has a rich history in water sports and as well as building top class foils, you’re also a successful kiteboard brand. Where and when did it all begin? I built my first windsurfer when I was about 14 or 15 years old. My parents wouldn’t buy me one, but they helped me translate from a French windsurf magazine and I built my own board in the back room of the house, made of polystyrene and plywood. I really enjoyed building things and it developed from there. When I finished school, I did mechanical engineering, which has helped me a lot in everything that I’ve done. I got into windsurf competing in New Zealand and ended up getting a job building windsurfers in Auckland. When I was 19,…

Well, the fact is the world went and got a bit weird as we were pulling together tests, so we decided to do the right thing and put them on hold this time round. But rest assured, we’ve got plenty done and a whole lot more in the offing now things are opening up again so issue #5 is going to be test-tastic… Sign up here to subscribe and get it delivered to your door. And if you haven’t checked our tests from the first three issues though, then you can fill your boots on our website here.…

When did RRD see the potential in bringing the wing to the line-up? Well, it was the first time I tried it! I actually made a prototype in June 2019 as I thought that it would be interesting to try it out, and that’s what we did. The first impression was great… I thought it would have been kind of like a little toy to have fun with, but I was wrong, because when you actually used it with a proper foil, you could actually start to plane at very low speeds with the wing. It’s a phenomenal piece of gear. Then when I first tried it on the Pocket Rocket 180 with the KSH hydrofoil, I immediately understood that there was huge potential. We feature Camille and Julien Bouyer…

“SO MUCH OF THE JOY OF THE SPORT COMES FROM LUFFING THE WING AND LETTING IT DISAPPEAR BEHIND YOU AS YOU CONNECT FROM SWELL TO SWELL” It looks like the SlingWing has been on a serious weight loss program from V1 to V2 – take us through how you’ve achieved this and your reasoning behind that. Weight is everything when it comes to a wing. So much of the joy of the sport comes from luffing the wing and letting it disappear behind you as you connect from swell to swell or rip turns down the line. The lighter the wing, the more it disappears and the easier it is to control with one hand. Beginners in light-air conditions also benefit from a light-weight wing with reduced arm fatigue, while…

Foiling has opened so many doors for me in my life and I can’t wait to see where it goes in the future. Being in the water is what makes me the happiest, and foiling allows me to do something in the water almost every single day. Whether it is prone surf foiling, kite foiling, winging, tow foiling, or just cruising behind the boat, the hydrofoil has gotten me in the ocean on days when I used to not even consider it. I come from a surfing background and got into prone foiling a few years ago. Dave Kalama gave me my first lesson behind a ski, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Learning the sport wasn’t easy and I definitely put in plenty of time eating…