Flatter Is Better

 We had great wind yesterday, and went winging. The session, however, was anything but great. So many things did not go as planned .. I don't really want to talk about it. But I'll say one thing: it was choppy.

Today's wind was very similar, but fortunately, the session was not. Fortunately, my lovely wife had suggested a change of scenery: Wacky Bay. That's were I had my first wing foil session that felt like fun about 3 months ago, so convincing me to forgo the chop for some flat water was not too hard. 

I'll tell you the story with little bits and pieces from my GPS tracks today. Here's the start of the session:

The drops after each run means my initial jibe attempts were quite bad, and usually wet. Notice how several times, the speed quickly increases a lot, followed by a sudden drop. That means I stayed true to my plan to not move the back foot forward when starting a jibe. I did, however, start the carve exactly the same way I had done many thousand times on a windsurfer: with most of my weight on the back foot. Not only did my muscles remember that "this is the way to turn downwind", but it also made sense to my brain: the back foot was across the center line on the side where I wanted to turn, and the front foot on the other side, with the toes barely touching the centerline of the board.

But not everything that seems to make sense actually does make sense. The "back foot carve" approach meant that I shifted my weight towards the back of he board. If you've foiled, you know what that will lead to: the foil will start climbing. Up I went. That meant less drag, so I also went faster. Faster means more lift, so I went up more. Positive feedback loops are fun! In this case, they also let to a wet ending.

After reproducing this three times in a row, I finally remembered that throwing all your weight onto the back foot is not such a great idea on the foil. Fortunately, there are a few windsurfing moves that requiring carving downwind on your front foot, one of them being the downwind 360 in the foot straps. Since I had worked on this move during many ABK camps, there even was a bit of muscle memory for this from my many hundred tries! The only modification I needed to add was to move my front foot a bit, so that the toes ended up on the other side of the center line.

Turning downwind his way, with even weight on the toes of both feet, did indeed keep the foil from jumping out of the water. I practiced that a bit doing S-turns, and then managed to keep decent speed through a jibe:

In this jibe, I followed the advice a couple of friends had given after my last post, and did not switch my feet at all. Switch stance with a wing felt a bit funny, but I managed to pick up a bit of speed again, and even foil for a little while before crashing. Simple jumping around to switch the feet after completing most of the turn seemed easier, so I went back to doing that.

What followed next was a lot of fun:

Of the next 14 jibes, 12 were dry, and I came out with a bit of speed left. Two of those 12 dry jibes were a bit wobbly, but in the others, I kept the board speed near or above 5 knots even in the slowest section of the jibe. A few of these jibes felt really good. In one jibe, I was foiling the entire time, although the board touched the water a little bit for perhaps a second. The minimum speed in this jibe was 8.12 knots, which is about 2-3 knots above the stall speed of the foil. It's also a knot faster than my previous best wing jibe, and a new alpha 500 PB (personal best) for winging.

It's been a little less than three months since my last session at this spot, when I got the feeling that wingfoiling could be a lot of fun for the first time. Back then, I was happy to get 8 runs in, before I was exhausted and call it a day. Today, 16 wing sessions later and in very similar conditions, I managed to get decent jibes in 12 out of 14 successive tries. For a slow learner like me, that is a rather rapid improvement! Wing foiling seems quite a bit easier than windfoiling, at least once past the initial hurdles. According to my session log, it took me 157 windfoil sessions to get a jibe as good as today's jibe (measured by the minimum jibe speed) - and that happened at Bird Island in Corpus Christi, where the water is even flatter, and after a private lesson with Andy Brandt.

Of course, I did not cleanly foil through a wing jibe yet, and repeating today's success in choppy conditions will likely take many more practice sessions. But fun and confidence are growing, so there's an increasing danger that I'll become a wingnut, too.