Jibe Practice for Foiling

We got our second foil three days ago: a Slingshot Infinity 84. I've foiled on it only for two short sessions, but so far, I love it. It gets me flying as quickly as Nina on the Infinity 76, with a sail that's just one sail size bigger. But more importantly, it can handle all my extra pounds much better than the 76 - no more spinouts and breaches! But my first attempts at foiled jibes on the i84 looked quite similar to those on the i76 - mostly crashes, with an occasional exception where I plane out of the jibe after the board touches down.

As new foilers, we are in a stage where we often hope that the wind does not pick up beyond 15-18 mph. This summer so far, the wind often has played along, but not yesterday - it picked up to the high 20s, gusting to 30. So it was time to take the old slapper out for a change - my white Skate 110 that I had repaired for foiling, since I had forgotten to put my new Skate into the van. Off to Egg Island we went. Nina tried her usual freestyle moves, but I was on a foil related mission: practice the sail first jibe!

After more than 20 AKB camps, I am a step jiber - when the sail moves, the feet switch (or at least they should). But for foiling jibes, there's plenty of advice to do a sail-first jibe (also called Power Jibe and Speed Jibe): flip the sail first, and the feet later. That's what the Horue jibing tutorial suggests, and Balz Muller says the same thing. I have tried enough step jibes on the foil to see that separating the sail and foot movements might be a good idea, but I almost never do sail-first jibes .. which means I did not really want to try them when flying. But being nicely powered on a 5.0 on perfectly flat water at Egg Island - there's no better training grounds!

So after a few regular jibes and a 360 try or two, it was sail-first jibe practice. I was surprised to find me planing out of them after just a few tries, and having tons of fun! I'm not good at multi-tasking, so flipping the sail first while maintaining the carve, and then switching the feet, seemed more natural to me than doing two things at once. When the wind picked up after a while, I ended up doing tacks on one side so that I'd be able to do some "slow speed runs" along the sandbank on the way back. Since I tack the foil much more than I usually tack my shortboards, my tacks had improved a bit - nice!

Here's the GPS tracks from the "forbidden jibe" session in the "kiddie pool" at Egg Island:

The jibe analysis with GPS Action Replay showed that this was one of my top-15 best jibing sessions (from more than 1300 sessions). Cool!

Hopefully, the wind will remain lighter today, so that I'll get a chance to try foiling sail-first jibes. For anyone who wants to foil at Kalmus, check these tracks from my last foil session there:

I was using a relatively short (71 cm) mast, but still ran aground about 800 feet from shore at low tide (0.2 ft). I tried walking into deeper water several times, but always made ground contact again when I tried to foil away. You can see the stones pretty well on the Google Earth image. I would have probably been fine another 100 or 200 feet further out, but the ground there is uneven, and my head was barely above water in the deeper spots. I ended up just body-dragging in.
So if you foil at Kalmus, check the tides, and make sure to walk out far enough at low tide! Once the tide level goes beyond 1-1.5 ft, even a 90 cm mast should be fine, though.