I wanted to do rail rides ever since I learned windsurfing a few decades ago. Eventually, I learned to do them on longboards thanks to ABK Boardsports clinics.
Foiling has replaced longboarding on lighter wind days now. But it seems my body still wants to do rail rides:
Unfortunately, my body forgot to tell my brain in advance, so it was completely unprepared and panicked:
I can highly recommend to not try this kind of crash. I hit the water in front of the foil, and the board and foil were still moving forward. Fortunately, I foil slowly, so the foil hitting my leg did not really hurt.
Apparently, this only encouraged my body to try again (of course, also without advance notice to the brain, which would have vetoed the idea). This time, it was in the middle of a sail-first jibe try:
This clearly was over-ambitious: not only did my body try a leeside rail ride this time, which is harder than the regular rail ride - but it also went for the one-footed, one-handed version. As soon as my brain noticed what was going on, it ordered my body to bail, and the board continued on it's own:
At least this time, I fell away from the foil, so the crash was harmless. But seeing that my body apparently was up to no good, I decided to not try any more jibes that session. So the foil jibe remains elusive. But on the upside, I discovered a new way of messing the foil jibe up. Perhaps if I remember to not do rail rides on the foil, I can get a step closer to making one! It would also help to place the backfoot more to the rail, and to not let the mast escape to the outside of the turn. The mast on the outside probably caused the leeside rail to come up, and the foot placed too close to the center meant I had no leverage to push it back down. Maybe next time...
After the session, I watched Spencer and Coon foiling a bit. Both of them had foiled just a few times before, and while the both got some decent runs, at other times, their attempts looked more like attempts to tame a wild bronco. That looked awfully familiar, and made me feel a tad better (or perhaps the after-foil beach beverage was to blame for that part).
Here's a short video from after the rail ride attempts:
After a year of foiling, I still struggle with the jibes. The goal of foiling through jibes on a regular basis remains elusive. Of course, I have all kinds of great excuses. My foil board is narrow - only 22 inches (56 cm) wide. Just about every article about foil gear in the German "Surf" magazine states that wider boards are easier to jibe when foiling. But this excuse seems a bit lame when I look at my lovely wife, who foiled through jibes on a regular basis .. on her skinny 90 l freestyle board. So I won't even bore you with my other excuses, which are even lamer.
Instead, I'll share a few insights I had after watching a couple of jibe tutorial videos from Sam Ross. Here's the step jibe tutorial:
The jibe is quite similar to a jibe on slalom gear. One of the differences is that he sails clew first briefly after stepping to stabilize; that's quite common for foil jibes even among racers, but unusual on slalom gear.
Overall, Sam's technique is very similar to what Nico Prien shows in his jibe tutorial video. One thing that looked very familiar in Nico's video was the "oversteering" mistake he shows at 5:44 in the video:
This has happened in many of my jibe tries: the board just keeps carving, and the foil seems to be pushing the board into an even harder carve when the windward rail catches the water. Nico points out that "you need to actively balance the bank" - in other words, flatten out the board to stop the turn.
I started trying step jibes on the foil, but moving the feet and the rig at the same time while the board is in the air always seemed a bit too much for me. Largely based on Andy Brandt's suggestion at the ABK camp in Hyannis last year, I switched to sail-first jibes instead, where you sail out in switch stance and move the feet later. I have no problems with sail-first jibes on windsurfing gear, but on the foil, they seemed just as difficult as step jibes. So maybe the tutorial video from Sam Ross, who calls it the "strap to strap gybe", would help:
Comparing the two Sam Ross jibe videos, there's one big difference I noticed: the position of the mast during the sail flip. In the step jibe, the mast is moved to the outside of the turn:
That's the same when windsurfing. But in the sail-first foil jibe, the mast does not move to the outside - it stays perpendicular to the board:
Since the board is banking into the turn, the mast is also leaning into the turn a bit. When teaching the jibe at the ABK camp last year, Andy Brandt said we should keep the mast to the inside of the turn. I guess this is what he meant! I over-interpreted his instructions, and thought that the mast should point even further to the water - something that's hard to do if you are not oversheeting.
Interestingly, during the sail-first jibe when windsurfing, moving the mast to the outside of the turn is not a problem at all. But the foil is much more sensitive, and moving the mast to the outside when letting go with the back hand immediately changes the carve, and makes it nearly impossible to complete the jibe dry.
When thinking about the instruction videos, I was wondering why foil racers always seem to step jibe, while many early foil jibe instruction videos used the sail-first jibe instead. Both Sam's and Nico's tutorials provide a clue when they talk about slicing the mast forward: on race foils, foilers are often going faster than the wind. That makes opening up the sail impossible, since you'd just get backwinded. On the foil, that means that the foil would probably shoot up and out of the water for a spectacular crash.
The sail-first jibe requires that you are going slower than the wind, since the wind pressure from behind flips the sail. In contrast, a step jibe also works when the apparent wind is coming from the front because you are faster than the wind; you just have to make the sail flip similar to the sail flip in a helicopter tack.
Both Nico Prien and Sam Ross are on race or freerace-type foils and boards. In Sam's "How to go Faster on the Windfoil" tutorial, he reaches speeds of 26 knots. But typical speeds on freeride foils like the Slingshot Infinity 76 or 84 are much slower. My typical cruising speeds on the i84 are around 10-12 knots, so I'm going slower than the wind speed most of the time. That makes the sail-first jibe possible, and it has one big advantage for "marginally coordinated" foilers like me: I can concentrate on one thing at a time, and don't have to move the sail at the same time as I move my feet. Time to go foiling!
Nina winging in 30 mph. Picture by Eddie Deveraux.
It was windy in Kalmus yesterday, with averages in the low 30s and gusts to 40 mph:
iWindsurf meter readings for Kalmus 8/3/2020
We went in the afternoon, when the wind was nice and steady. Nina wing foiled for almost 3 hours, and reported that she may have gotten closer to the upper end of the wind range for her 4.2 m wing. It was fluttering at times, and upwind angles were a bit compromised since she could not move the wing to the side as usual - too much power!
I decided to go for a session on the "slapper", as Australian wind foilers like to call windsurf boards. But since I'm not the biggest fan of high tide slapping in Kalmus WSW voodoo chop, I went over to Egg Island for some really flat water. I tried to get a few guys to come along, but without success - Gonzalo, who had indicated interest, decided to rig down from 4.7 to 4.2 after a few trial runs, and I did not have the patience to wait for him. High tide is the best time for speed runs along the sand bar, and the tide had been dropping for a while already! Besides, he had sailed Lewis Bay on a longboard many times, so he knew the way.
I ended up having the "kiddie pool" at Egg Island entirely for myself. I'd rigged my old 5.5 m Matrix sail since it has a ton of high end, and that was a perfect choice. The wind behind the sand bar tends to be a bit lower, and the flat water also allows for larger sail sizes. How flat, you ask? Have a look:
I was working on my sail-first jibes for foiling, which are a ton of fun in flat water. I learned on reason not to let the mast get way to the outside of the turn: the sail is a lot heavier than the freestyle sail I normally use, and when whipped around by the strong wind, was too heavy to be pulled back in. That resulted in a few fun high speed crashes before I got my act halfway together. Still needs a bit of work, since my speed dropped from a 30 knot entry speed to 12 knots after the sail flip. But it was fun, anyway!
I ended up getting a 32 knot top speed on my GPS watch, which is the fastest I've ever gone on a freestyle board. The little 22 cm weedie from Maui Ultra Fins held astonishingly well, even though it's the freeride version, not the speed or slalom version.
After about 2 hours, the tide dropped low enough to expose parts of the outer sand bar that is submerged during high tide. It's oriented at a right angle to the WSW wind, so it creates a nice setup to work on alphas (500 m runs with a jibe in the middle, and the ends of the run have to be within 50 meters). For that, I reverted back to the step jibe:
I just did a few tries before heading back to Kalmus through the chop. Since the wind was still up, going back upwind was super easy. Here are the GPS tracks:
It's been a hot and windy July. I've been on the water for 19 windfoil sessions, and windsurfed four times, often when the wind picked up so I could plane on a 5.0 or 5.6 m sail.
Yesterday was a day with a mediocre forecast, which tends to make for great foil days. I started foiling when averages were around 13-14 mph, which made it quite nice with a 5.6 on the i84 foil. Here are the GPS tracks for the day:
The flat water was nice for tacks, and encouraged me to try a few sail-first jibes. I ended up with a few reminders why you should not let the sail get to the outside of the turn. I also discovered a disadvantage of the sail-first jibe on the foil: if the board gets all wobbly after letting go of the back hand, crashing safely gets much harder since only one hand remains on the boom. It took me a couple of tries to understand that. The first one was a warning which I ignored; the second one was harder to ignore, since the board tilted sideways. That put the foil exactly where I was falling. Fortunately, I have a hard head even without a hard hat, so I did not even bleed after hitting the back of my head on the foil. It killed my appetite for additional jibe tries in the same session, though.
Instead, I headed into the flat water behind the Hyannis Port pier, and pushed the foil a bit faster than I had ever foiled before. By then, the wind had picked up into the mid-20s, and it was time to head back in. The strong wind made for a very interesting ride in steep chop. And then, it got even stronger, hitting 29 mph averages and gusts in the low 30s. Waterstarts, which were difficult, one-footed, and only in gusts at the beginning had long changed to the two-footed, "keep the thing controlled at all cost!" variety, were not placing enough weight on the front foot meant I was foiling before I was even over the board. But now, I was either getting catapulted right away, or the wind just grabbed under the board and flipped it over, completely ignoring the heavy aluminum foil. Not even body-dragging with one foot on the board, my usual fail-safe when things get crazy, worked - board and foil were blown out of the water and flipped over within a couple of seconds. Eventually, I discovered that body-dragging clew first from the leeward side worked, with the added benefit of being an excellent workout. After dragging a quarter mile downwind, the wind finally let up enough so that I could waterstart again, and foil in the last bit, with a fully flagged out sail. Meanwhile, Nina, who had been wing foiling on her 4.2 the entire time, stuck around and enjoyed that the strong wind let her foil through her jibes with ease. Maybe I need to get one of these things ... but I have the suspicion it just would not work quite as well for me.
Well, an interesting session it was, and certainly a memorable one - but also a lot of fun.
I've been windsurfing for more than 30 years, although this includes several multi-year periods where I did not windsurf at all. I got really hooked again a few years ago, after getting married to my lovely windsurfing wife, and starting to take ABK clinics. ABK also introduced us to windfoiling, which then led to winging. We mainly wing and windsurf on Cape Cod, with regular trips to places all over the world.
