Foil Jibes

Foil jibes are easy. A lot of foilers say that. I thought so, too, in my early jibe sessions. My lovely wife probably still thinks so, because she foils through jibes on a regular basis, even on her little 90 l freestyle board.

Foil jibes are hard. Many foilers say that. I moved into this camp a few months ago, when I started crashing every time I tried a jibe. Here's a picture of a typical attempt:

When windsurfing, I can jibe just fine. But when foiling, I often found myself stuck. For some reason, there seemed to be no way to move the feet or the rig until it was way too late.

I looked at lots of videos and read every bit of advice. Sail first jibe or step jibe? Foil high or low at the start? Everything seems to work .. for some. Just not for me.

Finally, I connected a few things. Some guys say "start the jibe with the foil high because it will go down". Others say "start low because it will go up". Ideally, though, you'd want to foil to just stay at the same height!

The other piece of the puzzle was understanding why I could not move my feet. When I started foiling, I was backfoot heavy. With little weight on it, moving the front foot back is no big deal. But as I foiled more, I adjusted the trim so that I now have even weight on both legs. Try moving you leg with half of your weight on it - it's impossible! You first have to move the weight off the leg, then you can move it. But if I move my weight around a lot on the foil, it will go up or down - not good! Even if the foil does not breach, the sudden change in height will probably freak me out, and I jump off.

So - how can I move my feet without affecting the foil? Not really that hard a problem. First, the back foot moves forward and outward, towards the carving rail. It's a small and quick movement, and easy since I'm foiling without straps. With the back foot further forward, I have to put more weight on it to keep the foil balanced, so shift the weight to the back foot! With most of the weight on the back foot, moving the front foot now is possible. For balance reasons, we'd want to put it in front of the back foot, so we can shift all weight to it, and then move the old backfoot forward. The final little step is moving the new back foot back a bit.

I tried this yesterday, and it ended months of wet foil jibes. No, I did not foil through, but 3 out of 4 jibes were dry (all except the first one), and one was planed through. By focussing on my foot work, I messed up the sail flip a bit, but nevertheless, this was a big improvement! I would have tried more but the wind dropped quickly, and I have yet to find out how to get decent upwind angles on the foil when I am barely powered. I think the 71 cm wide board with a comparatively narrow tail is a bit limiting here.

As luck has it, James Douglass just posted a video where you can see the weight shift to the back foot very nicely:


Lots of nice foiled jibes in the video. One of these days, I want to foil jibe like that!