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On this episode, we sit down with Alex Mertens, a windsurfing and wing foiling enthusiast from the San Francisco Bay Area, to dive into his journey from elite soccer to mastering wind sports. From his early days hating windsurfing to competing on the European Freestyle Pro Tour and creating the YouTube series Secrets of the Send, Alex shares his passion for foiling, safety tips, and the vibrant Bay Area wind scene. This episode uncovers the grit, creativity, and community fueling his water sports evolution.In this episode, you'll discover: Origin Story: A soccer injury led Alex to windsurfing as physical therapy, sparking a lifelong passion. Learning Process: How video analysis and gymnastics training helped Alex master freestyle moves like Spocks and backflips. Safety Tips: The critical omega-shaped foot strap setup to prevent injuries like Lisfranc fractures while foiling or windsurfing. Bay Area Scene: Why Sherman Island's tidal river and Chrissy Field's boat wakes make the Bay a wind sports mecca. European Edge: The accessibility of windsurfing centers in Europe compared to North America's smaller scene. Creative Ventures: Alex's custom Duotone board design and plans for a video exploring the artist-athlete connection. Dream Project: A wild idea for a wing foil “Escape from Alcatraz” film, Clint Eastwood style.Check out Alex's YouTube channel at youtube.com/@AlexMerts.
In this episode, we chat with Lukas Lam, a rising wing foiling star from Austria, whose meteoric rise with Duotone has taken him to the GWA Wingfoil World Tour. From learning to wing foil to impress his girlfriend to landing backflips in months, Lukas shares his journey of passion and perseverance alongside his pro wing foiler partner. Hear about his freestyle tricks, coaching kids in Greece, and chasing big air dreams.In this episode, you'll discover:Unlikely Start: How a former ice hockey player from Hong Kong dove into wing foiling in 2022 via his girlfriend's windsurfing family.Fast Progress: Mastering tricks like frontside 360s and backflips with a gymnastics edge and relentless drive.Duotone Deal: Landing a sponsorship through a chance meeting with a kitesurfer in Austria.World Tour Path: Qualifying for Leucate, France, with video submissions for the GWA tour.Malta Training: Thriving on a rocky island with 20-knot winds and gnarly waves, training with his girlfriend.Coaching Kids: Teaching at the Duotone Pro Center and Board Academy's 10-day camps in Limnos, Greece.Big Air Goals: Aiming for 14-15 meter jumps in the Canary Islands' Big Air event, with safe landing tips.Life Off-Water: Juggling international relations studies, weight training, and Malta's nightlife.Follow Lukas on Instagram at @_lukaslam and explore the Duotone Pro Center and Board Academy at boardacademy.bg for wing foiling camps in Greece.Watch the full episode on YouTube
In this episode, we catch up with kiteboarding legend Tom Court, a UK-based pioneer whose 20-year career has shaped the sport from its wild early days to its modern mainstream appeal. From riding two-line kites in Maui to producing viral vlogs and representing Duotone, Tom shares his journey of chasing wind, creativity, and freedom across the globe. With stories of competing on the world tour, kiting with sharks in Honduras, and advocating for sustainability, this episode dives into the heart of kiteboarding's transformative power.In this episode, you'll discover:Early Days in Maui: How Tom's childhood trip to Maui in 1998 sparked his love for kiteboarding, watching pioneers like Robbie Naish and Flash Austin experiment with the first inflatable kites.Sport Evolution: The rapid progression of kiteboarding from dangerous two-line setups to a dynamic sport with freestyle, big air, and foiling disciplines, driven by a community of innovators.Vlogging Journey: Tom's shift from cinematic films like The Freeride Project to his weekly Caught in the Act vlog series, balancing spontaneous storytelling with action-packed adventures.Global Adventures: Highlights from kiting in Honduras with nurse sharks, tow-foiling through crocodile-filled mangroves, and downwinding 500km across the Western Sahara with his 67-year-old dad.Mainstream Moments: The thrill of introducing kiteboarding to UK audiences on Good Morning Britain and pushing for its recognition as a lifestyle that boosts mental and physical health.Sustainability Push: Insights into Duotone's Concept Blue initiative, using eco-friendly materials like bio-based bladders and recycled plastics to reduce kiteboarding's environmental impact.Wing Foiling Transition: Tom's love-hate journey learning wing foiling, rediscovering the joy of progression, and his thoughts on the sport's untapped potential and the rise of “para-wings.”Advice for Young Riders: Tom's wisdom for aspiring water sports athletes—embrace the learning process, prioritize fun over pressure, and stay true to what fuels your passion for longevity in the sport.Follow Tom's adventures on Instagram at @courtintheact and catch his weekly vlogs on YouTube at Tom Court Kite. Watch the full episode on YouTube
Working with Patrik D, F2, Choco, Fanatic and now the Production Manager at Duotone... we catch up to hear Dani's full story
brianturnershow.com, eastvillageradio.comMARINA SWINGERS - Little Swine - 7" (L.A.X., 1979)VAGUE FUGUE - Enya Gotti DeVito - ST EP CS (cs, Lavish Deathstyle, 2025)THE FEELIES - Forces At Work - V/A: Ork Records, New York, New York (Numero, 2015)THE SHIFTERS - Creggan Shops - 7" (It Takes Two, 2016)YOUNG HORMONES - Egg - V/A: Disk Musik: A DD. Records Compilation (Phantom Limb, 2025)MÚSICA DISPERSA - Cromo - Música Dispersa (Diábolo, 1970)MATT 'MV' VALENTINE - Wad - Grateful (BC, 2025)NOEL VON HARMONSON - Oscillator Solo - Comets On Fire/Jams (Sub Pop Promo, 2004)BRUCE RUSSELL - Sonata Number 4 for Electric Guitar - Dirtbox Sonatas: Kyoto and Elsewhere (cs, Un Poco Fría, 2025)MAMEHY - Je Mitsiko Ro Mokotse - V/A: Tsapiky! Modern Music From Southwest Madagascar (Sublime Frequencies, 2025)THE 3D'S - Sing Song (Peel Session) - The Peel & JJJ Sessions (Flying Nun, 2025)BRIAN JAMES - Neat Neat Neat (Isolated Track)HESTER VALENTINE - Lazarus - Valenta (Mimizu Izuru, 2024)Z-3 MC'S - Triple Threat - 12" (Beauty and the Beat, 1985)DOMESTIC ARAPAIMA - Live @ Venerdì Della Mannaia (26-01-2024) (Sonic Belligeranza, 2024)THE HAPPINESS BOYS - Meat Parade - 12" (Duotone, 1982)PIERRE ELITAIR - Pierrot Croissant - Gedigitaliseerde Cassettes (Ultra Eczema, 2020)VALENTINA MAGALETTI & FANNY CHIARELLO - Pink Flamingo - Gym Douce (Permanent Draft, 2025)CHUCK ROTH - Twister - watergh0st Songs (Palilalia, 2025)AK'CHAMEL - Mauled Compressed Twisted and Ruptured - Rawskulled (Akuphone, 2024)MORGEN - Begging Your Pardon (Miss Joan) - Morgen (Probe, 1969)PAPPO'S BLUES - El Brillo y el Tiempo - Vol. 3 (Music Hall, 1972)MUDHONEY - The Only Son of the Widow From Nain (live on my old WFMU show 5/12/13)ADAPAR - 4B3TXKӨ - 3: Öpik Transmission (Iluso, 2025)ORGANZA RAY - Even Uneven - Even Unever (Rayanza, 2025)IMMERSION VS. SUSS - In Between Us - Nanocluster Vol. 3 (Swim, 2024)MICHAEL SCOTT DAWSON - Summerette - Guitar, Solo (We Are Busy Bodies, 2025)YOGA NUGRAHA USMAD - Old Tress - Gurnida (Phantom Limb, 2025)
On our last of 3 episodes, Dave Westwood, Director of Sales and Marketing at ALUULA, Paula Novotna, Professional Kite and Wing Foiler and Klaas Voegt, Co-Division Manager PD & Marketing Duotone Wing & Foiling Duotone, join us to talk about: - How did the ALUULA Duotone relationship develop? - Why did Duotone start using ALUULA- Early insights into the use of the fabric (R&D, Testing)- What are the performance benefits of ALUULA- How has using this material impacted the way Duotone designs wings?- Longevity of the wings versus dacron/stiffness. Are there other benefits?- How does it feel to ride an ALUULA wing versus Dacron or other materials - Is there a Target market group, or is the material for everyone? (heavy versus light riders)- Can you feel the weight or performance differences- And Much More!Visit: https://aluula.com/ & https://www.duotonesports.comWatch entire episode on Youtube Trip Alert !! --> Want to improve your wing foiling? Join us in Bonaire, May 4-10. Details: foillifepodcast.com/bonaire-may-2025Learn more about our team!Our Links: https://linktr.ee/foillifepodcastHelp Frank get to AWSI 2025: Support us!
Zapraszamy na kolejny odcinek naszego podcastu z serii "
Systematycznie pojawiają się nowe kolekcje sprzętu, więc wracamy z serią naszego podcastu "
Yann Rifflet, PRO Windsurfer & Content Creator joins us to talk about, His entry into water sports as a competitive windsurfer and wing foiling for the first timeHis lifestyle -- living in France and Brazil, enjoying the perfect conditions for windsurfing and wing foiling with his wife.His sponsorship with Duotone and the creation of this YouTube channel. The evolution of equipment technology in wing foiling, including the development of high-modulus (HM) masts that offer better performance and lighter weight. The Parawing is a new concept that combines elements of wing foiling and downwinders. We discuss the potentials of this new sport and how we think it will evolve. Upcoming trips to Dakhla, South Morocco for the Kite and Connect event, and to Brazil for a GWA competition.The different equipment options from Duotone and the importance of making the sport accessible to riders of all levels.Visit: https://www.instagram.com/yannriffletfreerider/ This episode is brought to you by the Wing Foil Expedition in La Ventana, Baja California Sur. Are you looking for an all-inclusive wing foiling adventure this January with oceanfront accommodations? Visit https://winglifepodcast.com/wing-foil-trips to learn more. ★ Support this podcast ★
Duotone Kite Designer Sky Solbach reveals all about the exciting new Rebel D/Lab and the design process behind the kite. The Legendary Rebel being transformed into the revolutionary Rebel D/LAB Join us as we dive deep into the creation of Duotone's latest groundbreaking kite, the Rebel D/LAB, with Sky Solbach. With over 18 years of experience developing cutting-edge kites, wings, hydrofoils, and surfboards alongside watersports legend Ken Winner, Sky shares his journey and the pioneering innovations that make Duotone the leader in the kiteboarding industry. Discover Sky's extensive experience spanning nearly two decades, working on iconic products from the first Rhinos to the revolutionary Rebel D/LAB today. The Birth of the Rebel D/LAB: Unveil the story behind developing kites using the ultra-advanced material Aluula. Learn about the challenges and milestones in transforming the renowned Rebel into the Aluula-powered Rebel D/LAB. The innovation journey: Get insights on the collaboration between the Duotone R&D team and pro riders like Reno Romeu and Andrea Principi during the testing phase. The unparalleled advantages of the Rebel D/LAB for kiteboarders of all levels, not just professionals. Performance Breakthroughs and big air excellence: Understand how the Rebel D/LAB excels in big air performance, offering incredible jump heights and extended hangtime. The strength of 5 struts: Analyze the benefits of the five-strut design and its impact on stability and performance. Further Sky delves into the benefits of having three seasoned dedicated kite designers and a committed R&D team in combination with the financial capabilities that allow Duotone to experiment and maintain its leadership in innovation. Whether you're a die-hard kiteboarding fan or someone curious about the latest technological advancements in the sport and why Duotone is leading the industry, this episode offers an in-depth view of the exceptional craftsmanship and innovation driving Duotone's latest success, the Rebel D/LAB. Gain valuable insights straight from an industry veteran and elevate your understanding of what goes into making world-class kiteboarding equipment.
Mit Kite Designer und Unternehmer Ralf Grösel über seinen Wechsel von Duotone zu Harlem, F-One &…?
Von außen schaute das Kite-Labor aus als würden 22.000 Legebatterie Hühner vergeblich auf ihre Freilassung warten. Doch als sich das Rolltor öffnete, war man in einer anderen Welt. In der Welt von James Bond, voller Wissenschaftlern die in an magischen Dingen basteln. Der ehemalige DUOTONE Designer Ralf Grösel hat er sich selbstständig gemacht und ein Labor in Nordmazedonien eröffnet. Hier möchte er die Kiteindustrie NEU erfinden. Es erinnert ein bisschen an den Umsprung von Tastenhandys auf Touchscreens...oder den ersten Digital Kameras. Die großen Marktplayer NOKIA und KODAK haben das damals belächelt....
We've finally done it. Duotone is on the podcast We've given the mighty brand a little (barely any) grief in our relatively brief existance, but it was time to set the story straight - enter windsurf legend and Dutone Foiling Division Manager, Klaas Voget. Like, Comment, Subscribe, Join our OnlyFans, all that stuff.
Zapraszamy na kolejny odcinek naszego podcastu z serii "
Aaron Hadlow sits down with Colin for an exclusive interview regarding his decision to leave Duotone and join Harlem Kitesurfing. Portrait: http://portraitkite.com Flysurfer: https://flysurfer.com Woo Sports: https://woosports.com Follow us: https://www.instagram.com/colin_colin_carroll/ https://www.instagram.com/kitesurf365/
On today's emergency episode, Colin and Adrian discuss Aaron Hadlow's move from Duotone. What does Aaron bring to a new band? What does that mean for Duotone? Fantasy: https://www.fantasykite.com Check out PortraitKite: http://portraitkite.com Flysurfer: https://flysurfer.com Woo Sports: https://woosports.com Follow us: https://www.instagram.com/colin_colin_carroll/ https://www.instagram.com/kitesurf365/
Zapraszamy na kolejny odcinek naszego podcastu z serii "
More exits at Duotone more other brand rumours.. 2024 is going to be interesting!!
Wow.. didn't see this coming!! One of the most hard working and talented guys in the windsurfing world has been dropped by their sponsors!!! Lets discuss...
This is a big one! The Kernow Foil Classic will go down in all time history as one of the most significant events in foiling in the UK (and worldwide in our biased opinion). It deserved a proper debrief, especially given that Freddie wasn't there! All founding Wang Lordz committed to driving an hour or so to meet up at a central location in a pub on the A30. The first 4 way conversation we've done, and we've done it with pints, mixel grills and bloody football on in the background.... lets just say the editing was time consuming. So, October 2023 saw the UK's first surf foil competition down in Cornwall hosted by Chris Burke/Poseidon and his team, and it couldn't have gone better. Loads of riders and perfect conditions for it. In this episode event organiser Chris and event judges Liam and Rich fill Freddie in on what he missed by having to work elsewhere that weekend instead. Make sure you commit some time to listening to this one, we guarantee you'll enjoy it. And if you don't, you know the score! *!$% Duotone. Give us a 5 star rating on whatever platform you use, follow us on the socials for more bullshit - we do end up on those chatting away most days!
Manchmal sind es die kleinen Dinge, die einen großen Unterschied machen. Ein, zwei Grad Anstellwinkel zu viel oder zu wenig, ein paar Fettflecken auf dem Mast oder ein bisschen zu viel Coating an der Abrisskante und schon macht der Flügel nicht mehr das zu 100%, wofür er designed wurde. Was folgt ist nerviges heulen, plötzliches ‚stallen‘ oder Ausbrechen des Foil oder - ganz simpel - Geschwindigkeitsverlust. Wie all das ungewollter Weise zustande kommt und auch wieder behoben werden kann, besprechen wir mit Klaas Voget (Windsurf Legende, Wing Foiler der ersten Stunde, Verantwortlicher für Produktentwicklung und Marketing bei DUOTONE). Neben Tips & Tricks fürs Foil Tuning gibt Klaas spannende Einblicke in den Alltag der Produktentwicklung bei DUOTONE. Wer da nicht reinhört, ist selber Schuld.
At only 18 Italian Duotone Rider Adrea Principi has become a 2X World big air Champion and one of the biggest stars in kiteboarding right now. A product of the Duotone youngblood programme, Andrea explains how his connection to his parents and the Dutotone brand is important in his ongoing pursuit of success. Amongst many never been done before tricks, Andrea tells us about his new move ‘The Triple Contra Boardoff' landed at the DCP pro center whilst training in Mykonos. Yoga, staying focused and free from injury is also important to Andrea and his disciplined approach to keeping in shape is impressive to hear. His current gear set up / quiver makes for a great discussion point and we also find out about his aspirations for the 2023 RedBull King of the Air.
A long term member of the boards and more family, Sky Solbach tells all about his journey on becoming one of the main kite designers for Duotone. Always curious about design Sky tells us about his early modifications adding straps to surfboards with his dad and now shares his excitement of working on the Duotone Kites. Working alongside Ken Winner in Hawaii, Sky has had the perfect mentor and the ideal location in order to develop his design skills. Patri McLaughlin our Duotone team rider plays a big role in testing with Sky who explains that a good relationship between tester and designer is essential for a great product, communicating ‘feeling' is everything. Concept Blue the new program from Duotone which pushes sustainable design to the limit also makes for a great discussion!
WOO Worlds is off to a flying start! Highest Jump and Team Max Height Leaderboards are buzzing after big storms hit Europe, New Zealand, and New England. This weekend we'll see the conclusion of Team Total Height, where Team Eleveight is in a tight race with Guardians of the GalaxSea for the top spot. Duotone's Youngblood Challenge is also live this weekend, for anyone 8-18 y/o (full details in our Instagram).
Aloha friends. It's Robert Stehlik. Welcome to another episode of the Blue Planet Show where I interview foil athletes, designers, and thought leaders. I talk not just about the equipment technique and so on. but also try to find out a little bit more about their background, what inspires them and their plans for the future and so on.You can watch this show right here on YouTube or listen to it on your favorite podcast app. Just search for the Blue Planet Show. I've been trying for a long time to get the Spencer brothers to come on the show and I finally met up with them after the Molokai To Oahu race and I got them both on the show today. So really stoked about that. Finn recently won the Maui to Molokai race and the Molokai to Oahu race, even though he had a major infection on his foot. So congrats on that. And they are both amazing athletes, not just in wing foiling, but also downwind foiling, prone foiling, surfing. They do everything. Really great guys to talk to. Hope you enjoy the show. So without further ado, here are Finn and Jeffrey Spencer. Alright, Finn and Jeffrey, welcome to the Blue Planet show. It's great to have you here. I've been trying to get you for quite a while. And then I finally ran into your dad at the finish of the Molokai Toahu race. And then Jeffrey gave me your text your cell phone number. So finally getting you guys on the show. Stoked. Yeah. Thank you for having us. Yeah. So you're on Maui. I'm on Oahu. And on Maui, just, since the Molokai race and not too long ago, I was in Lahaina like right before the Maui to Molokai race and everything was fine and now it's all gone. So can you talk a little bit about the fires on Maui and what, and. If you know anyone that got affected by it totally, yeah, we we had this storm that was passing to the south of the islands and it was like, usually it's not too concerning because it didn't look like it was actually going to hit us. But what happened was it ended up generating extremely crazy strong winds, like through the whole thing, but there was no rain or anything. So it's just. Like the most windy it's ever been, especially over on the West side in Lahaina. And they're just not used to having, that crazy amount of wind. So tons of stuff was getting knocked down. And I think just in the chaos, like the fire started, it was, there was ones on both sides of the island. There was some up country up in Kula and then also in Lahaina. So it was probably pretty difficult to be able to actually like. Control everything, especially in that amount of wind. It spread extremely quickly. And yeah, it's pretty devastating, but yeah, most the entire town of Lahaina pretty much burnt. Quite a few places up country as well, but look, it wasn't as bad up there. Yeah, it's not as densely populated now, at least but yeah, I was just reading in the paper this morning that there was some like live video of the power lines getting knocked over and then just falling into the grass and just like a line of fire starting instantly. Stuff like that. And then yeah, the wind was so strong that day that it just spread super fast and I guess people didn't even have time to. To get away, it's pretty, pretty tragic. It's like probably the big, the worst fire in, in recent history. Yeah. And then, so do you know anybody that got affected by it or lost their home or? Yeah. A bunch of our friends on the West side that we know and grew up with Santa paddling and foiling and surfing and just lost everything like lost their homes and pretty much everything. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, so if yeah, and then I guess I talked to Zane yesterday who lives over on that side too and Zane Schweitzer, he, and he said like they don't need more clothes and stuff like that. Everybody's been sending clothes, but they just need like certain things like VHF radios and containers and things like that. They need it quickly. So because shipping stuff there, it takes a while, so anyway. Probably the best way to support Maui's is by making a donation. Absolutely. Yeah. The best way is like supporting the families directly. If I know personally, like the Clayton's and the flex from paddling, they're good family friends and there's tons of others. We're able to find them on there, especially social media has been a really good way for people to communicate through all this and the Maui strong foundation as well as a really good resource that they're able to take the funds and use them wherever's most needed at the current moment. That's another really good one to donate to. All right. Yeah. Best wishes for everyone on Maui. That's just a tough situation to be in for sure. But anyways, let's talk a little bit about you guys. How, where did you, have you always lived on Maui or how did you grow up? And, what, how did you get into water sports and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, since we were, We've lived here since we were babies. We were born in Canada, but basically our entire lives was here. We weren't even a couple of years old when we moved here. So yeah, it's just been my way. But interestingly, it took us a while to get super into water sports. We did a bunch of, the average like school sports growing up team ones, like basketball, volleyball, stuff like that. And then we started stand up paddling around. Probably 10 years ago, actually, at this point, but then just from there, like we always had fun bodyboarding and surfing and Santa paddling and then got into it from there. Yeah, right on. Who's older or what are your ages? I'm older and 19, 22 and 19. All right. So I guess when you started, you were. Like around, I was probably 13. We'd always play in like the shore break with boogie boards and, when we were really young, but we didn't really start like getting into it more. Until, yeah, until I was 13 and you were probably like 10, 11. Yeah. Yeah. And that was that your dad taking you down, down to the beach and putting you on a board or did you just show interest in it or like, how did that work out? We would actually, we'd go over to the west side near Lahaina, we'd go to Laniopoko and the waves there are super fleet friendly, the best place for any, anyone to learn. We just take long boards and stand up paddle boards and spend the days over there in the summer. Nice. Nice. Okay. And then how did you start getting into foiling? What was how did you first start foiling? I think it was a while ago now. I think before it all started, we talked to Alex Aguero about just trying some surf foils. Cause he was making kite foils at the time. And then it was funny, he said he had just started working with Kai Lenny on the same thing. So then we started doing that with them, just went to Sugar Co. and had the first GoFoil prototype that we tried and then just started going to the west side a bit and just getting into it and then Kai put out that video of him downwinding and that just exploded it. Yeah. Then everyone was like, Oh, I want to try this. But you were basically tried some of the very first prototypes that Alex was making him. Totally. Yeah. We just be like us in the beach down here, just going with Kai and on this old sub board with a tunnel box drilled into it and Yeah, just testing stuff. It was fun. Yeah. And then where are you mostly trying to do downwinders or more in the surf or both or what were you guys doing? Most part, it was in the surf. For the first couple of months. And then we started to try a couple of downwinders and realize that it was super fun. So then we started doing that a lot more too. Yeah. The foils quickly evolved to be good enough for downwinding. Yeah. And then in the beginning you were using GoFoils and then I guess at some point you got sponsored by Slingshot or or how did that evolve? We'd run GoFoils as well and it was great. And then we had an opportunity to. To try the slingshot stuff as well and it worked really well for us. So yeah, we, we met with Tony Ligo. She's a awesome designer and Yeah wrote with them for a while, which was amazing. Okay. And then did you have like influence in the design and things like that? Developing products or not so much. They just would send you stuff and you'd play with it. We'd help them test stuff, but we're a lot of new stuff and the wings and then all the coils and boards. And so it was super fun. Learned a lot from that for sure. We're definitely still very early on in like our experience though. So it's not like we were saying like, oh, this is. What you should do to make it good, it's like more just Feeling it out and helping as much as we could. Yeah. And then probably the equipment you were using on Maui was like smaller and you guys are lightweight too, right? It's probably like smaller than what they could sell to the average consumer, right? So yeah, and then you were some of the, I think, were you the first to do a back loop on a wing foil board or yeah. That's awesome. I remember seeing that video and I was wow, that's insane. Yeah, I just remember we were doing them surf foiling off of waves. You could come back out and hit the ramp. And I'm just thinking oh, I think this would probably work with the wing after I just had a wave session. And then right after that, I'm like, in my mind, I could see how it would work. And then after that, I went straight back out that night and tried it for a few hours. And then. The next didn't get it, but I got like close. I like fully saw the potential. And then the next day I yeah, went out and tried again and somehow made it work, which was honestly really strange. Like usually if you're trying a new trick, it takes a lot longer to learn. Like even for me, it I usually take weeks to figure some stuff out. But I think the backflip is just so it's such a natural movement on the wing of the foil with that, that it it worked out pretty well. So what are, after people say, are you doing it? Then a lot of people figure it out how to do it, but, I'm still doing it, being the first to do it is always you don't have someone else's videos you can watch to figure out how to do it. So what are the biggest challenges of doing a back flip with a wing? I think a lot of it's very mental because it's it's difficult to, see yourself actually going upside down with the foil, especially. And I think the most important thing safety wise is just to keep your feet like in the straps with the foil facing away from you. Cause as long as that's good, it's not, you're not going to connect with the foil, which is pretty much the main way to hurt yourself if you're trying it. And after, after time of doing it to the biggest. Things that I've learned to help is if you're able to do one surf foiling or even start with a backflip on a trampoline and then transition to do one surf one, so you get the feel of how you move through the air with the foil on your feet. And then, after all that, if you can transition to doing it with the wing, make sure you have enough speed, really stay strong, it's easy to get disconnected with your legs and your upper body when you're going through it. Yeah, if you're able to work on all those things, it makes it a. Much, much more possible. Nice. Okay. Those are some good pointers. What about the wing handling? It seems if you don't get the wing right on the landing, you end up getting backwinded and falling into the wing. Like, how do you deal with that? Totally, yeah. A lot of it's for a lot of wing tricks, so much of it's in the takeoff which, or how much speed you have and what direction you jump when you get in the air. So for that one, it's really about Making sure you get enough height and angling off the window a little bit, because if you turn up too much, you'll come around and that's when it'll backwind. So if you're a little more angled down away from it, when you get that height and then suck your knees in and pull it around, it'll really focus on just pulling that top hand up. It'll not catch as easily when you're coming out of it. Yeah. You guys have amazing Instagram accounts. I'm just looking through it. I'm going to actually screen share this a little bit and maybe you can tell me how far back I need to go to find that when you first started doing backflips, it's pretty close a little further, I'd say. What is this? You're wearing a plastic bag. That was a ghost costume for Halloween. But yeah, a lot of it was not easy to breathe in if you ended up in the water. I think right there. I think, yeah, with the red board on the left and this one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So let's watch this. Oh yeah. I remember what, Watching this and being blown away, and you have a really small wing too, I guess that, that helps too, right? Absolutely, if especially if you're learning, the smaller the wing, the easier it is just to maneuver. I'd fully recommend if you're beginning, if you can get a good bump or ramp of a wave to go off of, and then a small wing, it's by far the easiest way to learn. That one right there is a three meter wing. Yeah. Just having less wingspan makes it easier. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. That compact style definitely helps as well. Not like you getting a huge amount of air, but that probably helps to getting high, the higher you get, the more time you have to rotate. But then I guess there's also more risk of injury, right? Probably, yeah. It's tough because sometimes you think so, but giving yourself more time to rotate in the air, actually, it just makes it easier. That's one of the things now I always work on with, especially the backflip, is I just try and get as high as possible. And you don't actually, unless you're going off a massive ramp, you don't end up going that high, just because you have to consider up. But then also as soon as you start pulling the wing back, you, you stop going up, it you just want to give yourselves as much time as possible to come around. Okay. Is there like a, another video you would, that one, your mouth is on right now is a pretty light. This one. Yeah. I'd say this is when I've got it consistent. I'm still using a bit of ramps, still not that much height. It's still pretty early on, but this was, I was feeling more comfortable with the double. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. And then you're doing it, on the way into the beach, just cause that's your natural your natural regular foot or why is it that you're doing it on this tack? We're both regular footed. So we pretty much all our tricks going in, which is a bit of a bar for here. Cause. If we were goofy footed, we'd have way better ramps, but yeah, we try and make it work going in. It's good for surfing here since you're with the window a lot of the time, but yeah, for the wind sports, it's not as not as easy to find a good ramp. And then what about you, Finn? I guess you probably picked up the backflip pretty soon after your brother, or how long did it take you to figure it out? A while, actually. I started trying them pretty soon after, but I had never really done a backflip doing anything before. So I was doing them very weird and not going over backwards, like doing them sideways a bit. And then I went to a trampoline park and learned and then felt comfortable doing them and then went surf foiling and learned them going out off of waves. And then the next time I went, I was getting them down a lot more. Yeah. Finn was funny. His first attempts were so sketchy, which is why I say it's so important to keep the foil away from you and learn all the backflip stuff because he would get straight upside down and then just fold in half and land on top of the wing. But as soon as as soon as he figured it out on the surf foil, it was like night and day compared, for his technique compared to what it was before. I think it was later. It's so important to do this. All your backflip flips? Yeah. Yeah. I've seen, I've had friends who are trying it and it just yeah, like the board coming off their feet in the middle of the jump and there's like the foil landing on their wing and getting, trashing many wings and all that kind of stuff. And plus, yeah, it looked dangerous. What is this move? That looks nuts. But a backflip without the, without using the wing basically. Yeah, just going out and then you drift the wing and then do a flip off the wave. Wow. Yeah. So you guys are definitely on the forefront of all these tricks, but let's talk a little bit about the races. There was a lot of races over the last month. And and you guys both of you guys did really well in in these races. So let's talk first, I guess about the Maui to Molokai race. I, I was there and experienced it and just saw, I saw you, Finn like I was wing foiling too, and I saw you just disappearing on the horizon, just going it seemed like you were just going in a straight line as fast as you could locked into like a real steady, fast downwind angle. Yeah, the wind angle was pretty good. We were able to pretty much shoot straight from the start to, the Kanakakai buoy or the Kamalabouyam, the Kamalabouyam, yeah, and it was just weaving a bit downwind from there. But yeah, that first leg was pretty straight and just. Going super fast the whole time. So then, yeah, and I talked to Bobo Gallagher. He said that he didn't really see you until clo until you guys got close to Molokai. So did you see Bobo at all or after maybe 10, 15 minutes into the start? I think I did a turn and he kept going, and then I just lost sight of him for the, until around the buoy. But that whole race, I couldn't, or that whole section of the race, I couldn't really see anybody, so I had no idea where I was. And then . When I got to the booty I saw him a fair bit ahead of me and I was like, oh, shoot I gotta speed up. So then I just worked super hard and was going as fast as I can to catch up. And then we're, that gap was staying pretty similar to him ahead of me. And then I think once the wind got a bit lighter, I had a bit bigger wing and was able to pull up to him and then pull ahead to the, towards the finish. . So what size wing were you on? I was on a six meter. Yeah. And then Bobo was on like a 5'5 or something. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and you were both on the same foil. Like he showed me the duotone foil. He was using like a kite surfing, kite foil. Yeah, we were both on the Daytona race foil they have. Yeah. Daytona race. Yeah. That thing was, I think probably the foil is the most important thing for going fast. And, but of course also the wing is important for, because that's what powers you along basically. All pretty fast foil and then just a big, powerful wind. You can go as downward as possible. Yeah, and then when and you finished in 114 or something like that. Is that right? Yeah Which is amazingly fast for whatever it was 28 miles or something like that, right? Do you know what your average speed was on that run? I don't I think until the wind got lighter is probably around 28 to 30 miles an hour and then once you got lighter, it really slowed down a lot So at the end when I came towards the end, like everyone that was in my kind of around me just came to completely came off the focus, it wouldn't just completely died for a while. And then after a bit, then there was another gust and I was able to get back up on foil and fly over the line. But how was it for you guys? Did you have the wind completely die and you have to like just pump or how was it at the end? It got pretty light. I think even on the six, I was pretty underpowered and probably for Bobo on the five, five too. But we were both able to pump our way into the finish. Yeah. Yeah. So then, and you ended up finishing all I guess it was pretty close to like he was a minute or two behind you only or something like that. Yeah. So yeah. And from what I could tell is it seemed like you had more of a straight line and Bobo was trying to go more downwind on the way to Molokai. Yeah. So what's I know, like when, cause when the more downwind angle you have, the less power you have in your wing, basically. So how did you figure out your ideal angle to the wind and to the waves? And did you just go on a straight line or did you try to use the energy of the ocean or like how do you maximize your speed? It was mostly just using the winds and just trying to go as downwind as I could. And then just, Yeah. To keep enough power in the wing that I was able to go pretty fast. And then when it got lighter, I had to bear, go a bit slightly more upwind. And then, yeah, just trying to have as much power as possible. So yeah, you have to do that to keep some pressure in your wing. But do you try to weave a little bit to use the bumps or do you just go straight? Do you make any adjustments? When I, when the wind gets lighter. Then you can use the bumps a bit more, but when it's really windy, you're going a lot faster than them. So you're just cutting straight through. Okay. Or like it, you have to stay super focused when you're doing that. Cause you have to go up and down and try not to over foil or hit your board on a bump. And then. Yeah, especially when you're overtaking a bump, then it's easy to overfoil behind it, right? As you're coming down the face. What size mask were you using? I was on a 105. Okay, so pretty long mask, too. And then that, that foil, the Daytona, what's the how many square inches, do you know, like the the surface area? It's around a five. 60 square centimeters. Yeah. And it's not like a super high aspect shape, right? It's almost more like a little bit. Yeah. Like you can control and really just really locked in at high speeds. Yeah. So what do you think makes that foil so fast? I don't know. What is it that, is it a thinner profile or just like the overall, I think it's just. The mast is really slim and fast and then all the connect. It's a full one piece lower, so it's super. Sleep like the fuselage really thin and the wing connections and then the wings are really good shape and good profiles. So Just a lot of that makes it just super fast and low drag all right, and then jeffrey you did the maui to mulukai on a standard foil board, right? So yeah, so talk a little bit about how that went and and the whole experience Yeah, that was good. I same type of thing with Finn. After the start you get going for a bit and then you, it's, the bumps are, even though, it was a good day, there's just so much swell and water in the channel that you don't really see. Anyone else, like even if they have boats and everything, it's actually hard to tell where you are in relation to to everyone. So I was just coming and I had no idea where I was basically, but the run was really good. I think at the start, I had a pretty good line, but then definitely, Were you able to get up on full right away, right from the start or? Yeah, I was able to get going right away, which definitely is important in the races. You can lose quite a bit of time If you're off oil, which I figured out at the end, but about halfway, I think I went too close to the island and I would, the bumps just weren't as fast as they would have been further out. And I was worried about the wind angle being tough to fight against at the end, but it turned out to just get light. It wasn't actually hard to come in. So I think if I was, yeah, to do it again, I would have. Taking a much wider line especially through the finish where near the end, I accidentally, or I actually went too far over the reef and my wingtip came out on just a little accident as I was pumping in. And it was right before the finish where the wind was the lightest and the bumps were super, super small and I did my best to get back up on foil and got up for a second. But it was, if I had stayed further out, I would have had the energy to keep it going to stay in. But. On the inside, it was not the move. I lost tons of time there. Did you, and I was shallow. So you hit the reef or did you go around the reef? It wasn't too bad. I wasn't like all the way inside. I think the tide was pretty high when we were coming in. So I. I luckily didn't hit it. I hit it I was paddling on my stomach coming in, but it was just, once you get over that shelf, the, even the little bumps that you would have just outside of it, just aren't even there. so I just flattened out the bumps basically. Yeah. Yeah. And then you ended up finishing like in 14th place or something like that. Huh? You said 14, but and then what kind of what kind of foil were you on and board and foil? I'm just curious. Yeah, I was on a, just some prototype, a foil board we're working on. And a same thing with the front wing. It's about an 800 square centimeter size, but all the rest of the stuff is production stuff. I was using the mast and fuselage and all that. Like how long of a mass we're using on a standard flow board. I've been actually liking the shorter stuff. I've been using a 75 centimeter mast. Maybe when the conditions get really crazy, it can be nice to ride. A bit longer, so you have a bit more forgiveness just in that trimming and that height. But otherwise, yeah, the 75 is really nice. It feels like you have really good control and that's honestly one of my favorite parts about the whole duotone setup is how stiff it is. So you really feel like you have really good control the entire time when you're riding. Yeah. And then for stand up foiling, it seems like with the shorter mass, it's a little bit easier to pump up on foil too, right? And then you also have less drag from the mass, right? The shorter it is, the less drag is in the water. Cause when you're getting going, that whole mass is just sitting down in the water. So any length you're adding on is just. Pure drag when you're getting going. So that's probably a big reason. But it just helps with being a little bit more comfortable and having more control and more margin of error when you're, especially on wing foiling, I like to, I have a one or three mass and it just gives you that a little bit of extra time to react to, to like getting too high or whatever yeah, but cause when you're on a shorter mass, you really have to follow the contours of the water. Like you always have to go up and down. over every little bump versus the longer mass. Sometimes you can fly over the smaller chop without making too many adjustments, yeah, exactly. Interesting though. I like how, I think it is a little bit different in wing foiling than in standup foiling, like the, or downwind foiling, what size mast you're using. Totally. With the wing, it's nice to have that length. So you can just like, because you don't want to have to worry about going up and down. You just want to cut straight through everything. And then for downwind. Like that control you get from the shorter mass is definitely worth it. So even if you have to change your angle a bit, it's, I think it's nice. Yeah. So when you, when Jeffrey, when you wingfo, do you use the same size mass or do you use a different, or do you wingfo race at all? Or yeah, absolutely. I would use the same setup and was on, if I was doing. Yeah, interesting. Right on. And then the next day was the Molokai Holokai, and I guess only you stayed stuck around on Molokai Jeffrey. And then, yeah, so how did that next day go, the race, just on the Molokai coast? Yeah, it was great. Our our friends had a place for me to stay. So it was really easy for me over there. And it was great. There was tons of the people that live over there that were into doing the canoe race and everything. And the conditions I think were actually, yeah, it was a little lighter. And I think the the whole race was super interesting. Like we paddled way out to the Camelot buoy and which is just offshore near the the start of the run down the coast. And then we, yeah, basically started pumped up the bumps were really slow, which was, it was like kind of work to keep it going, but it was very like, they're just lined up and even it was hard to really gain a bunch of grounds. And when I started the race, the two other people who were really fast and that was Oscar Johansson and Aiden Nichols. And we all took super different lines like. Me from the day before I was thinking, okay, no matter what, I don't want to be too far in. So I went really wide into the middle of the channel and Oscar went in the middle and then Aiden went really close. And I think just the style of the bumps kept us all like really close. We were like super spread out the whole race and then we were coming into the finish and it was crazy after the whole, I forget how long it was exactly. But after that whole time, after the 10 miles or whatever it was, we were all basically in a line next to each other, like almost on the same bump. Basically. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So it became like a super hard pumping race and both goes, both those guys are super, strong and super good at pumping, especially like. Oscars of machine when it comes to that stuff. So it's very much for me. I knew I really have to focus on the technical part of it and really make sure I'm like taking the best line to each bump, making sure I save as much energy as possible. But I was still pumping as hard as I could some of the times. And just before the end, luckily, I think Oscar said he made a couple. Like bump mistakes. And then I was able to just pull ahead of them by 10 seconds before the finish. And then Oscar and Aiden were, I think it was 0. 4 seconds apart across the finish, which is extremely close for a race, right? Over 10 miles. Yeah. Yeah. It's unheard of. I think it was just because the conditions out there and the type of bumps were. They were so lined up. It was so hard to actually make distance on anyone, even though like we all took completely different lines. So it really doesn't make sense that we were right next to each other at the finish. Yeah. Yeah. That's just how it went, which it was pretty fun. It was like, I, it was the hardest I worked. I think in most of the races, just because they were right next to me, I just had something to really push for and really like really focus on to that was the most I focused in, or the most I had to focus in any of the race scenarios. From the past couple of weeks. Yeah. And then that, that just, that length of that race, it's almost, yeah, it's more like you can really go all out the whole way. It's not like you have to conserve for the last part, like on the mobile or whatever. It's really tough on the longer ones to know how much energy you should use at the start. Especially for M2O, that's the scariest part, is that basically, flat water pop up at the start and just thinking okay, if I use this much energy here, how much am I going to have for the end? And so for the Molokai Holokai race, it was like much more of a sprint the whole way. So yeah, it was a full grind. But yeah, it was really fun. Yeah. So yeah, so the Molokai or Maui to Molokai race and the Molokai Holokai, that was like two weeks before the M2O race. And then I think the following weekend there was the gorge challenge in Hood River and also the paddling mua on Maui, right? Finn, which one did you do again? I went to the gorge and then Jeffrey stayed here for Paddleamua. Okay, so how did the gorge, how was the gorge challenge? It was super fun. It was decently windy, a lot lighter than it usually is in the gorge, and then they ran both the wing downwind race and the sub downwind race on the same day, but they were, luckily this year they spaced it out by three or four hours, so we had time to do that one and then go back up to the second. So which ones did you compete in? Which races? I did the wing foiling downwind and course race, and then the sub downwind race. Sub foiling, right? Okay. So how, and then, yeah. So tell us a little bit about how those races went. So the first day they did all the downwinders, so at, in around 10 in the morning, they started the wing one and it was pretty light. We were all, everybody was just on their biggest wings, pretty much. I had a 6'5 and the, everyone started super close. And then these two guys, Johnny Heineken and Joey Pasquale, who are really good kite racers or kite foil racers, and now wing foil racers, they pulled a bit ahead. And then. I was trying, I was keeping with them a lot and then just slowly falling back and then just stayed like that the whole way down and just came in third in that one, maybe 15, 20 seconds behind Johnny and first and then 10 seconds. Wow. So that was a super close race too. Then how, what distance is that? Like how long is it? I think that one's not eight or nine miles. And what was the time on that one? 24. And you're going against the river current too, right? So that, that makes it a little bit slower then. Yeah. If you, yeah. Yeah. When it was super light. Yeah. Yeah, so I guess obviously if the wind was stronger, the how it is a lot of times, then you guys would have had faster times, right? And then in terms of the foils, we're using the same one that used in the M2M or? For the wing race, I was using that same Daytona foil. Yeah, so I guess depending on the wind conditions, you just use a bigger hand wing, but not necessarily a bigger foil. Yeah, usually. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's also a 6'5 unit D Lab for that one. Do you know what what kind of wing Johnny Heineken was on foil? I think both him and Joey were on the Mike's Lab foils. Do you know what size by any chance? No. I think the, either the 540 or the 600. Yeah, and those are super fast foils as well. But interesting. Okay. And then how did the Paddle in Mura go? You stayed on Maui, Jeffrey, right? And then how was that? Paddle in Mura was awesome. That event is a fundraiser to support kids with special was. I think 300 people registered to do the race and they had to close registration because it was so full, which was just, yeah, it was so incredible to see the race launches from legal gulch. So having everyone down in there, like the whole. Canoe paddling community. And then all the oil community as well was like, just so incredible to see, and yeah, the race itself was really fun. The conditions were good. We had all had a nice, good start out in the wind line and went down to Kanawha and it was, yeah, pretty good race. I was feeling good. The other guys, there's some other really fast guys. I think James. Casey Andrew, I was where they got a bit ahead of me through the middle of the race. And then I was coming in next to Kai. And then I did the same thing that I did in a M2M where my wingtip came out and I fell and I had to grind back up to get up. And then Oscar came in and passed me just before the finish. And then I was able to like, run past him on the beach to the end. Cause it was like this crazy beach run finish, but it was a super fun race. And also I will mention Edo ended up like just coming out just to be part of it. He wasn't even able to get in just because it was so full, but he was faster than anyone, which was pretty cool to see. Oh, so Edo actually won the race, but he wasn't officially registered kind of thing. Interesting. That was pretty cool. And then, those guys are the ones who've finished in the front on the M2O race as well. Yeah. So that's interesting. But yeah, so let's talk about that. The big one, the paddle board world championships, the Molokai Toahu race that one you guys both did. And so how did that go for you guys? That was good. I think it went very well for me. Yeah, it was super fun. Except for one thing. Yeah, we had good wind and then pretty good bumps the whole way, but it was a bummer for me. A couple days before I started getting this weird pain in my heel and was having a hard time walking. And then the day or two before the race, it just, this weird spot started coming in. And then up until the morning of the race, it just kept growing until a big blister on my heel. And I still just couldn't really put any weight on it. And then did the race. Luckily I had footstraps on my board, so I was able to. Kind of not put much pressure on it and use my toes on my foot a bit more. And then when I got to the finish, I just had to go to the doctor and they like drained it all out and then had to cut all the skin away. And yeah, I saw you briefly at the finish and you were limping and I was like, what's going on? And you showed me, and it's it was almost like a tennis ball size blister on your heel. It was huge, ugly looking too. It's yeah, the night before we were looking at it, wondering should we try and drain it and bandage up now or we ended up just yeah, I talked to Scott Trudeau, and who's Kai's, Scott Sanchez, sorry, who's Kai Lenny's trainer and he just said that I should probably wait to drain it because I don't want getting infected, which was good advice because I think if we had tried to pop it, it might not have been able to race. And then, but luckily made it and then just had to go to the doctor right after. Yeah. And then they basically just cut off all the skin and just cleaned up the infection kind of thing, or did they, do they know what kind of infection or what would happen? No, not really. I think it just, I got like a weird bruise inside and then it was bleeding a little maybe, and then got infected. So are you still healing up from that? Or is that all done now? Yeah, still healing, I think. Still on crutches right now trying not to put much weight on it. And then I think it's maybe another couple weeks before I can do stuff again. And you're taking like some, you probably had to go through some heavy antibiotics and stuff? I had to go through a week after. Yeah. And yeah, wow. But yeah, it was the first time they had the wing flow division at the at the Molokai Molokai Tuawa race. So I always get those mixed up, but anyway so it's cool that you were able to win that one. And it was a really good battle with Bobo and then Aiden Nicholas. Yeah. Most of the whole way, I think. Did you see them? Did you see them going across? Or I know that you guys were all pretty close, but yeah how was that? Yeah, we all started really close and we're pretty much on the same line, all in a pretty tight pack going towards Molokai. And then once the wind got a bit lighter, I think I had a bit more power in my wing and I was able to just drop a bit below them further downwind and pull ahead. And then. Once we got a lot closer to Oahu and further up the coast and we had to start weaving downwind, then I think I really pulled ahead a lot just because I had more power and was able to ride the bumps a bit more when it got really light. And then I think. But before that we were all super close. Yeah, and that's something to mention too that I mean I guess at the start the wind was actually pretty decent but then in the middle of the channel it got really light in some spots and then and it didn't really get seemed like it maybe got a little bit windier again towards the end towards Oahu, but And then once you got around the corner, then it was light again, right? Did you get any lulls coming in towards the finish or? I think I came about as close to coming down as I could have, and then just got another puff of wind, as I was about to come down and kept going, but it was, yeah, it was close coming around the point where there's this big dead zone of wind before you got the wind coming from Hawaii. And then I guess Bobo is a natural goofy footer, which is helps in the Molokai race because you're going in that stance most of the way. So for you, do you feel like you can go faster in your regular stance than in your in when you switch feet in the goofy foot stance or how do you, it's pretty similar right now. And then I will, I need to spend more time going goofy though, cause I think it would be faster, but. With my foot to that race I, it was like, he was my back foot. So I didn't have to put as much weight on it. I had to use that as my front foot. It would have felt a lot worse, but yeah, both, both Bobo and Aiden were goofy footed. So on the. The kind of first reach over to a Wahoo, I think it was a lot more comfortable for them. And then Aiden is from New Zealand, right? And he's on a, he was on the Armstrong foil, right? Yeah. What kind of foil he was on or what size and I think he just had a prototype one. He said it was around 470. Oh, so even smaller than yours, huh? A fair bit smaller than ours, which I think it helped him when it was windier. And then when the wind got lighter, he was just having a hard time going as downwind. So that's another thing to to mention too, like basically on a really small foil. Yeah. Like sometimes you can't get the same downwind angle because yeah, it starts dropping off foil. So you need a little bit more pressure in your wing. Yeah. So it's always like a gamble a little bit. If you are too small. It helps going faster, but then you're also taking a risk at when the wind gets lighter. So yeah, for sure. Cause that's what happened was at the start he was super fast and actually pulling ahead a bit when it was windier. And then once he got lighter, I caught up a lot to him and then was just able to go more downwind and the same speed towards the finish, just put a big gap on him because it was really light. And I was able to go more downwind. And then what handling were you on? It was the duotone. I was on the duotone unit D lab six meter, which I think I would've preferred to have a six five, but it's so hard to tell what the wind is doing. Apart from, do you mind sharing what your weight, your body weight? I think like one 40 to one 45. Okay. So yeah, so six meters, pretty big for you, for your body weight. And what about your board size? What's, what were the dimensions of the board you were using? Four, four, 35 liter sky free board or sky. It's a pretty small board, like basically a sink sinker, right? So it's nice for the weighing down one to just use something that. Cause you're using such a big wing. You don't really need a ton of board to get you going. And then you want something that once you're up is just really out of the way, so you're not catching it on other bumps. And there's a lot of moments there. I feel like they make it a lot easier to control the foil at high speeds. And then, yeah, you're not really too worried about it catching. And you didn't fall at all during the whole way across or did you have any, right at the start, maybe a minute or two in, I was. I think I just hit a weird warble and then the nose started going down and I tried to put weight on my back foot and put it right on my heel where it really hurt and then just. Stuff that knows I've been flying and then luckily God pretty fast, like 10, 15 seconds and was going again. Oh, good. Yeah. That's I always like to use a little bit longer and board higher volume board for racing, because yeah if you do fall or come off and it's light, then it just makes it so much easier to get back on foil for like course racing and then if the wind's lighter, that's definitely the way to go. Cause then it's the worst when you're just stuck down in the water and everyone's passing you and. Yeah, I can't get going again now. All right. Jeffrey, talk about your experience at the Mali to Molokaris. I heard from A lot of stand up foilers that the start was tough. And then all the wing full escort boats went across or, made wakes and chop and world up the water and stuff like that. So yeah, talk a little bit about how the start was and then, yeah, how the whole channel crossing went for you. Totally. Yeah. The start of the race is always difficult since you start just below the island. Time to. Generate as big as they'll be in the middle of the channel yet. And the wind at your back definitely helps. It's, it makes it like much easier than a completely flat water pop up. But the hardest part is you're able to grind up and get going. And that's something I practice a lot, especially like in flat water stuff, but just staying up for that time until you actually get into the bumps that you're able to relax and regain some energy is definitely the difficult part. So my focus on the start was just getting up, getting going and then keeping my heart rate as low as possible and trying to ride as efficiently as possible to not. Burn so much energy. So about how long did it take the pumping in the beginning where you just couldn't even rest at all, like until you reach some bumps where you could just take a little breather, you can take like tiny rest. Cause there was like a little bit of motion, especially like with all the boats going around. Some of it was bad. Some of it, you had to pump through, but then some of it, you could use to, to ride a little bit, I ended up. On the south side of the line at the start. So the boats actually cut across me really quickly, which was bad because it was right at the start and I hadn't gotten on a glide yet. But then I got to the other side of this boat wake and got a tiny bit of rest, which actually might've helped me a little bit. It didn't last very long. It was probably a few minutes before any good rest and then several more until you were like. You could actually ride a bump for a bit. Yeah. Yeah. But my friend Eli was saying he had a couple times where boats went like right in front of him and I think that's something that they need to educate the escort captains on that when we just can't go through a boat wake when it's all turned up. It's not, we just, the foil doesn't work in that, yeah, it makes it super difficult to divide when those currents are moving in the water off the prop. Yeah, it's definitely tough. I'm sure next year we'll have it all figured out, because... It's tough starting the wing and the sub at the exact same time as well. Yeah, there's... Yeah. I guess there's talk of doing the foiling on a different day than the paddling. What do you think of that? Do you think that would be a good way to do it? Yeah, I think that could be awesome. And I'm sure even if they do that, there'll be separate starts for the wing and foil, or maybe the boats will start further out for the wing since they have to like... If they let, if the wingboats let the going to catch up with how fast the wings are going, especially like this year was pretty light winds and which is easier for the boats to drive in and makes the rider slower. But if it's strong, it's going to be even more difficult. So I think I think a separate day in general could be awesome. It would. I think give them more customizability for the race course and just start further on the wind. And then there's maybe talk of finishing down at like Waikiki area. So you have bumps all the way to the finish. And then it's still a cool, like finishing the run that all the guys do over there. And I think it could be nice for like their Just managing everyone in the water. It won't be so many people on one day which is always good for safety as well. Yeah. And then, we were talking about do we really, does every foiler really need an escort boat? Cause it's not like you have to switch out hydration packs or whatever. It's, usually. You don't have that much interaction with your boat. It's for safety, but everyone also had the satellite tracker and whatever. So if they had enough safety boats, maybe not every foiler needs to have their own escort boat. I feel like that's overkill. What do you think about that? I don't think any of the foilers or especially the ones that were going fast had any interaction at all with their boats unless something went wrong, like you said. And I heard that a couple of spoilers, the boats didn't even find them, like they basically went across the whole channel without their escort boat. Oh man. Yeah, I think there were a couple of guys that they didn't find them until they were coming in at the finish. That's crazy. It's tough with so many people out there. Yeah. Yeah. And then you said you... Yeah, pretty good positioning at the end, like you were like around fifth place or something like that coming towards the China walls, Portlock, and then what happened like that. That last part is always so challenging. So how did that go for you? Yeah, I was coming in and I was like, I'd saved enough energy coming into the end that I'm like, okay, I want to save a good amount for the finish here because you always know how tough it is, especially when the swell is small, you're just going to have to pump quite a bit. And I tried coming in. I ended up just on the back of a swell along the wall where the wave breaks. I'm like, okay, I'm not going to make it over this thing. I should just try and pull off, catch another wave. And then when I tried to pull off on the one behind me, it just wasn't breaking. So I ended up going over to the other boil next to it and did catch a wave. And then, but it was too big and I fell on it. And just, yeah, just messed around, wasted tons of time doing it. Was it, sorry, this was at China Walls or further down? China Walls, okay. Yeah, right after I finished, me and my mom and dad went back out on our boat and then was just watching him come in. And, oh, it was such a bummer because he was doing so well and like up with, like up ahead of Kai and Mateo, I think. Mateo was like next to me coming in. Yeah, I think he was running like fourth or fifth. Was just in between two waves coming around, like right at China wall and then came down and then there, there just weren't many ways to catch. So it was, yeah, it was a moment. Yeah. There wasn't that much energy. There wasn't many waves coming through that day. And then and then where did you just paddle straight towards the finish from there? Or what was your strategy after that? Were you trying to catch another bump or were you prone paddling the whole way? Or what, how did it go after that? I decided to wait and catch a bump just because I, there was enough swell that I figured something would come and I did get, I got one first one and then just couldn't hold on to it when I first caught it. And that would have been like good. I wouldn't have lost that much time if I got on that one, but then I had to wait for another one, got on that. And I think it might have actually been faster if I just paddled in, but. I guess I saved a little bit of energy and then I ended up catching another wave at the next reef inside and pumping as far as I could on that. And then, yeah, just paddling all the way in. Yeah. And then just prone paddling or did you paddle on standing up or both? I prone paddled most of the way. I know a bunch of people were actually like doing the knee paddle thing which might've been faster, but I don't know if it was. For me personally, I felt like I could grind pretty well laying down. And then once I got close to the finish where it wasn't as windy, I stood up and paddled in. Yeah, because standing up or kneeling also has more you have more surface area and it's a really strong offshore wind there. So yeah, it's but yeah, it's funny how that the last part is a little bit anticlimactic where it turns into a paddle race, right? But yeah, it's definitely challenging. A lot. Yeah, a lot can change in that last, not even a mile, really, I think even for first place, I think Oscar was actually the first one to the point. And then James was a little behind and even came down, but luckily got back up on a wave just at China wall and then was able to pump like the connection was really good. And he was he's really good at pumping as well. So he's able to like pump further in. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think he caught a wave further in. He like, he pumped out to like pillars. Yeah, and then caught a wave there and then was able to connect it all the way over the reef and into the channel. So that's how you want it. So yeah. Cool. Yeah. So that so that was a bunch of exciting races and in a couple of weeks. Yeah. And what's next? Are did you guys know we're doing a wing full race here on Oahu on August 26th? That's like the, we're calling it the Hawaii wing full state championship. So I don't know if you guys can come to that, but that would be. Another somewhere else plan, but if not, yeah, we're certainly considering it because that could be super fun. You should come over for that Yeah, that'd be cool to have you guys But any do you have any other races planned or doing other competition stuff currently? I think you were considering going. Yeah, there's a kind of wing wave event in Morocco that I think I'm gonna go do and then Yeah, after that, not much. Yeah, otherwise we're considering other downwind races if they happen, but yeah, we'll see what comes. Yeah, right on. When is that race in, or the wave event in Morocco, when is that? I think it's end of September. Okay. So if you could design your own competition what would you include? Would it be like racing and freestyle or wave riding or yeah. What would, or does it, would it combine different? Like standup foiling and wing foiling, or what would you like what would be like your ideal race? If you could pick and choose. Everything would be pretty fun. Definitely a downwind subfoil section and then maybe downwind wing and then maybe some surf foiling and wing freestyle wing and waves. Just everything would be super cool. So like almost like four different division four different competitions and then have a combined score for every, everything. That would be cool. Yeah. Thanks. I'd be crazy. Yeah, that'd be super fun. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We're thinking about maybe trying to put something like that together for Oahu. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about, about your equipment. So after you, after your sponsorship with Slingshot Energy you're both writing for Duotone Fanatic now, or yeah. So how did that come about and how's that going? We were just talking to those guys and it. It ended up working out really well because their design team is based on MAUI, which makes it really easy for us to work with them for testing and designing and everything like that. It's really nice to be able to like, meet with people and actually go and ride together sky Solbeck, who's done a lot of the wing boards, and then Ken Winter, who does all the wings, pretty much. They live super close to us, so it makes it really easy. And yeah, it's been awesome working with them on everything. Yeah. And I interviewed Ken and Alan Cadiz and I guess they, they go together on like upwind and downwind to test the wings and see which wing is faster going upwind, which wing is faster going downwind and things like that. Do you guys go out with them too, or do you, are you part of that kind of the testing crew for the wings? Absolutely. We do a bit of that with them. And then I think a lot of reason why we came in was to test the wings for kind of freestyle and jumping too. Because I guess they don't do that a lot. Yeah. Yeah, they don't like I know I don't get this doesn't jump at all that's and I think that's pretty smart because yeah for me too like I like to jump but it seems like I always get hurt when I jump that's how I end up getting hurt so I try to avoid it too lately but Yeah. So what have you guys had any serious injuries? I would, I guess that the infection doesn't really count as a foiling injury, but like what kind of injuries have you had from foiling or water sports? I've had a couple pretty bad, like knee injuries. One a couple of years ago, we were towing and then. I like fell with one of my feet in the straps and got a little rolled and just twisted my knee super weird. I think I'm, I think I strained my MCL. So that was, I was out of the water for two or three months. And then another time, I think it was the first time I was trying front flips winging. I just landed one super weird and tweaked my knee again. And then was out the water for another couple months after that. So actually the front flip the forward loop. If we can't, let's is there like a good video that you can maybe talk about that a little bit? Jeffrey will have a lot more video. I think you posted the one where you hurt yourself. Oh, yeah, I think yeah, it shouldn't be too far down. Maybe Pass this a little further Did you post it? Yeah. Okay. I think yeah the one in the center at the bottom. No, yeah this one Oh, yeah, that's the one I heard myself on. Okay first time trying. Oh, that was your first attempt Yeah. Oh, yeah. It looks like a kind of a rough landing. So what happened, your knees got discontinued, got tweaked forward or something like that? My front knee, I think I just jammed it super hard into the board and then just tweaked it weird. Okay. So that's what, that's, yeah, I guess for somebody trying it, they don't want to visualize it where you hurt yourself, right? So let's I. Okay. So do you have a one that you can, is this a forward loop? I think you should go to Jeffrey's page. He's got a lot. Yeah, tell us which one was a good video that you, where you can talk about the doing. Probably. Yeah. A little up. Oh, wait. Yeah. Back a little. The one at the bottom of the center. That one's actually, yeah, that one's good. This one? Yep. I think the one before might be the first one I posted. Okay. And it was, I don't think like when I was doing this one, I don't think anyone was doing it this style. Like a lot of guys we're doing very like forward loop style ones which were good, but that's when you get like those super hard landings, which can be really tough on the knees and on it. Like when I was first trying this, I didn't actually like. The rotation is much harder for landing than the backflip, because when you come around the backflip, the board's moving forward, so it's very easy to plane out and get right back on foil. But with the forward, you really have to like, slow yourself down in the air so you have a soft landing. So I was pretty happy when this kind of all worked and it all made sense. I actually to learn this one, I wasn't completely blind. Wyatt Miller, who's this really good wind surfer was doing basically forwards on a wing. And I like watched his videos and saw his body movement and saw what like I could adjust a little bit. And yeah, then it all worked out, which was nice. Did you guys ever windsurf? Or before, before starting wing foiling? I can, but I Not a single Not like a single jump windsurfing Is that like how you tuck in on this one it looks A lot like windsurfing like a forward forward loop and wing foiling Like that tucked in Yeah, totally. I'd say the biggest difference is I'm looking like under my right shoulder instead of back up and over it. But they're very similar for sure. Yeah. So yeah. So give us some pointers on or is there another video we can play here? Yeah, near the top there should be some good ones. Okay. Let's look further up. At the very top, I've been posting lots of downward stuff. That one on the right, right there. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. So there's, oh yeah, that's a high one. Oh, over rotated. Yeah. So talk, give us some pointers on how to do this move. Totally. Yeah. So the biggest thing I look for is a decent gust. And that's like for the day you want to make sure when you're in the air, you're not going to hit a hole in the wind and lose power. Cause that's The sketchiest thing and the sketchiest thing is like committing to that forward rotation, right? So as long as you get up and have the power I find it's very consistent to get around. And yeah, once you get over, it's not it doesn't feel dangerous anymore. Like you can land on your stomach or back even, but the foil under you or to the side of you and it's fine. So yeah, I go, I focus on finding a decent gust. Try and get a good amount of height. It's the same as the backflip, where if you give yourself a little more time to come around, you're generally going to have it's generally going to be easier to actually make it. And then the biggest thing is I, so I jumped, get in the air, like a, just a big straighter. But then as I'm coming up, I tuck my legs up under me and keep the board pretty like flat. And then I wouldn't say flat, but like foil facing down. And then once you're at the apex, it's really all about pointing the nose of the wing, just straight down and holding your whole body, like compact and together and strong and then obviously coming out of it, once you feel like you're halfway through the rotation, then you start to extend your legs, trying to reach out and feel for the water on your landing because with front flips you're blind when you're coming in. Like you don't have the, when you're doing a back flip, you can. Look up and you actually get to see how far you are from the water when you're coming into touch. But on front flips, it's like mostly all about feel. So the more you can reach your legs out and feel that water, the like easier time you're going to have. Absorbing the impact of the landing. So I guess, yeah, like for tricks in general it's always good to use like the smallest wing possible handling possible, right? It seems having a smaller wing but at the, it's obviously you don't want to be overpowered and stuff, but you're saying like, yeah, use it basically use a small wing, wait for a good gust. And then. But yeah, I guess this is saying it's you don't want to be like probably overpowered with a wing that's going to be too big or whatever. And yeah, yeah, the bigger wings just make it more like you more technical, I'd say, like your technique has to be a little more on point because otherwise it'll pull you or throw you in a weird direction that you weren't expecting. And with the smaller wings, you just get a bit more of that control which definitely makes it easier to learn. Okay. Cool. Yeah, and then I guess, and also you don't really have that issue where you get back winded, like in the back loop, like if you get the wing in the wrong position, it's not like you're going to get back winded or whatever, but what are some of the potential mistakes or things to avoid when you're doing it? Yeah. It's a funny thing. Cause a lot of. A lot of people that do front flips are they do end up shutting the power off and going much more like over the front and then you can have points where it can potentially backwing but I like to try and keep the power in it just so I don't have that problem. But yeah, the definite, what are the things that I'd say people struggle with the most? I think a big thing is just keeping your legs really connected to your upper body because a lot of times, especially when I was learning them, I would go with the wing and then just leave my legs and the board a bit behind and then just get stretched out during the rotation. Yeah, it's really easy to leave the board and foil behind because there's quite a bit of even though the stuff is super high performance and super lightweight, there still is like volume and weight with everything that's on your feet there. So being like focusing on, you get that jump and you're focusing on the height, really just sucking your feet into your or just your knees up and your knees to your chest basically. And it's not even that much. It's just enough so that you have a good connection. Finn was saying and accusing it all tucked in a little bit, keeping your legs close to your body. The other thing I do is same with backflips. I make sure to not turn too much up into the wind when I'm doing it. And I think that very, like that allows me to keep the power in the wing a lot easier. And it really makes it so that when you're up in the air and you go to point the wing down, that it really like. throws you around and gives you that rotation because it's easy to come up and Force yourself over, but it doesn't throw you around the same way that it does when you're able to turn off the wind a little bit and really open up that wing to the wind and have it throw you around. Yeah, but it seems like also like you always pop up and try to get some height before you throw yourself forward, right? Like you don't want to just instantly throw yourself forward as soon as you come off the water, right? Totally. Especially for front flips, it's a lot easier to get a high jump than for back flips. Because of the way you're holding the wing and the rotation of it. So I always like focus, I jump and then pause for a second and think okay, I want to keep going up here. And then when I feel that I'm high enough for the rotation, then I'll commit to the point in the window and talking and going for it. Yeah. So how about some tips for landing? Not just and when you're doing flips, but just in general, what's, what are some tips for make sticking a landing and making the landing. Totally. Yeah. And in general, foiling is actually really nice for landing because you get. Yeah, the front wing and tail wing extended off that mass. So you get like a nice kind of cushion when you're coming in, as opposed to just straight windsurfing, you land so much harder without the foil. Breaking your fall on the water for basically any foil trick. The most important thing is to reach out as you're coming in and you don't want to reach out to the point where you're overextending your knees because then you could hurt them in another way, but you want to reach out enough just so you get elongated when you're coming in. And then as soon as you feel that water coming up, then you want to start compressing and compress as much as you can coming in, using the wing to support your weight as much as pos
Based in Hawaii, Ken Winner shares his story from being a champion athlete in the windsurfing hall of fame to transitioning to become an innovative designer for windsurfing, kitesurfing and wing foiling. We discover what drove him to become a designer from his interests as a small child all the way to his new found passion for Wing Foiling. Our conversation leads us to talk about the team that Ken works with and his roles with Duotone. We also learn which products that Ken is responsible for and how new materials and technologies have helped Duotone products develop even further.
Liam Whaley, Duotone international team rider, vice big air world champion, vlogger, kite school owner, porsche ambassador and recent winner of the LOTR kiteboarding event. Liam shares with us his jubilation over winning the first GKA big air event of the year in France and how his quest of being world champion has gotten off to a great start. We talk about the impact that the D-LAB kites are having on the sport and how he finds balance juggling a packed schedule in life. Tarifa, the European mecca for windsports is Liam's home and he explains how that has affected his career. From managing his own kiteschool, working with Porsche, training and producing a very successful vlog, Liam shares his methods for staying in control.
Matchu Lopes is on the Duotone team since a very young age, he grew up with the brand, and played an important role in growing the brand in his special way. He's on the tour since many years, been World Champion 2016 and had to train hard to stay on top of the big air game, but finally again become World Champion in 2022. Besides the competition scene, Matchu is a major factor at photo shootings, at sales and demo tours and as daily ambassador of the sport. Get to know Matchu even better, learn about some ups and downs as an athlete and about the feeling being addicted to riding barrels!!
We catch up with Sander Reneman from Twofiftyk to talk about how kiting for him is his escape from the crazy and incredible schedule he has with all the current events.
Zapraszamy na gaduszki sprzętowe z Markiem Rawickim i Norbertem „Beretem” o kolekcji Duotone 2023. Duotone to jedna z największych marek kite na świecie, która od 2000 roku wprowadza innowacyjne zmiany do swoich produktów. Kolekcja sprzętu 2023 to mocno odświeżona gama desek Twin tip, nowe bary oraz kolejne nowe modele latawców D/Lab. Chcesz poznać więcej szczegółów? Zapraszamy do słuchania lub oglądania. Z tej gaduszki dowiecie się między innymi o: - początkach najstarszej dystrybucji w Polsce, - nowych latawcach D/Lab, - nowej kolekcji Desek Twin Tip, - całkowicie przeprojektowanym Trust Barze, - nowej zrywce w barach Duotone Iron Heart VI - różnicach pomiędzy serią Original, SLS oraz D/Lab, - Programie True Service, Maciej Grzęda - manager Kite.pl, Instruktor Wykładowca Polskiego Związku Kiteboardingu, specjalista od sprzętu kitesurfingowego. Od 2020 roku prowadzi serię rozmów "Gaduszki sprzętowe", gdzie spotyka się z przedstawicielami różnych marek i rozmawia z nimi o bieżących i nadchodzących kolekcjach sprzętu i ich ciekawostkach.
Kites schweißen statt nähen?!? In Europa? Und was hat das mit Patagonia zu tun? Ralf Groesel Design denkt die Kite Industrie NEU. Als Kite Designer von DUOTONE hat er 18 Jahre lang zugeschaut was man besser machen kann und schreitet jetzt zur Tat. Mit diesem Wissen hat er eine eigene Produktionsstätte und Entwicklungsbüro in Nord Mazedonien aufgebaut wo er all seine Ideen und Träume verwirklicht: BRAINCHILDWas das für die Kites der Zukunft bedeutet erfährt du in diesem Video.P.S.: Follower sind ja die neue Währung....darum kaufen kann man sich halt nix aber wir freuen uns einfach darüber und geben am Schulhof damit anABONNIERE unseren Kanal und schicke ein Serotonin Gewitter durch unseren Gehirn!
From his early days as a successful kiteboarding competitor competing all around the world, Tom explains how his career has evolved into many other areas. Film production, vlogging, modeling for the likes of Armani and spending time with the next generation of future kiteboarding professionals is also important to him. We discuss how staying true to your passion can guide you through life and how it must remain the epicenter of all the projects you involve yourself in if they are to be successful.
Ralf Grösel ist der Vater der polarisierenden DLAB Serie von Duotone. Warum sie so teuer sind, was sie zu den besten Kites am Markt machen soll und ob er bei Duotone bleibt oder sich ganz seinem neuen Projekt in Nord Mazedonien widmet. Das und vieles mehr erfährst du in diesem LakeUnited Tech-Talk. Viel Spaß!Was dich auch interessieren könnte: Der DUOTONE CAP vs. Flysurfer SOUL Testvergleich https://www.lakeunited.com/blog/duotone-capa-vs-flysurfer-soul
Jerome communicates his passion for the Palau Project whilst maintaining a life as an international athlete on the duotone kiteboarding and wing foiling team.
Pippa shares her journey to becoming a professional and what the job involves being a professional kitesurfer Able to perform at the highest level in the freestyle discipline, Pippa explains how her equipment set up differs when approaching Big Air which she has dominated on the BAKL tour the last years. Advice is offered to young aspiring riders and we here about the riders that have inspired Pippa in the sport. We also discuss positive mindset which is aiding her recovery from a knee injury, how it feels to be on the Duotone international team and her Pippas dreams of competing in the RedBull Queen of the Air.
Mon, 02 Jan 2023 09:10:52 +0000 https://insidetheworldofduotone.podigee.io/20-new-episode 47ad09481c6320b4bf9375d7e256da85 Just recently the Rebel SLS Porsche edition has been launched, Flo Panther, Creative Director of Duotone will tell us more about it, from idea to final product. https://www.porsche.com https://www.duotonesports.com 20 full Just recently the Rebel SLS Porsche edition has been launched, Flo Panther, Creative Director of Duotone will tell us more about it, from idea to final product. no Porsche,Duotone,Rebel SLS,art,art director,Florian Panther Duotone Sports
Ken Winner, wing foil designer extraordinaire talks about his background as a pro windsurfer and how he became a designer at Duotone and developed the first inflatable handheld wing for foiling. At first there was little interest in his invention but once a few people tried it, the sport of wing foiling really took off. Transcript of the interview: Aloha friends. It's Robert Stehlik. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the Blue Planet Show, where I interview foil athletes, designers, and thought leaders. You can watch this show right here on YouTube or listen to it on your favorite podcast app. Today's interview is with Ken Winter, the designer at Duotone wing designer extraordinaire. And as always, I ask questions, not just about equipment and technique, but also try to find out more about his background, what inspires him and how he got into water sports. So Ken was really open in this interview, shared a lot of information about wing design, even showed his computer screen where he designs wings. So that's at the very end of the interview. So you don't want to miss that part. It's really cool if you're into Wing design and wanna know more about the materials and the construction, the design and Ken's philosophy. This is a really good show for all that kind of information. During this interview, I'm gonna play a little bit of footage of Alan Cadiz Wing foiling in Kailua. I got some drone footage of him, which was after this interview, but he's using the 2023 Duotone unit Wing 4.5 meter wing. I'll play some of that in the background. Thank you so much for your time, Ken, and for sharing all the detailed information. So without further ado, here is Ken Winner. Okay. Good morning, Ken. How are you doing today? Good morning. I'm pretty good. All right. It's a little bit of a rainy and windy day here on Oahu. How's the weather on Maui? Same. Same. Yeah. Yep. So have you had super stormy winds the last few days? It's been crazy windy here. Yeah, it's been gusting 45 at times. Do you actually go out in those kind of conditions or do you wait? Yeah. Windy days. Yeah. It's pretty fun. Yeah. So you've been doing what you, what do you do on days like that? You go on a down window or you just go go off? I only do down windows with my wife nowadays. That's her favorite thing. Otherwise I from a friend's house over on Stable Road and Peter actually lives on Stable Road and so we launched there, go out race around a bit, test different wings, hydrofoils. Nice. What kind of equipment were you on in, on those super windy days? Anything from a two to a four. Sometimes we go out pretty overpowered just cause we have something we wanna try and we don't have many choices. Some days we just have to go and do what we can with what we have. We do a lot of prototyping in the four and five meter size. We do a fair amount in the three meter size and then smaller and bigger. We also prototype and test quite a bit, but maybe not as intensely. Nice. Okay. But before we get more into all the equipment and stuff like that, I wanted to get talk a little bit about your background. So tell us a little bit about start in the beginning, like wh how, where you grew up and how you got into water sports and all that kind of stuff. was born a long time ago, 1955, so there's a lot of history there. You don't wanna hear it all. Grew up near Annapolis, Maryland. Did a fair amount of recreational cruising type sailing. My dad owned boats. Built a lot of stuff when I was a kid. Owned a couple boats when I was a teenager. Started windsurfing in 75. How extensive do you want this to be? Started windsurfing in 75, won the world championship in 77. We won again, 80 in 81. We had the right there on Oahu, where you are. We had the World Cup, the PanAm World Cup, which I. Actually, yeah don't worry about making it short. Like we, we got time. So just actually like how did you get into windsurfing? What was your first experience with that? Or what were you doing? Anything other like surfing or water sports before windsurfing? Yeah. No, I've never actually surfed. As I said, I grew up sailing I, when I was a teenager, maybe 17 or 16, I bought a old wooden boat, a little wooden boat, a Bahamas fixed it sailed around, kept it house else. I also bought a shark catamaran sail out bit. So I was into sailing and I, I saw an ad for a windsurfer and thought that would be a good thing for me to try. So wind, Also about the same time bought a hang glider. So I taught myself to hang glide and but I really enjoyed the windsurfing more so sold everything else and just focused on windsurfing. So that you were around 20 years old? Yeah. About 20. Yeah. Did you you have any like formal education or did you go like straight into wind surfing? Yeah, it's funny, I was gonna University of Maryland when I started windsurf, and I might have stuck with that, but I started windsurf and thinking, oh, I can go to college little, a little time windsurfing. And and then when I'm ready to quit, I can go back to school. But I never did actually go back to school, kept wind surfing. For the next forever , 23 years, but ba So basically you're self-taught, like all the knowledge you have on with computers and aerodynamics or, all that is basically from experience and self-taught kind of thing or? Yeah, I do a lot of reading. I remember in, sometime in the early eighties Barry Spanner, I think got a book. The title was The Aerodynamics of Sailing. And I, I heard him make a comment about it, so I got it and I read from cover to cover several times and really absorbed, I think the lessons of that. And did a lot of other reading after that. But that was sort my foundation for learning about the technical side of sailing. , nowadays, of course, it's super easy to get a lot of information online, really good information. So unless you're pursuing a career like attorney or doctor or degreed engineer or PhD scientist, you don't need formal education as much as you used to. If you need it at all, I don't know. But yeah, I think as long as you're a lifelong learner, you can pretty much teach yourself almost anything. . Yeah. Okay. Yeah, a lot of things, for sure. Yeah. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna do some screen sharing here from the windsurfing Hall of Fame. There's little bit of information about you online here. So in the, so you started windsurfing in 1975. That's, this was the day, days when they, the booms were still made out of wood and so on, right? Talk a little bit about your first first wind windsurfing set up bought a used board for 300 bucks and went out, taught myself to use it, and just became hooked like most people. Did it every chance I had. And at first all I focused on was trying to improve my skills. That was hundred percent of my effort. But then gradually over time, I got more interested in improving the equipment. So over time I did some things like. Built my own boards and built my own rigs, masks spoons. Yeah. And you start, you started winning a lot of races, so you were very focused on the com racing side of windsurfing or also I guess freestyle as well, right? Yeah. So I won the freestyle world two or three times, and that was back, it was a much simpler affair than it's now. Of course, the guys who do freestyle nowadays circles around all of us who did freestyle back then. yeah. Around. But you gotta start somewhere in every sport. And so that, that's a picture of Robbie and Jurgen in me at the pan, the Panta actually which was right there on Wahoo. Over in Kai. Yeah. And you were able to beat Robbie, I guess at that point. Still, and you have several world world titles right? In Windsurf racing. Yeah. Robbie and I were rivals to some extent, but he was younger and when he got to be when he achieved his full adult strength, he was extremely hard. I started when I was 20. He started when he was nine. And it's surprise that he dominated the sport so much for so many years. He's a amazing athlete and really great guy. Good entrepreneurs, got a great business. And and we're still rivals. , it's been a good, it's been a good 40 some years. . And then you started build, you said you started building your own boards and making smaller and smaller boards, right? Yeah. So I, excuse me. Yeah I built a a nine foot board. Actually prior to that I had a board shaped for me and glass, and that was a board I would say. I basically invented carving, jives, cause everybody had boards back then. I had a round tail board, which carve through my, instead of skid through them. And basically from that point on, I focused a lot on trying to improve my equipment. I you're showing a picture of the Transatlantic Windsurf race, which was a pretty funny. That was in about 98, I think. But this has gotta be pretty boring for anybody watching. People are interested in what's happening now. Yeah. No, I don't think so. I don't think so at all. I don't think any, what he's gonna find is boring at all, but, , yeah, just yeah. And then I guess you yeah, I tell us a little bit about how you got into the Wing, wing des, or were you designing w windsurfing sales for duo to before kites, or like how, or, and then, yeah. Just tell us a little bit about how you got Yeah. So I went surfed intensely for three years. I guess in 97, I think I won the US Racing Championships. And then just shortly after that I tried kiting for the first time. And basically after I tried kiting for the first time, I I sold on my windsurfing gear and got straight into kiting. My, my first kite experience was with Don Monague right off Stable Road on Maui. He was out kiting. I was out windsurfing and I told him I wanted to try that, so he handed me his control bar and the leashed, his board to my ankle, and he told me how to secure the kite. And I, so I kited back and forth down to Kaha for the next half hour. And so that was my, that's how I got hooked on kiting. And so from the very first session, you were able to stay upwind and everything and no, I didn't stay upwind. I ended up down at Kaha, so starting at camp one, ending up at Kaha. Oh, okay. And yeah and when, not long after that, I spent a week on Maui hiding every day. And and then a few months after that I did some, I did a how kite video. Cause there were no schools, hardly anybody knew how to learn. So I did some videos. Robbie was saying needed somehow to kite videos. So took the opportunity to do that. We sold about 30,000 videos and then of course, schools came along and the internet came along. So that was, there's, you don't need that kinda stuff anymore. It's all online. Yeah. Oh, so you had a, like a VHS tape on how to kite and sold it like through magazines and stuff like that. But I actually, I used the Nash distributor network to the dealer network to sell boxes of videos to dealers who would then them, to 'em, to customers. And I had a website so I could retail videos directly to the customers. And we actually did a total of three howto videos over a couple years time. And then I helped convince boards and more, which is the parent company of Duotone and fanatic to get into kite boarding kit, making kites. . And so that was about the year 2000. And we tried to hire people to do the job of designing kites, but there were so few kit designers at the time that I ended up taking it on. So I had learning design kit weeks and in China working 16 hours a day learning how to use computer aid design software, CAD software, and then pumping up existing kites and trying to figure out the geometry and trying to figure out how to do that on the Ultimately it worked, so we ended up with a decent and started growing the company from that point. Okay. So boards and more at that time, they had Brand was fanatic and or what were their brands that they were run? It, I'm just gonna say Boards and More is the parent company of the, the parent company that I work for now. , which is we produce Duotone kites and Fanatic windsurfing gear and kites surfing and surfing gear and, sub foiling gear. Boards and More is the company I've been working for the last 22 years. And right now what is your official role at Duotone? I know, I just wanted to say I've been waiting such a long time to get you on the show because you're always so busy. You said you have to, come up with a whole new line of wings and kites and everything, so you were too busy to meet with me. But Yeah, tell me a little bit about like your job, like your role and how you were able to make time today to come here, . Yeah. Yeah, great question. I I tend to overcom commit and try to do more things than I can reasonably do. So years I was designing kites, but I also decided to start designing hydrofoils and that turned into a lot of work. And then I started designing wings and that turned into more work. So I was to foil design work off on some very capable guys that we in Mauritius and Germany. And then more recently I've been able to push the kite design work off on Sky now. Sky's been working with me for 18 years. We've both been learning a lot about kite design and in the last year, so I've been helping him master the software that we use for kit design. And so now he's doing the kite design. And I would say that he's for sure one of the most experienced and capable designers in the world, even though he hasn't been the lead on kite design until recently, but he's now and he's doing a great job. He's making some really great improvements. So having a good teacher, right? Hope . So having so now I'm just focused on maintenance, so that, like your job basically at duo tone right now is wing designer? Yeah. I'm focused on wing design now, and we have two main wing models the unit has handled, boom. And. The unit is more focused on wave riding and down winding. The slick is more free ride and freestyle. Unit has a little bit more Wingspan Slick has a little less the okay. So before we go into the current gear let's go back to when you first started winging and like how you came up with The Wing. I interviewed mark Rappa Horse and Alan Ez as well on the show. And they both talked about how, you guys used to go out downwind together with the standup paddle foil boards and and then, when one day you showed up with the wing. So can you talk a little bit about. Like how you first came up with the wing and the inflatable wing design and so on. Yeah, I was trying to downwind hydrofoil with these guys, and I wasn't doing it that well, was having great success and I was getting a sore shoulder. So I was trying to figure out how could I do downwind hydrofoiling and not get a shoulder? And I, by chance, I saw a video of Flash Austin with his homemade handheld wing that he was using on a hydrofoil at Kaha. And I thought eight years before I had designed some inflatable handheld wings for suffering. Not with a hydro, but just for, and so I thought I wonder if something like that would work. It fits my skillset because I do inflatable adult toys. And so I, I went home, got on the computer, designed crude. Another crude, handheld, inflatable wing. So those designs are you sent me an email with some pictures. Is that from that time when you designed your first wings? Yeah. That, that blue and black wing was my first effort to do a handheld inflatable wing. My idea was to use it on aboard, and that was back in two 10 Sky and I tried it. So this one was the one the original one that you made for for basically wind windsurfing on or on a regular windsurf board? Well, a sub board, yeah. Board. Ok. Yeah. And so it was very similar to what we have today, actually, you yeah. It has some similarities. Yeah. And then you would, hold one hand would go here on one hand here. Yeah, that's how it was at first. Okay. And I tried another one a month or two later and Sky and I didn't, we tried and we didn't really think it was that much fun. Another guy who designs for us took the idea and made a inflatable rig. We call it the I rig, which was pretty nice for kids, very low impact. So I remember that. So in that picture of six wings, you can see the first two in two 10, 2011. And then in 2018, I tried something. I just yeah, just very quickly threw something together. I modified an existing neo design and like a Neo's, one of our kites. And sent that off to the factory. And then when I took it to the beach and stepped on the board and sailed away, it popped up. I popped up on the foil immediately and sailed right out to the reef. Turning around, I fell and I had trouble getting going again. But basically I considered that a success and I figured that would allow me to do down windows without stressing my shoulders. I kept building prototypes after that sky went, this was June of 2018. Sky went to a dealer meeting in there and demonstrated it for everybody. Everybody there and nobody was interested. And then we took it to the SI show in August and nobody was interested. But then finally in November, people started getting interested. I got our ceo Alber. He's a, he used to be a snowboarder on the German national team, so hes really good. And he had thought it looked too complicated and difficult, but then when he tried it, he discovered that it's not too complicated and difficult. Maybe we make some of these and people will buy 'em. So at that point we decided we were gonna go into production with wings, and I think some other brands decided at that point. Interesting concept. Of your of your wife, and then you also sent me this little video. So she was the fir you said probably the first woman to wing Foil. Is that, Yeah. Sky's wife, Christine and Julie both tried it out. I think right around Christmas time of 2018. And then after that Julie got very interested in it. And I took her out at KEG quite a few times, and I think this was her first time on the North Shore , and she was a little excited by the size of the swell . So nowadays she, she really enjoys doing downs from to the harbor and she can do it in about 35 minutes if she's in a hurry. And it's her favorite sport. Cool. Yeah. And then this was your first wing design? The foil wing. And I actually got one of those. I've been, I was waiting for a long time and then finally got the wing and I think it was a three meter, the first one I got. And it was yeah, it was super cool because same as you were, we were trying to do the foil doman runs and Really kind. It's really hard actually. But talk a little bit about this first wing design and because it had a boom and no strut and then it had full battens and so on. So talk a little bit about the swing. Your first Yeah. Starting from scratch, we had no, I had no idea really what to do with it. We, we tried differentl angles and different patterns. I put bats in it because that reduces the fluttering by quite a bit. Nowadays we don't have belong bats because we've found other ways to reduce the flutter. Some of us have a lot of brands go ahead and continue making wing wings with a lot of flutter, but I don't really care for that. The boom I made my first few wings with handles as you saw in the photo, and I really hated the handles. Then I went to a kind of a strap on rigid handle. And then after that I thought why should I have a strut and a boom or strut and a handle and I can just have this one boom or long tube and potentially save money and hassle. So that was the reasoning there, but, It turns out the strut is really nice for stabilizing draft. And so we went back to using a strut sometime later. Yeah. Like I know the, that first wing, it was it did that TikTok thing right? When you held it by the front handle it, it didn't really behave very well. Just lefting behind you. It didn't yeah. So was that, I guess part of the reason for that was because it didn't have that strut to of stabilize it. Yeah. I think the strut kinda acts like a ruter in some respects helped stabilize the it's really hard to know what's gonna be important to people when you're starting with something new. One of the, one of the things I have to do is I have. I can't just pay attention to the things I like to do. I have to pay attention to what other people like to do. At first, to me, the idea of holding the wing by the front handle I just never did it. I would hold it by the boom. So never really noticed that instability when I was using it myself. Yeah, but basically, yeah, that's what, how when I used it on a wave, I would just hold the front of the boom and it worked fine. But but then, yeah, I guess some of the other wings were really stable, just holding it in the front handle and you'd be able to surf with it, just holding the front handle, which, which then I guess so yeah. So another thing that's kinda interesting is if you wanting, that will be pretty stable when you're just on the, we experimented with. And the thing we found is that if I let the air out of my wing and let it get a little bit floppy, take it down to three or four psi, it will fly on the leash. Really stable. But then if I pump it back up to eight psi and I haven't really tight 12 canopy, which is something I like, then it's no longer really stable on the leash. So far we kinda have to make the choice. Do we wanna, do we want our wing more floppy and therefore it'll fly on the, or do we want our wing more stable? Which it's less stable on the leash, but it's more stable otherwise. And so basic, so that's basically why you have those two different wings. One is the unit for more that's more, I guess more stable being on supplying by itself. And then the unit is more, has more of a profile. And is that kind of the thought behind it? We go for a lot of canopy tension on both models of wings. We're not gonna compromise on canopy tension cause it gives, it helps give lift to the, when it's, and it improves power when you're pumping. It improves de power and stability when you're overpowered. So we're not gonna compromise on canopy tension but the difference, one of the differences between the slick and the unit is the unit has more sleep. In the leading edge, and that helps improve the stability. While it's, if you're surfing a wave and holding it by the front handle, the fact that it has more sweep than the slick makes it a little more stable in that respect than the slick. But then the downside is you have more wingspan, so it's easier to catch a wing tip, by sweep. You're saying like the leading edge in the front is a little bit more like this versus that kind of thing? Or, but what do you mean by sweep? Sweep is the you know how some airplanes, like a fighter jet will have wings that are swept back. And some wings, like a sail plane will have wings that are not swept back. . So sleep is that back angle in the leading edge. Understood. Okay. And DL is the up angle in the leading edge. So we've done quite a bit with different DL patterns and some things I thought would be better weren't. So I thought a progressive DL would be more stable than a linear dl. And a linear DL is actually more stable. So the new unit has a very linear DL shape and uhno. Another thing that's kinda interesting is some wings have very little dl and the advantage of that is when the wing is lying flat on the water, it's less likely to flip over. The disadvantage of that is it's hard to have a, with a deep canopy and with a lot of canopy tension when you have little, so again we're giving up the fact that. . Our wings when they're lying belly down on the water, are more likely to flip over than somebody else's mic. But on the other hand, we have the ability to put in more depth while maintaining really good canopy tension cause we have more behavioral. So would you say there's a downside to having more canopy tension? Like to, to me it seems like the more tension you have, the, the better the profile works, but I guess like sometimes on a wave or whatever, when you're luing it, it has a little bit more drag, right? Is that, or like what's your experience with a tension? The canopy tension gives you less drag if you have, if more canopy tension gives you less drag when you're, but the wing is more stable while if it has A bit less canopy tension. If I let some air pressure out my wing and make it have less canopy tension, it'll flutter more. And that makes it drier and sad to say it makes it more stable. Yeah. Cause it basically when it doesn't have a lot of attention, it can just completely flatten out and just flutter flat. Versus attention has, it still has that profile. Yeah. So thet thing you can have is a wing that flaps and flutters and loves, but that drag impart a certain amount of stability. I see. This is one of those things where you, it's hard. It's hard to get, it's hard to get everything you want. Divorce, trade offs. Okay. So maybe talk a little bit about things you've tried early on that were that ended up on the trash tape and versus, like things that, I guess like the full battens, you said in the beginning you tried them or used them to reduce the flutter, but I remember those battens used to break really easily too in the waves, right? So the, they're thin battens. Yeah. So early on I never really even imagined I would be using a wing in the waves, which is why I didn't mind putting bats in . They don't, they're not really compatible that way. It's, I did make a three strut wing early on. My, my fourth wing in 2005th wing in 2018 was a three stru wing. And it was, perceptively heavier. So I didn't make any more three str wings for a while. So by, sorry, by three struts you mean three inflatable struts? Like this kind of Yeah. So the blue one? Yeah. The 3.0 from July of two 18. Yeah. Yeah. I tried that and it was, not a great wing and a little on the heavy side. So I decided I was gonna try to stick with just one strut, and then actually went to a home after that. For the simplicity and the low cost and so forth. So the three stru is something I abandoned early on, but it does have potential advantages. So we've been doing more work with that. F1 has a nice three wing. It has its pros and cons, but there are people who like it. And one of the reasons is the fact that you have strut takes away the corner, the the back corner at the tip of a wing, and that's the place people drag most often when they're trying to get going. Getting rid that, I'm sorry, screen. Share that again. So what you're saying, like this corner is what drags in the water when you're to get foiling, right? Yeah. And so a certain arrangement of three strut, I certain three strut geometry will get rid of that corner. . So I think F1 actually has like a patent a patent or a patent pending for that third strut. But it looks like you were the first one to develop that. So how does that work? They They, if they came to contesting it with us, I don't think they could win. But I don't think either of us or them are interested in having a fight. So I don't think it'll be a problem for us. So basically when, I know Duotone is also has a, I think you, I know you have a patent for the hand, the rigid handles on the unit. Are there any other patents that you're, you've gotten or applied for and Yeah, we've, and the question is like, why didn't you apply for a patent for the inflatable wings in the first place? Or did you? Because I think in part you have to do it pretty quickly and it can't really be in the public domain. So these wings that I made in 2000 10, 2 11 From what I understand is they were out there in the public domain and they were, they happened many years before. And so just trying to patent an inflatable wing I don't think that was an option. But we've tried to, we've applied for patents on various aspects of the inflatable wing design as, things related to the DL and boom. And trying to think, what can I mention? What can I not, there's some things we do that we don't even talk about because some people. Aren't aware and we don't wanna give them ideas. Yeah, you don't wanna give away your secret sauce. So I understand. Not too, it's not too soon. Yeah. . Yeah. Okay. So actually I had a question from a friend, my friend Steve. He was asking, have you ch or about basically, on windsurf sales where the can doer and stuff, they have a left tube to improve the laminar flow on the bottom side of the, have you tried that? Have you tried playing with that and or what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that, that's a popular topic. It came up in in connection with kite design years ago, and I think when I was picking up. The first kite that I actually owned from Don Monague, he was talking about that very idea and doing it in connection with kites. And Don Monague has done amazing amount of work along those lines in connection with kites. And if you were to see PDFs, he put all the things you tried, you would be astonished. Don would be a really interesting guy for you to talk to on this. Don Monague. Okay. Yeah. . Yeah, he was the kit designer for Nash 20 years ago, or 23 years ago. , he's moved on to a lot of really interesting things. But he was talking about it then he worked with it then, and it, it's never really worked for kites for a variety of reasons. There's weight, there's the tendency for. Water to get in and weigh down the kite. Complexity, cost and the actual benefit is hard to find. I've also tried to do elliptical, leading edges in kites and where I have two leading edges side by side. Kinda two bladders next to each other kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Trying to thin out the shape of the wing and make it stiffer. And that, that's been really hard to make it work. There are people who, tried this stuff and they, know, somebody's probably gonna succeed at some point someday, but so far hasn't One of the problems with double surface on a wing is that the lower surface tends to keep the flow attached, and that attached flow sucks the second surface down. And actually tends to suck the whole wing down. So we spent a lot of time making sure our wings always lift. If you're locking the wing, it lifts if it, if you get hit by a lifts every, all the time, our wings are lifting. If you add that second surface, boom, your lift goes away. The flow remains attached on the bottom of the wing. As it passes, the leading edge sucks the lower surface down and sucks the whole wing down with it. And this is something I've actually experimented with and tried and observed, so I'm not just speculating here. Interesting. Again, I'm not saying it'll never work, but it's not a slam dunk. It's not an obvious, easy thing to do. And the benefits aren't obvious either, so Yeah. And it's more weight, it's more cost. So we and with wings in particular, we have to worry about weight. Wind surfers don't worry about weight nearly as much as we do apparently. Tis are, you have to hold it, hold that thing up in, in your hand, and light wind especially then the weight really makes a difference. It does. Yeah, for sure. What about rigid wings? I know people have been making rigid wings for on the ice and stuff like that, but and forever, have you played around with that or have you tested rigid wings? Yeah. Yeah. I saw early on I'd like to have a rigid wing that opened up like an umbrella. . And I actually have tried some rigid and hybrid prototype. But the problem you run into there is you lose one of the greatest attractions of wings, inflatable wings, which is the simplicity in the fact that you just blow 'em up and go and when you have rigid components, elements. You make a more complex, harder to rig up. They're less robust because something like a carbon fiber tube can break pretty easily, especially in the waves. And I question whether a lot of people would want give up the simplicity and the robustness of inflatable in order speed or higher or whatever tructure might give you. That's priority for Right. Would working on that for kids and people who aren't fanatical wingers, people who wanna get into it, but aren't gonna be doing it every day, I would, I'm interested in making it better for families rather than, Better for Kailin . Yeah. But obviously you're also very interested in going fast and testing. I know ANCA has told me that you guys go out and race each other and see what's faster and test equipment and that's, he told me about the Mike's lab foil that he let you know, you let him try your foil and then he got one himself and I just got one recently. So those are, yeah, just having a fast foil makes a big difference that alone, right? I do going fast up to a point about the Mike's slab, what happened was during the pandemic we had a shortage of fanatic hydrofoils. We weren't getting the latest stuff. We weren't even able to get anything out China for a while. My wife is pretty into getting the latest stuff. So she ordered Mike's lab hydrofoil and she got it and she actually had a hard time with it, so I started using it. So I used it a fair amount. But she went to an 1100 Mike's Slab and that worked really well for her. Then she moved to 800, which worked well for her. Then she went to a and that worked well for her, and now she's, now, she now, I dunno she's in the five 40 to 800 range nowadays, depending on what she wants to and so through all that I've been using her hydros as well. But I also use, fanatic has some new stuff that I also use. Peter Slate, who I sail with a lot, is using fanatics and he's going really fast with, he's hard to keep up with. And Alan, of course is very hard to keep up with too. Yeah. And I, sorry, should, when we're talking about fast and I should say don't try to go faster race, because I think that but I'm not sure how to put this. I think that racing with slow equipment is actually more interesting than racing with fast equipment. In the old days of windsurfing, we raced with really slow boards. Didn't matter that we were going slow. Cause the important thing was trying to use the wind and the waves and whatever we found out there to go a little bit faster or to take a slightly shorter course than the next person. So I don't of speed as requisite on the, and. just getting on the water and racing with the stuff you have is pretty interesting. . Yeah, I that's I guess the beauty of one design racing where everybody uses the same equipment and it's not an arms race and it's more about this, your skill and sta strategy and so on, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think of it as the most social form of winging on the water because you're actually doing something with other people. And it's a very sort of a responsive thing where you do one thing and somebody will do another thing in response. So you're, there's interaction that you don't have pretty much any other time, except when you're wanting people to stay outta your way on wave, which is different kinda interaction. But getting back to the winging that Alan or Peter and I do if we're racing around side by side, Trying to go faster. What the main thing I'm doing is I'm trying to assess the performance of the wing. I'm trying to, the power delivery, I'm trying to, is the power consistent hit? Does easy to deal with gust? Is it difficult to deal with the gust when a gust hits, do I accelerate or do I just slow down because there's so much drag? And then, we'll go upwind and we'll go downwind. And if we're going downwind, we can, whether we can deeper with one wing rather than another. This all translate into performance that even someone who's not racing is gonna appreciate. And you can notice subtle differences between wings when you're side by side with somebody of equal ability. But you can't notice if you're just out there cruising by yourself. So that, that, I think that's a real valuable thing for us. But the other thing we do is we've got Finn and Jeffrey Spencer out there on our wings. They test every prototype that comes in. They write our little report and every wing that that comes in, they go out, they loop 'em and spin 'em and race around with them. Do everything that anybody does with them and evaluate them in very thorough, in a very thorough manner, I think. Yeah. I think originally they used to ride for what's it called? They used to write for Slingshot. Slingshot, yeah. So how long have they been writing for Duotone? The last few months. Okay. Yeah, they're amazing wingers. Talk a little bit about the r and d process. I guess it's like you can't really make too many changes at once yet, right? You have to change one, one variable at a time, and then like how many prototypes go into like how many prototypes do you have to make to come up with next year's wing, kind of thing. I'm just curious about that. Yeah, so for the 22 4 meter unit i, I design I name every prototype with a, from the alphabet. So I got down to Q on that one. I'm not sure how many. That's maybe 20 or so. And each one is one that you actually made. Is it just a, do they all make it to the, to be actually samples, or those are all actual samples that you made or that's a good question. I might starting design and try five different variations on my computer. , but they'll all be the same letter. That might be, it might be, okay. Four B dash one or four B dash two and I'll, okay. I'll look at all those and then I'll decide which one I wanna try and in person. And I'll send the, I'll generate patterns. Send the patterns to the factory. The factory, ship it out a week later, or five days later. And then we'll test it. But, I can go through dozens and dozens of prototypes before we finalize a line like, The unit from size two to size 6.5, which is 10 sizes. And we do build and test every size before we put any big into production. Yeah. But I guess on Maui, like basically the four meter is your, like that's the one you start with and then once you have a good four meter, then you start working on the other sizes. Is that kind of how you do it or? Usually I'll do a four or a five in a lot of iterations. I'll also do some sixes. I'll also do threes. I did quite a few threes on the latest slick design because it can be hard to get a three meter working really well. So we , we made six or seven threes before we felt like we were in the right ballpark with with the slick. Yeah, because you can't really use the same design and just make it bigger and smaller because obviously the bigger wings the, one of the issues is that they have too much wingspan, so you have to make 'em kind of lower aspect and then, but the smaller wings, it's not, the wingspan isn't so much of an issue. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like the differences be from your bigger swing to your smallest w in the same lineup, or is that Yeah, that's exactly right. The wingspan, the aspect ratio can be a little bit higher in the smaller wings. With the bigger wings, we haven't really gone over seven and we haven't adjusted the aspect ratio that much up to there. But in the future we'll probably have a seven and an eight with a little bit lower aspect ratio. Another thing you can't scale exactly is. Pretty much everything. You can't scale. Exactly. You have to make adjustments with everything. So if you take a five meter that you like and you wanna go smaller, you actually as a percentage have to go bigger with diameter of the leading edge. And because if you were to scale those down exactly to a, like a three meter, the leading edge wouldn't be big enough in diameter to get the stiffness you want. And then it goes small wing. You really want a stiff leading edge. Cuz otherwise when you're winging and gusty wind, it'll just bend. Yeah. And that, let's talk a little bit about that, the leading edge diameter, like the what you learned about that from all your designing and where, what are your thoughts on that and also the different materials. I know you're doing the unit D-lab with the a Lula fabric and stuff like that, and can you make the diameter thinner with the different fabric if you have more pressure and so on. Just go talk a little bit about that. Yeah. At first of course I was trying a lot of different diameters to see what seemed to work OK at my weight. And one of, one of the issues we have is people of all different weights are doing the sport. And we have to optimize around the average weight of the average writer wrap. So why are you showing that? Oh, I just wanted to bring up some of the wings and the different I was gonna show the aula wings and stuff like that. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. Distract you there. Yeah. So leading edge diameter is a huge topic and most of us who test are in the one 40 to one 90 weight range. So we tend to optimize for that weight range. And a four meter wing has a diameter of about 10 inches at the center. And at eight psi or eight and nine psi, that seems to enough, we've. Tried going smaller diameter. When we go to our ULA wings or glab wings are made outta right now and is great cause it's very light. It's very, and you would think that since it's so you could go smaller in diameter, but after making quite a few prototypes with smaller leading edge we see both advantages and disadvantages. So you can have a little less drag if you're going up wind or if you're in a lot of wind, you get less drag with a smaller leading edge. But if you lose a little bit of air pressure, then you have a softer leading edge. And the smaller, the leading edge, the more sensitive it's to small losses and air pressure. So with our DLA wings, our Lulu wings, we've decided to just keep the diameter about the same. And anybody that wants a little bit softer leading edge can run a little air out. And then bigger riders, the 200 pounders or 210 pound riders will have something that's fully stiff enough to handle their weight. That's one of the tradeoffs we've made with leading edge diameter. Another thing, so basically you found that you can't really even though the all Lula can handle more pressure, you can't really reduce the the leading edge diameter by much? Not yet. We can. It's just when we do it, we find that we're not happy with the tradeoffs. . And so we're leaning toward being conservative. We won't, we don't want. We don't want people to have unreasonable we don't want their expectations to be stymied. Yeah we're getting the best all around performance by keeping the leading edge diameter pretty substantial. Recently, for example, we made two identical slick prototypes. One with standard leading edge diameter. One with maybe a not quite a 2% drop up a about a two centimeter reduction from about 10 inches to a little over nine inches. And the smaller leading edge diameter had advantages as we expected. If we were going up wind and a lot of wind, the guy on the smaller levy edge had a, had an advantage. But overall it had a little less power, little less grunt. And if we lost a little bit of air pressure, it had a little less stiffness. And we felt like those were big enough problems to keep us away from that. Okay. So can you talk a little, sorry, go ahead. Another thing we did related to leading edge stiffness is we put a two 30 gram Dacron in the center. That white panel, those white panels in the center are a heavier, stiffer Dacron. So we put those in a place where there's a lot of stress on the leading edge and both in terms of point loading where the strut attaches and that leading edge handle attaches and the leash touches. And it's also a point where there's a lot of bending load. So that helps make our leading edge differ. I know a lot of brands will double up on their clock there. , which we did at one point, but we really prefer the single layer of two 30 gram Dacron. It's very robust. Interesting. Can you explain like how, why you recommend different pressures for, depending on the size of the wing, like I, I see you're the 2.0, you're recommending 12 psi and then for the 5.5 7.5 and kind of in between. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. The load on the seams, first I should say the closing sea of a leading edge has the most load on it. Of all the seams, it has twice the load on it. Segment, the inter segment seems are the ones between panels of, so we do a lot of testing to try and maximize the strength of our closing. But one thing about closing seams is the load on the closing sea is related to, it's proportional to the pressure times the diameter. So if you have a small diameter, you can have higher pressure without overloading the closing sea. But if you have a big diameter, have to have lower pressure to avoid overloading the closing scene. And think every, everybody understands this in the business. They're all recommending higher pressure for small and lower pressure for big, and it's all related to how much load the closing can handle without breaking. I. I see. Okay. Do you our standard Dacron construction can handle 15 or 18 PSI in a four meter size before it breaks. And I've, I. Done test tubes. I do a lot of test tubes where we test the strength of seam and I've done test tubes where I've taken it up to five psi in the standard diameter for four meter before its, so we do actually quite a bit of lab testing and bench testing on things like strength and cloth strength. So the difference between the unit and the D-lab unit is basically just the material of the leading edge and the str. Is that correct? Otherwise? Yeah, that's correct. Another difference is that the materials stretch a little differently and they require different seam construction. So I can't use the same patterns for the D-lab that I use for the unit. Customize the patterns for the D-lab wings. To make adjustments to allow for a different, not just different stretch, but also different shrinkage because different scene construction will take up more cloth. know, One scene construction might take up X amount and the other scene construction will take up 1.5 x amount. So I have to make those adjustments in the patterns. And then I've noticed let's talk a little bit about the flutter in, in wings. I noticed looks like the unit has like this little tiny Batten thing versus the D-lab doesn't have that. Is that what's the reason for that? No. The D-lab has it. They just didn't put it in the graphic. Okay. They both have it. But that's one thing I noticed, like the first generation wings, they would get really baggy quickly or after a few months of using them, they would get all bagged out and and you would lose a lot of performance and there would be a lot of flutter in the, in especially in the trailing edge. So how did you, do you eliminate that? Or how are you able to get away without battens in the trailing edge and avoid fluter stuff like that? About a year and a half ago we decided we were gonna attack that problem and we built some wings with different materials stronger rip stop materials for the canopy, and we sent 'em out to team writers in schools around the world and got feedback on how durable the different materials were. And so the material we use in the canopy, the white material in the canopy of the, no, not that one. That, so that one has standard kite rip stop, which is 50 gram rip stop, which is pretty good, especially if you get this panel alignments right. And you get the warp orientation. But then the wing, you're showing now the 2023 D-lab which I think is coming up tomorrow. Oh wow. That has our, what we're calling mod three for modules, three ripstop material in the canopy. So the white material in that canopy has three times the bias stretch resistance of the standard kite style. Rip stop and. That makes it not only more resistant to things like rips when you drop it on your hydrofoil, but really makes it more durable and a higher performance material. It makes our standard unit feel more like a D unit because it's more solid and when you're pumping it, you get better response. It's not a spongy response, it's a, it's more rigid response when you hit a gust. The draft is really super stable. So all around it's a big improvement. There's a small weight penalty of course. But we've, we did some testing where we built three nearly identical six meter wings and we put different amounts of this mod three material in the canopy of each one. So they would in weight by bit. And we founded the canopy with the most, with the largest amount of this material in it was far and away the best performers. So we decided to put in all of our wings for 2020 canopy. So that, so basically that combats that bagginess after, after using it for a while. That doesn't stretch as much, basically. Exactly. Yeah. I just noticed that. Okay. Yeah. So this is the traditional canopy, the mod three. You just have less stretch and especially in the d diagonal direction, right? Yes, exactly. So I just noticed that for the unit. You recommend, the D-lab wings, you recommend a lower pressure than the regular unit wings. Why? Why is that? You get more stiffness for the pressure, know, whatever you're given pressure is. The D-lab gives you more stiffness, but the thing about all is it's incredibly strong and stiff. It's incredibly strong everywhere except where you put a hole in it. So if we have to sew these things together so they have thousands of holes in them, and we do a lot of reinforcement on the seams with materials that are not alu. , but our testing shows us that these are the numbers we should be using for inflation to be safe. And so even though you might pump a five meter to seven instead of eight, it's gonna be stiffer at seven than Aron wing at eight. Okay. So you, you just said, so tomorrow you're gonna release the new the 2023 wings. I think on your website, this is still your 2022 model, right? So what is the no that DLA you're pointing at is the 2020. Oh, I'm wrong. It's the 2022. You're right. It's got the windows for 2022. So what has changed? I think I've seen Alan with some wings that have two windows here. Is that like one of the ways you can tell, or? Yeah. So the new units. Have windows that are more like the current slick, the 2022 Slick has four windows, not just two of them. Ok. And that improved our, that improves the visibility quite a bit. So talk a little bit about the seam orientation. Because it seems like the seams have a little bit more they don't stretch as much as the fabric, right? So is that, is that you're trying to use the seams to add more basically more tension to the canopy? Is that what your thought is on that or? What I'm doing there is I'm trying with the wing design in general, I'm trying to get more tension from tip to tip across the canopy. And in order to deal with that tension, I'm, or I'm making the thread orientation run tip to tip. So it's more about getting the thread orientation. The aligned with the loads that I'm trying to put in the, and that's actually evolved a bit. Those same angles have changed for 2023. And I surprised there's no photo anywhere of the 2020 threes. They've been out for a while now. . So the Duotone Sports website doesn't have the New Wings. Yeah, I dunno. But yeah, so talk a little bit about the changes that you did make in the wings from 22 to 23 other, I guess the windows, the seams, but what else has changed? Yeah the cloth is a huge thing. It's a really big thing. And up to now, the leading edge materials have lasted longer than the can materials, and you really want everything to break all at once, ideally. So we change the windows, we change the, we increase the depth and the power of the wing a bit. The profile depth is greater. So we are getting more power, but the canopy cloth itself also improves the top end, so we have more wind range overall. We we refined the tip angles, tip angles, tip twist has a lot of influence on wing performance. And so we've been, we've gone through a lot of prototypes trying to find the tip angles that are best. So I'd say we have an improvement in overall power delivery in part cause we've got better control over tip twist. Trying to think what else we've done is I know I'm forgetting something. So the, this wing that Alan Kiddas is using is probably the 23 right? As that's probably A2 three prototype. Correct. That's one of our prototypes where we were trying different canopy materials. Material is one of the materials we tested for use production. And we, we decided not to use it, but it's a very good material. We might use it in the future as possible. Okay. Interesting. Cool. That's cool that , you're able to talk about that it's gonna be released shortly for wing design. What's your philosophy and what are you trying to accomplish when you're designing a wing? I guess for this slick, I really like a wing that delivers power as, very consistently across the wind range. And, I've ridden a lot of wings. I've, I've ridden wings that don't do that. Most wings in the past haven't done that. And we're getting better and better at keeping the power on at all times. I like a, that's always lifting. A lot of people don't have that yet. I like a wing with good canopy tension for low flutter good pumping. Never want, I never really want have to move my hands cause I'm in a, the old days of windsurfing and the old days of winging, you hit a, you have back, wind, move back. You used move handle, or, which is one reasons I liked having a boom at first because I could just slide my hand back. I didn't have to let go and grab another handle. Nowadays the wings, our wings are so stable that I never really have to move my hands back or when lull hits, they're always in the right place. So that's really important to me and I think it's important to everyone when I'm thinking about the sport in general and how to, how to make the sport appealing to more people. I think about the fact that we get families doing winging. We get. No, my, the guy who actually runs our wing brand guy named in Germany, lives just off the Baltic Sea, near Keel. He has a seven year old son who started when he was five. And yeah, I think that's awesome. I love the idea being able to do the sport. So I don't ever wanna lose focus on making it easy, making it accessible, making it affordable. We're a high end brand, so we don't tend to go for the bargain basement type wings. But we do wanna make quality wings at a reasonable price, and I don't wanna lose sight. Yeah. And like in terms of price, like obviously the, a Lula wing is much more expensive, the material like, and like what, how much of a performance advantage do you actually get out of that material and is it, only like someone noticed that, is it just for high performance wing foiling or do you think the average user, it's a big advantage for them to go with a Lula fabric? Yeah, I mean anybody that can afford it will benefit from it. It's just a question of do you wanna spend the money and, know, where are your priorities? You have three kids you have to worry about until spending my wife likes them cause they're light and she doesn't need the stiffness, but she likes the low weight, so she always wants to be on, if possible bigger rider like the. Someone who weighs 200 pounds is gonna really benefit from the stiffness or somebody who likes to jump, who benefit from the stiffness. Most people, it's totally a matter of whether they wanna spend the money or not. You, there's always a benefit and the bigger the wing, the greater the benefit. So a six meter gives you more benefit in aula than a three five in Aula for sure. So let's talk a little bit about the equipment that you use personally. What's your go-to wing like on Maui? I know you have, what, which wing do you use the most, on. We use s scores and fives here a lot. Three. Three fives scores and fives a lot. . On a sea breeze days, sea breeze day when it's blowing six, eight knots, I can be on a seven or eight pretty easily. And. Of course if it's blowing like it has last week, I can easily be on it too. And do you prefer the unit or the the slick wing for your personal use? I really like booms a lot because I can, it's easier to locate my harness lines precisely and I can put my hands anywhere and I can fly one handed. When I say I'm getting from my, from a sitting position to a kneeling position I can one hand the boom and that makes it easier. One hand. But, I used to hate handled wings, but we, our handles are good enough that I like the units also. So what I, it's pretty much whatever I'm working on is what I'm writing. So lately I've been working on slicks mostly and I've been writing slicks mostly. But in the coming few months I'll be working on units entirely and I'll be writing units. So what changes have you made to the slick wing for 2023? What have been? So we did a lot of the things on the new slick that we did on the unit. So we went to the mod canopy, we four windows. We have gone with more canopy depth and more power. We fine tune the tip twist and we had some reflex, quite a bit of reflex in the strut of the 2022 slick. With the new canopy cloth. First I should point out that the thing the reflex did was made it so that the back of the canopy didn't bag out so much when you get gust or if you're out in high wind. So the reflex in the stru improved the top end performance of the slick. By however, with our new canopy, We don't have that bagginess in the cloth. So we were able to tone down the reflex by quite a bit. It's just a maybe three degrees now of reflex in the strut. I should point out also that the wider tips of the flick make it so that the slick benefits more from a little bit of reflex than the unit. The unit has narrower tips and it works different. What else on the slick? We've changed the shape of the strut a little bit. And yeah, o overall it's a lift smoother, lift wing, smoother wing. The power development is actually the smoothest of any I've tried. So when we're sailing along through Guston walls, we feel the gusts less with the slick than we have with any other wing we've ever tried. Okay. And then what about your board and your foils? Like what are your go, what's your go-to equipment on that? Yeah, so I I don't use small boards. I did a little bit a while ago, but I don't jump, so I don't really need a small board. I've been using 75 liter five foot boards quite a bit for the last year or two. And lately I've been on a five four, that's 24 wide and we're trending narrower. Some of us are trending narrower, just cause if you're on a small hydrofoil, if you have a little bit longer narrower board, you can pop up on the foil more easily. But. A longer board isn't necessarily good for waves, so anybody who's on, heavily into waves isn't gonna be on the longer board. I see. There's probably, I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna say the ta tail shape, I mean I know it people used to have all the kick tails and all that, but it seems like with the, the smaller, faster foils high aspect foils you need, it's almost like you don't want to pop up at a steep angle. You want to keep that board as flat as possible on the takeoff. So do you still use that kick tail or is it just a flat tail in your Yeah, I haven't used kick tail in quite a while. And I think those were mostly valuable in the bigger boards cause it was hard to some lift. Sinking the tail and getting the nose up is easy. So I think you don't really need any kick for a small board. , the boards I use my mask is about six or seven inches from the tail of the board. So there's just not much back there to keep it from kicking up in the nose. And then how long is your mask? What mass length do you like? I've been using in the 90 to 95 range a lot. And I've used longer, but there's a lot of shallow water around here. Yeah, I was gonna ask what's the disadvantage? So a lot of times it's, it is just like you don't want to hit the reef, right? ? Yeah. The longer, longer mass are either they're, to keep 'em stiff, they have to be a bit heavier and maybe a little thick, which. Not necessarily attractive. And then there's, you always have to look at what the tide's doing. Where I ride I don't like to go out. If there's less than a foot of water a foot above mean water. And if it's two feet, that's better . And sometimes I'll just go to the harbor. If it's a super low tide time of day and I need to test something, I might go to the harbor. Cause at least I know they can get away from the beach without hitting the bottom. I'm curious cuz you've done a lot of testing, like when you get scratches on your foil from the, like hitting the reef a few times all my fos are pretty scratched up. How much does it affect the performance, like in your experience? Hugely. Hugely. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. I feel it. I've had, I won't say bad luck, but I have had collisions with things in the water that have destroyed my foils. And you really notice yeah, you notice everything. If you're, if you're sailing with somebody else, you notice because you're going slower all of a sudden, if you're not, yeah. Do you repair it? Scratch, do you try to repair scratches in your foils? Or is there a way to Oh yeah. Fix it. Like how do you repair scratches on the bottom of the foil? I usually try to keep the scratching to a minimum and I'll just use a little tiny bit of two epoxy to fill the scratch. Just, just enough to fill it and then sand it smooth. , I wanna get some epoxy paint so that I can, do a proper paint and sand job on some foils. But I haven't got around to that yet. You can't get a shipp here. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So that would be like a two-part paint epoxy paint kind of thing. Yeah, there's stuff called DPO out Think Australia that America's Cup campaigns use for their hydrofoils and boats. That's supposed to be really good, but you have to ship it by boat probably, or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, . Okay. And then what we talked a little bit about the Mike's lab foils, but like what foils do you use the most and what sizes and so on? Yeah, so we have a phone has a really nice five 90. It's, I don't think it's in the shop. It's a five 90 front wing that I really like. They, we have a seven, we, we've got an eight 50. We've got sizes, I guess the, I really dunno what's on the website. Okay. You just have a look real quick, but okay. So that's pretty small for you. You have five 90 is pretty small foil size for your you're not, probably not as light as Alan could is or someone like that, right? Yeah, Alan and I use a Mike five 40 sometimes my wife uses it too. And so Alan and I can sail around both being on five 40, but 60 pounds, 50 pounds. So work for most days around here, something like a five 90 is a really nice size for me. Lighter wind days. The seven five is good. It's a very powerful for size. I was looking at the so are they the duotone foils or the fanatic foils did you say? Use those are Oh, the ones you're showing the, there's those are kite hydrofoils. Oh, duo Kite hydrofoils. Okay. And they're not the, they're not the latest stuff. I don't know if we have the latest stuff on the website. Cause it's been quite the challenge to get the new stuff outta Asia. It's basically not in available yet, basically. Yeah, I think so. Okay. So probably by spring on the mainland. Okay. And that, but the, so the foil that. Five 90 that you're saying using, I assume that's a pretty high aspect pretty thin fast foil. Is that kind of what you, how you would describe it? Yeah. It's, yeah, high. It's probably 10 to one aspect ratio and designed to be fast. We have cfd Computational Fluid dynamic in Germany who does, we work for a lot of projects, likeer America's Cup campaigns, and he's designed some profiles for us, for our mask and for our wings that we think are really very competitive. I, Peter rides his stuff all the time and he's extremely hard to keep up with, so I have no doubt that it's fast. , yeah. It's pretty amazing how much the foils have improved over the last couple, or, last three years or so. Coming from the early goal foils, what foils did you start on? I was designing our kite hydrofoils and our windsurf hydrofoils, and we had some decent trading windsurf, hydrofoils. And then when I started making 'em bigger, they weren't very good at first. So I started on some real crap foils. Very difficult to ride hydrofoils. . Then over time they got better and and became pretty easy to ride over the period of some months and maybe a year. Okay. So I just want some of the, a lot of those hydrofoils you just showed on the website or things that I designed Oh, a couple years ago. . Yeah. So actually, let's talk a little bit about the challenges that, during the pandemic, the whole supply chain issues and logistics, shipping issues and things like that, and delays and the demand, obviously during the pandemic when everybody was like staying, could, couldn't, people couldn't go to work, so they added more free time. It seemed like that's when winging just took off, like I know here on Oahu it was like, you just couldn't, we couldn't get enough stuff, there was like more, way more demand than supply. And then now it seems like where it's almost like the op opposite way where there's everything's back in stock and people are back in at work and not buying as much. I don't know, just can you talk a little bit about that and your experience with that? You pretty much said it all except for the fact that when pandemic was. Paradise. There was no traffic, there was no people on the beaches. It was amazing time in so respects sad in many respects, but not
Mike Zajicek and Stefano Moris make some of the world's fastest foils. When I researched their foils to use for wing foiling, I could not find much information online. After many months of waiting, they were finally able to make time for an interview. The timing was great since I just received the 600 Mike's lab Foil from them that I ordered months ago. We talk about their background, how they started designing and making foils and go into detail on their foil design theories and construction. For more information on their foils, please visit: http://www.mikeslab.com Aloha friends. It's Robert Stehlik. Welcome to another episode of the Blue Planet Show, where I interview foil athletes, designers, and thought leaders and get lots of good information for all those foil crazy people out there, like you and me. This year I didn't post a lot of interviews, but I'm ending this year, 2022 with a bang, with two really good interviews. Today's interview is with Mike's lab founder Mike and partner Stefano. They make some of the best foils in the world, the fastest foils in the world, hand-built in San Francisco and in Italy. The story, background story is really cool as well. know, Mike grew up in Czechoslovakia, communist Czechoslovakia, where he started building windsurf equipment and making it for his friends. And then escaping over the border, risking his life to escape Communist Czechoslovakia, and ended up in the West and eventually in San Francisco, started making windsurf boards again for some of the top athletes in the world, and then getting. Foils at the time of the interview. I only had one quick session on my 600 mike slab foil. Since then, I've been able to try it more and also use it on a really long downwind run in epic conditions from Hawaii Kai to White Plains where we winged like about 40 miles downwind. Super fun. And that's why I could really tell how fast this foil is. I went out with some really fast guys and was able to of smoke them in some of the runs just because the foil was really quick and easy to control and I was just able to make these big drops on these big bumps. And so I had a great time with it. I might include some of that footage in this during this interview. And then also I have some really nice footage of Alan Kez using his five, I think it's a five 40 Mike's lab foil in Kailua. And got some cool drone footage of him going super fast on that foil as well. I hope you enjoy the, this interview and next week's interview is gonna be with Ken Winter. He's the designer at Duotone and making some of the best wings on the market and also was really the first one to make inflatable wings for foiling. He's definitely a pioneer and a really good story. Started. Windsurf professional, and then got into the design side of things. And he really shared a lot about the, his wing designs and philosophy and et cetera. So that's a really good show as well. And I'm gonna post that the following Saturday, which is December 24th, and wishing everyone happy holidays. And without further ado, here is Mike and Stefano with Mike's lab. So welcome, Stefano and Mike to the Blue Planet Show. Today's show is about Mike's Lab foils. Thanks so much for joining me. I've been waiting for quite a while to get you on the show. And I finally got my own Mike's lab foil. I've only tried it one time, unfortunately, but really really excited about it. So welcome to the show. Thank you. Yeah, no problem. Yeah. And actually, let's start with where you are joining from, so we're spread out all over the world here. All right. I'm in Sienna, Italy, and I'm close to San Francisco. Yeah. And then I'm in Honolulu where it's morning time. And I think for you it's Mike is midday and for Stephano, it's late in the evening. So thanks for making the time to, to join the Blue Planet Show. , my, my video is, Doing funky stuff, but, so anyway let's talk a little bit about your background. I just heard Mike saying that you you basically had to escape from, or Yeah. Tell us about, a little bit about your background how you got to where you're now. Maybe start with Mike. Yeah, so obviously I have went grade school, then apprentice training for cabinet making, but high end cabinet making, the European stuff, which you make, eat for generations rather than the, whatever I learned here. Kitchen cabinets with a staple gun, , very different. And then I went to like high school with kinda orientation for architecture, interior design and furniture design. And after that I worked for about a year in interior design in the office and also in the what is it? Shop shop. And we were catering to diplomats in Prague, taking care of the residences, preparing all that and. About 1978 actually. Exactly. I started making windsurfing boards because that was one thing we were allowed to do because my brother took on hang gliding and that was a no-no, especially close to the border. So that quickly became somewhat outlawed except one little hill in center of Czech Republic. So that's why me and my friends, we picked up wind surfing and, so 78 I made the first one, and that's how I actually introduced myself into epoxy and all that. And I kept making boards until 2012, actually more, that was the end of windsurfing boards, and then the kit boards went on for another, I would say three to four years. But during the end of that time the foil came on and I was able to jump on probably the first sword foil, which was imported into America by Brian Lake. And he left for a week somewhere and he said, yeah, Mike, hey, he have at it and I, it was a very interesting time. He couldn't quite do it yet. It was a skim board. I put footsteps on it so I can even try because I hate boards without footsteps. And yeah, it was difficult. He thought he wasted his money soon, very soon after he came back, he learned enough that he was doing the, I think it was Friday night races on kite boards. And very quickly he started winning the weather mark. And so we knew this is the way to go. And so sorry to interrupt you, but this was all still in the Czech Republic, right? No. I escape in 1983. And what are we are talking about now? Maybe 2014. So there's 30 years between. Okay. But okay. So you were saying back, so back in the Czech Republic, you're doing an apprenticeship for building furniture and so on. And then you started playing with hang lighters and building wind surfers, correct? Correct. That was all. So in the Czech Republic? Yes. And I'm sure that at that time you weren't really able to buy any goods from the West, so you had to basically build your whole rig and everything, or like, how, yeah. How was, how did that work? So back then, yeah, we basically bought, it was actually a pre molded piece of styrofoam, but we didn't like the shape, so we reshaped it a little bit and then laid it up with fiberglass and epox. and for, let's say universal. We had friends like machine fittings where the high pressure hose would fit into get screwed from the, from both sides with like heavy duty bolt, expand the high pressure hose into this little delivering housing. That was our universal. And then we fitted aluminum MAs, which is just a piece of pipe, and same thing for the boom, which I found two trees and started bending my aluminum pipe to make a boom. And then I SCO end together. And I'm sure everybody started like that. Everybody in eastern Europe, right? Yeah, because I grew up in, in west Berlin, but we had friends in East Germany and they had to basically build their own equipment unless we brought them something over from the west, . Yeah. But I recall the beginnings in Maui, like early seventies, and nobody was making anything and they were pioneering their own way. Oh, so that, was that early you got into windsurfing, like back Yeah, I was 78 maybe just few years later and certainly couldn't buy except those pre molded styrofoam blanks. Somebody was able to put together probably on the side in some factory. And yeah, that's what we bought and we could buy a park and fiberglass that was doable. Okay. And then talk a little bit about how you escaped from the Czech Republic and made it to the us. So me and my wealth, our dad was always on a dissident side, but he never got too much in trouble except getting fired from pilot school. But his friends they were persecuted a little bit more to the point that some of them ended up in u New Mines, and actually two sons of one of this, these friends helped us later on. But first we took a vacation in Yugoslavia and we contacted these couples sons over on my dad's friend, who in the meantime died as probably the result of the minds. So they researched an area how we can, or where it's safe to jump the fence between Yugoslavia and Italy. First we tried to sail from Yugoslavia to Italy across, like this Northern bay. We were quickly stopped by boat and we were in the wetsuit, so they just sent us. . Then later on, I remember being in some kind of a police station. I think that's when we came up to the border crossing and they basically took us out and did little interview. And the third time, there was few days later, these friends from Switzerland came and we started talking, strategizing, and they had this city in US Lavia where some other check people were able to just jump the fence in the middle of the city. And so that's what we ended up doing. And we abandoned our car on the US lobby inside and they basically loaded us into their car. And from dark midnight Italy, we drove all the way to Vienna refugee camp, which is Austria, where the waiting line was locked shorter. And we just had to lie to authorities there, that was the first country we stepped our foot on. So we will be able to stay in a refugee camp and apply for asylum. Wow. So this was like, I guess this was before the Berlin Wall came down and things like that. Oh yeah. What year? What year was that? I, this was 83 and Berlin Wall came down in 89. Oh, okay. So that's when the borders were really still really strict and hard to Oh Cross, right? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So that, you're basically risking your life doing that, right? Yeah, if you don't do it in the right spot. So my cousin was actually in the army and he was patrolling the bo border, and there was like 50 kilometer dead zone, and they had machine guns, him and his body and dogs basically patrolling the, this dead zone with electrical fences and all that. And my cousin decided to escape, this was like two years before I did it. So he knew that it was a bad area and he was so soft that his parents were actually just, his dad was allowed to go to the refugee camp, talk to him, and he managed to bring him back. And so he got little fill in how it goes, because he worked on the border and he escaped. And I'm sure his body wasn't deep due to after, wow. His whatever colleague escapes. But anyway, so then you applied for asylum, I guess in, in Europe and then, but how did you make it to San Francisco? . So yeah, you apply, you wait few months we had a interview with Ambassador, US Ambassador in vie. And once he okayed us, we in the meantime joined this American Fund for Czechoslovak refugees, which was financing the flights, to come to us. And we were asked where they were gonna send us to Boston, and we thought further away from Europe would be better idea. And luckily we got San Francisco, so we ended up directly to here. They paid us first month's rent and after that we were on our own. Luckily we got welfare the first few months and yeah, after I, I literally started working in a company shop two weeks after arrival with zero English, , some French, enough Russian. And luckily a Russian guy hired me for his shop. So I was able to speak Russian to him at first, but he had three other young guys like me, and I picked up English from them within few months. Pretty okay. Especially, and it's just about work, it's not, it wasn't too bad. Wow. Yeah, now, and now your English is very good, so that's impressive. How old were you when you got to the United States? 23. Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's a amazing story. And then, yeah, so then you got a job, and then how did you get into making your own foils? First it was the boards. I jumped from that 78 back in check. I made at least six wind boards. And then here I am in San Fran, driving by Berkeley, where I see dozens of wind surfers having fun. And I go, I gotta, get back to it. Me and two other friends, we bought this production like horrible quality boards and started going out there and later on I realized, yeah, I probably have to make me my own board again. And it was 1985 when I made my first board, maybe 86, 1 of those. And I managed to cut my finger pretty badly in that process, . And I finished the board injured, and three of my friends tried it, and they immediately said, yeah, we need something like that. We want same board. . So I had three customers before I could ever try my first board out here, And I slowly shifted from cabinet making and little bit later construction because my Russian boss managed to fire me for asking him a question . So I went into short period of construction and from that I was able to meander into making boards. And so that's how you started basically you started your own business building boards? Yeah. In 86 full-time. Okay. Definitely 87. And then, yeah. And then talk about, yeah. How that evolved into Mike's lab, I called it, believe it or not, Mike's lab. Then for the first board, just as a joke that I'm some big operation . It was, nothing. And yeah, I was making in inroads into the local scene, racing myself, pushing it. And then local racers like Bar Chrisman and Steve Silvester, they noticed sooner than later they got their own boards made by me, even though Bar Chrisman was making his own. But it was too much work for him, , and now he's using my force. That's crazy. Literally, what is it, 37 years later or 40 maybe Yeah. So I'm making boards and in 1996, Matt Pritchard asks me to make him aboard and he picks it up on the way to Hood River Nationals. And he wins by a long shot, like all bullets, by long distance. So immediately Kevin stepped in, then Kevin won his first World Cup, p w a beating beyond Dereck, interrupting his 13 year winning streak on my board, which was a big deal. Wow. And I think it was 1999. And film again calls me and he goes, Mike, you gotta come over. Kevin's gonna do it. And sure enough, I just made awards and that was a lot of fun. . Oh, that's excellent. Okay. So Matt and Pritchard put you on the map a little bit with the Win Winston Awards and Yeah. Later on it was all kinds of other people like Phil Scott Fent, and Michael many others. They all use Finian Min. Newberg who was, there was plenty of others. And the whole time, like basically you're not really sponsoring these guys, they're just buying boards from you because you make the fastest boards or were you making boards for free for some of those guys? No, they had to pay me. I was still very poor, barely making it. To the top guys, I was trying to keep the price down so they can keep selling it. And they did, they sold the board for at least the same, if not more. But I didn't have to do the paperwork or all that, so I just Yeah. Collected money and they let them deal with it. So early on, pretty much everybody had to pay me, but I was very reasonable about the prices, hopefully . Wow. Yeah, it's a little bit like I, I was talking to Mark Rappa horse who started S I c and all the best guys were buying his boards cuz they were the fastest boards available and he didn't really have to sponsor anybody because that's a nice position to be. Yeah, that's where I . But it seems like to the, to this day, it's like you have more, like you, it seems like you have a long waiting list to, for these foils. Like I had to wait, I don't know, three or four months to get a foil. What's your wait time? And I don't know is that kind of how you try to keep it where you basically, you can't make as many as people want? Or what's, yeah, what's your philosophy? Stef, I should men jump in here in let's say the waiting times and the list, but I would say boards, you can almost go in and, let's say have a mate in Cobra, which we did with the kite boards and they were pretty dang good. But I don't really see how our design could be successful and made somewhere in China without us looking it over. And we did try to teach an outfit here in Michigan, I believe, and we slept through about, I don't know, six months, maybe a year. And it still wasn't, the quality wasn't there, so it's not so easy. So I step, Steph should jump in here. Yeah, actually okay. So actually Stefana maybe start talking a little bit about your background, like how you got into this business. Sure. Okay. Mike is one of my best friends. I've known him since I was 18 years old. I'm 48 now. And I, yeah, time flies. And so I met Mike at the Berkeley Marina windsurfing because I caught the windsurfing bug when I was 17. And I met him when I was 18 and I was at the Berkeley Marina and I would see him and all these other guys just go up, up and down and upwind up to Treasure Island training every day. And as a senior in high school at that time, I got off at around noon, just afternoon. So I was going to Berkeley every day. And I just saw that as a goal I wanted to achieve, to be able to, be as fast as those guys and be able to go up wind as fast as those guys. And I was on this super heavy polypropylene, tega windsurf board, and I was just, slug up there. And I finally remember finally making it all the way up to Treasure Island and seeing Mike and the others dancing around playing, doing big jumps. And I chased them back down wind. And I tracked Mike down in the parking lot and we started talking. And then I, and for me, Mike's lab. as a board maker and as a person was already a legend at that point in the windsurfing scene. So I remember going up to him and oh my gosh, you got a new Mike's lab? Oh, when did you get that? And Mike was like, oh, I made it . And so that just started the whole conversation there. And Mike, gave me an awesome deal. My very first Mike's lab board was a one that had broken and taken up water and he was able to cut the whole thing in half and let it dry out and repair it. So he sold it to me for cheap and I paid off by digging under his house an addition, an additional room under his house. Cuz as a high school student I didn't have that kind of money . And yeah, so that's how our friendship started is out there on the race course, so to speak. And I'm a product designer, so I went to San Jose State and studied product design. So I'm right in the middle between mechanical engineering and fine art. And during my university days and on weekends I'd be working in a windsurfing shop. On the summers I'd be doing all the local race circuit and everything like that. And often would fly myself at Mike's for dinners and jacuzzi time and just philosophizing on life. And that's how our friendship started. . And then in 2006 I met my Italian wife and I have Italian relatives too over here. And so I decided to move over here. And in 2014 is when we started the whole Hydrofoil project. And since as a product designer, I have, I've been doing CAD and 3D and tool design and things like that since 1994. And I proposed to Mike Hey, let's, let's I knew the scene in San Francisco was already blowing up and Mike was already sending me messages about it and I wanted to get into it too. And I'm just one of the people I, I love to just build everything. And I'm always more satisfied to be out on the water if it's something that I've made. So I was just saying, Hey, let's, start a project together just almost like a hobby, we'll design it together and Mike will do all the first layups. I'll do all the tool design. I'll make the first mold. I should jump in quickly in here. Yeah, so I got it sort then soon enough I got spots, foil as well, l shortly after that, F four started making their own foil. and I was hacking together literally hundreds of pieces with thousands of combinations for maybe a couple of years and never really figured out what it needs and where is the problem. And I know I couldn't control the sort in pitch and spots in left. And I knew it could be combined. And I'm telling Stefano and he goes let's make our own. And there it was. . , yeah. Wow. So it started, so before you met, and I guess that was in the early nineties when you guys met when you were 18. So before that, did you grow up in California or Yeah. Yeah. I was born in San Francisco and I grew up in the Bay Area. Yes. Oh, okay. And then, so basically you married an Italian wife, your Italian wife, and then moved to, basically moved to Italy. Yeah. And then, so now you make, basically you make foils as well in, in Italy. Yeah so the whole development process with Mike is that, from TA 2014 when things started just almost as a hobby, but then quickly started getting requests and things like that I was always doing the design work, the tooling and we would always sort of hash out over at that particular time, Voxer, now we use what's up, but just chats to refine and go over the designs. And I would then come over once or twice a year to work with him in his garage and help boost production because we quickly gotta to the point where we just could not meet demand. And we had to get some more man, hands in there so to speak. So I would come over. A couple times a year to do these production sessions. And and at that particular time I was also teaching at a a university here in Italy, different design courses and curriculum. And then in 2019, the demand got so much where it justified me opening up my own shop over here. So from 2019, I've had my own lab, so to speak where I produce a lot of the foils that are then sold on over here in Europe. Wow. Okay. Great story. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna share this these cool sketches that you emailed me. I'm gonna screen share it and sure. And can you see them? Yeah. Okay. So I guess at that time you guys were one of you was in the Bay Area and one is in and Europe and Italy. And then you were making these for Kite, kite foiling. . Yeah. These first sketches are one of our very first designs. And we, Mike and I both have the philosophy where we just gotta try stuff and learn by doing, we are definitely of the trial and error philosophy. And so this, these are sketches of our very first design, which had, the mass mounted directly over the wing. And I would often 3D print stuff and send it over to Mike so we could have it in his hands. And what you're seeing, all those little pieces, seven through two, and A, B, C, D, those were all the first sort of positive mold like that I sent to Mike because our very first design made negative molds by 3D printing them and backfilling them with resin and M D F, but it ended up getting lost in the shipping. So then a few months later I had to send him the positives, which then he made molds of so just for a good laugh. That was our very first design. Okay, so these little pieces, you made 3D printed molds and then built the basically made the parts and then put 'em all together into to make one foil. Yeah, those, I sent them all the pieces and he could put them all together and then make a mold himself out of fiberglass or whatever he did at the time. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. , and this is where you were a little bit younger still . Yeah. . But yeah, talk, here's sketches, where we're thinking about, how to keep the tips from popping outta the water. Just what seems so obvious now. But at that time, these were all considerations that we were making. Yeah. And here's a little cross section of how I was gonna make the 3D printed mold to send them. And I, this, this was a, it was such a tragedy because I, for months, I printed all these pieces, made this huge mold, and it just literally got lost in shipping and just damaged. It's probably some buried in some warehouse in America somewhere. ? Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So talk a little bit about this. Is this like your secret sauce or can you share a little bit about like, how you built your molds and if, are you still do using that same process? No, the not at all. So this was in the beginning we used the 3D printing to make the first mold, but we quickly realized that it's just not accurate enough. When you're dealing with making and designing and making hydrofoils, you have to have much higher tolerances. And We quickly moved on to aluminum molds. However, having said that, often in our design process between Mike and I, Mike is somebody that really likes to have something, between his hands, that he can of feel the profile and help visualize the connection. And so often I would print out little pieces and send them to him just so he could like, touch and hold them and give feedback on what he thought. And that was these little pieces here kind of thing? Yeah. Or I don't know if, I don't remember if I sent a picture or not, but, our connections or sometimes profile sections and things like that. Yeah, wing section, wingtip, just to, for me to touch it and Yeah. But, oh, sorry. I just picked up basically the dimensions from what seemed to be working from my thousands of experiments over couple of years. And I gave the rough dimensions and then Stefano would add it, make it into a final product. And then we had somebody, I believe, in Kansas making our first aluminum molds, which were, reasonably pricey, but for, as he said lot better tolerances and also option. Cooking it in the oven to get the proper mask strength. We had to go the aluminum route and pressures, I we clamp our molds together. Everybody knows we do a wet layer process and we use really high pressures, which obviously 3D printing doesn't, can't hold up to it. . But these original molds, I guess the, this part here was the three pin 3D printed part, and then you put exactly resin underneath it and MDF boards, and then just Yeah. Made your own molds out of yeah, out of 3D printed materials for prototyping, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I since those early days, I have done this a couple more times when I want to do something that's just so ridiculous that it's not worth spending, a few thousand on an aluminum mold and then find out that it doesn't work, so I, I did a flying wing concept many years ago with this same process. Okay. And then I guess this picture here is like the, where the mass is right on top of the foil, but the foil is angled forward. Yep. Yeah. Looks like a good way to catch seaweed, right? Yeah, . Exactly. . But how did it work? We I think we ended up not doing such a forward rake when we, I think this was like maybe one of the very first sketches. Yeah, just a sketch. I bet you it would turn really good. And I know brand did this forward. Oh yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Okay and then this looks like what year was this? This kind of an older article. Huh? The world's fastest kite boards. Kite boards by day. Wow. So if it's a kiteboard, I bet you it's about 2014, maybe 13. And yeah, I went straight from winding making boards from, for Johnny Heineken, Adam Cook, and all these really fast guys. And again, they took it straight to the world championship winning. Johnny was at least two or three times world champion on the three Fin Kitire boards. Yeah, right there, . And then this, I guess this was before foiling, right? This, these were just Exactly with a regular fin on the back and so on. Yeah. Yeah. Three fins. Yes. Oh, three fins. Okay. Wow. Which ironically turned into be perfect for learning Wing foiling. Yeah. And then the, and then there's these asymmetrical speed boards. Huh. That's cool too. That's Rob Douglas, who was always, and he still is now pursuing speed on wings with my foils, and he's buying all kinds of wings, trying to go fast. But this was at the time when kites were actually holding the world speed record for sale powered craft. And he was asking me to make his boards with his ideas, his dimensions for different conditions. I believe at the end I probably made about 27 of these for him. . Wow. So at the at that time, yeah, the kites held the world speed record for sail power. Who's holding it now? What is it? Is it foils or still regular boards well be, so he got his world record, 55.5 knots, which held for I think a couple of years. And then the little boat, Ste. May know the name. I think it was some kind of attraction foil with a sail. Yeah. Vest. Sail rocket. Yeah. And sale Rocket disintegrated at the end of the run by, by obliterating that 55 55 Or maybe over 60, but it could never be repeated because the book was in, in pieces, . Oh, wow. And then that's still the world record, that's the current world record? Or did they get the world record with that run, or, yes. No, they did. They did. And then at the end of the run, the Bo boat, just self des or self-destructed. Hon, honestly, I don't, I, I know the, when the Sail Rocket had their big crash, I don't think that was the record run. I think they went and re rebuilt and did the record run after that, but I believe they still have the record. And this, yeah, this image here is just, I have a portfolio site just showing a, the depth of my work. I've done everything from consumer electronics to toys, to, to clothing. A lot of people think since I'm involved, in the design side of Mike's lab, they think I'm, an aero engineer or, a naval architect. But I'm not I'm really just as much an artist as I am a tinkerer. , if you would say, So even like first class airline seats and things like that you worked on . Yep. Yep. And what is this? A it's a little mp3, boom box from back in the day. And there's some other Bluetooth concepts there. I was working for a design firm for a while where we did shoe concepts for Nike. I've done everything from, multimedia commercials to some c compositing work to web design and coding and things like that. So a little bit of everything under the creative umbrella. The slipper looks a little bit like a kite surfing foot strap. Yeah. Maybe there's some subconscious influence there. What's this one? The Air Force water plane. Oh, I so I, all my life I've been into, radio control, everything and this kind of ties into the hydrofoil design. And I, it's the same with Mike in the sense that we've, all the things we've been into in our lives, we've always thought about just the way fluid flows. So neither Mike nor I. Like I said, aeronautical engineers but we definitely lie awake at night thinking about flow. And so I've done, yeah, that was a scratch built radio control airplane I built and I've done discus launch and RC helicopters and I there was a period of my life where I was skydiving for about 14 years, and I also designed and built a parachute. So I've even designed and built foil kites as well. So just flow, fluid flow. Interesting. And then this looks like a covid safe cafeteria design. Is that what it is? ? No, it's old fur. It's a old library furniture from a much old, just for privacy or yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So not not the covid flowing across the table. Yeah. No. And since 2019, that's all I've been doing is the hydrofoil. So before 2019, I was mixing in consulting and, working on the hydrofoils with Mike. But since two, 2019 it's been just full-time hydrofoils, which Okay. Even then, even with Mike producing in California and me producing in Europe, yeah. The wait list is still Optum 3, 4, 5 months. It depends on what model and where the person is located. Yeah. And then so the pictures in that portfolio shows Nico Par. And for about three years we were dominating the racing circuit on our kite foil and our waiting line just absolutely exploded. It was pushing past two years, waiting time for everybody else, learn how to make proper foils. We were definitely there having very successful race design. And I think Nico Parley were at least two times world champion. Daniel Lamoro at least three on our foil, and maybe Johnny I think was as well, one once or twice. Yeah. And I think it's really important to point out that, when people think of Mike's lab, they first think of Mike, and then sometimes they think about me. But the re the reality is it's really like a big team project. I If it wasn't for the valuable input and feedback of Nico and Johnny and Ricky Leche and Connor and all, just the whole slew of racers giving their input, then of course our hydrofoils wouldn't be where they are today. So I just got this foil that bullet six and it's yeah, it's beautiful. I only tried it one time for a short time to test it out. It definitely felt fast and very efficient. But I'm wondering like, how many people do you have working on these and do you, did you actually do some of the work on this foil or like who who actually builds these foils at them? Yeah, I believe I build this one and shift it to you, and the only thing I have done by somebody is to cut my pieces to be late inside the mold. So if you imagine a roll of carbon and I need to have the pieces precut, I have somebody doing that. But everything else I do myself. So the pre-reg carbon basically cut into into the pieces that fit into the mold. It's not even pre-reg, it's dry carbon. It's dry carbon and then it's saturated by liquid resin. So the resin, do you like vacuum it into the mold or do you lay it out wet it out before the mold closes? How does that work? Yeah, exactly. Just wet it out piece by piece into each half of the mold and then the two halves come together and hopefully next morning it pops open with what you have. It obviously needs a lot of cleaning after it comes out of the mold, but. . Yeah, so I guess this one looks like the whole, the fuselage and the whole front foil is all one piece and then it looks like the tail is molded separately and then connected here. Is that correct? No, it's all molded in the same time. What you probably are looking at is our own mold connection. It looks like it's been connected, but no, it was all laid up in, in one time, one piece. And that's because we have to screw the wings to the fuselage from each end of the fuselage, right? So you can see the seam of the mold on the final product. But other than that, it's all one piece. And our philosophy was back then trying to make a race foil. The less connections and the more in center the wings are in relation to the fuselage, the less, as Stephano called it, peak acceleration we gonna encounter. So if you have to screw the wing from one side or the other, you have bulk of the fage and meat necessary to, for the screw to go in on one side, and that's your unnecessary drag through the water. So we decided to go this route and learn how to build it and it's reason. Efficient, making it this way that we don't have to spend time, making pieces there, machining them together, screwing them together. , this way we can find unit for the customer who may not have the ability, conditions or time to do it themselves, so they get something what's already fine tuned and you, the only way to really mess it up is to run the reef or something. Oh, I know. And this foil looks so nice. I'm really scared of getting it scratched up. So the spot i g foiler is really shallow and then the mass I got is like 102 centimeters I'm probably only gonna use it in deep water spots. Yeah, I think you changed it from 96 to 1 0 2. . . Yeah. No, for racing. It's definitely nice to, especially Darwin racing. I wanted to ask these has these little blue fibers in it. What is that and what, why are those early on? It was for me to I used to go to the border with up to six different boards and foils on shore and I would go in and out with a kite back then. And I figured out how to mark them visually for me, because if you go in and out, you forget which one felt what and why. and I had this color coding type. Visuals. And I remember, oh, the orange one felt this way and felt good. Let me look how I build it. What is the pitch when I came home or to the shop the next day? And I think it also gives it a little bit of a character. When people have the same foil, at least they can recognize which one is theirs. Especially running into the wrestling line. Sometimes people would grab somebody else's board In the past, if you can't believe it, like wind surfing boards, I made so this way. It was a little bit, recognizable in the first glance. Okay. So that this is basically the color, just so you can each foils a little bit different and you can recognize which, which ones which. Yeah. And then, yeah, I noticed there is on the, and it's fun for us too, just it changes things up. I like to use pigments and tins too when I'm doing mine. And it's fun cause you can see the difference between my ies and mine and just changes. Yikes. Your connection is really slow now, I think. Yeah. We're breaking up a little bit, but, and then, yeah, on the mass too, it has these little colors and stuff like that. So it's just yeah, make it little bit unique. Each one. Each piece. Yeah. And the colors could be almost any color. I get a fiber in different colors and the pigments in different colors. So yeah, it just can be limitless. And then the other thing that I found really interesting is the connection between the mask and the fu fuselage. And basically rather than having it like a lot of foils have almost a box, a little bit like a tule box where the mask goes into the foil. But it looks like you try to it's more like you're maximizing the surface area where they're connected and and getting, that's not only the surface area, it's also not weakening the fuselage. The fuselage has to be super strong. And others using the mini total, if you can really pay attention, for example, lift, right lift foils, they do the mini total. And if you look at the fuselage size on their foil, it's massive. So I don't know if they ever will be able to go top speed, even though they do pretty well. But the disadvantage of the mini turtle is that your fuselage is too. Yeah, it definitely introduces a weak spot. Like on my access fuselages there's like several that had got a little cracks right here, like right at the end of the mast where it inserts into the board because that's just like a, the sides are relatively thin, right. Next to the box. So I guess, so basically part of it is just to have more strength right here in that connection. Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. It transfers a little bit too much stress. That's the, and then explain how this little screw works. Cause I guess the whole, with this screw, you can change the angle of the tail a little bit. Is that correct? Can you explain how that works? Because I haven't really tried that yet to put a washer or something in here. Yeah, you could, but it's not necessarily Yeah, go ahead. But I think we gotta take two steps back here because a lot of people that are probably listening to this, that are coming from the wing foiling or the prone or surf foiling, and maybe I've never heard of Mike's lab before. This connection system that we develop has been copied by many other brands, which is a testament to how well it works and. The design the crux of the, of designing a hydrofoil is you have to marry what would be the hydrodynamic ideal with what is mechanically required in order to just support the stresses involved. And so that's why we very quickly are very first foils. Yeah. We had a detachable, front wing and detachable rear wing. And then we quickly realized, as Mike was saying, that there's just way too much drag there in order to be able to house all the extra hardware, so on and so forth. So that connection system is to be as efficient and small as possible, but still be mechanically sound enough. And another misconception that a lot of people have is that little screw is used for the incidents, but it's actually not when you would, like with our kit oils, when we were, we had smaller diameter fuselages we would use shims and we still do with the kite foils. And you can literally you're bending the fuselage in order to get an angular change in incidents. So it's not so much that you have to have a little screw, but you just have to have material in there that then you're actually flexing the whole fuselage. Okay. Ba basically basically the foil is being held by these B three big screws in the. , but, and then this one is to hold a washer if you wanted to. No. The little stabilizes the fuselage going towards the back wing. We are using the mask and strength to keep the fuselage attached as long as possible before it has to go on its own to hold onto the back wing. And early on when I was testing a kite forests, the little screw wasn't there. And I could not quite, I didn't like it. It was all over the place as far as stability. As soon as I added the little screw manually into one of the foils, it improved drastically. So the legal screw is there for stability mainly, and Okay, got it. It became an advantage that the pitch of the incidents on the back wing was adjustable by putting reasonable tension without damaging something, we could lower the incidence of the back wing right there on the beach and, go back out. Okay. So if let's say I, if I wanted to, if I put a small washer in here in between, that would lower the incidence of the tail flow. So basically, if you want, if you wanna go faster and have, basically have less lift at high speeds, that's what it would achieve, basically. Or is it the other way? ? No. You are correct, but I don't think you need to do that. Yeah. It's already pitched to go really fast. You may wanna experiment. I don't think it's gonna help you with speed or anything like that. In fact, it's gonna force you to move your footstep maybe an inch back. But it, I don't think it's gonna buy you anything. It's probably gonna lower the stability if you go lower than the pitch you have. I don't think you're gonna see any good results. Okay. That's good to know. It's good. Measure it and it's around two degrees up to 2.4. I wouldn't ship it at all. And if you go below two degrees, at least in Kite Falls, we found that the four stars golfing, if you go really fast downwind, it loses the stability. The back wing is not helping to stabilize the fronting downwind at high speed. So you're saying the the built-in angle of incidents of the tail wing is about two degrees, is that correct? Ye between two to 2.4. And then what about the front wing? Oh, that's neutral. That's always neutral. Neutral zero. Okay. Yeah and it depends also what back wing it is as well. Cause we have different back wings. . Yeah. Because it's that's a little bit of a misconception is sometimes yeah. Really what matters is the difference between the front angle of the front and the back wing. So yeah. Correct. So basically your front wing is at zero angle of incidents. The back wing is like two degrees two to two and a half. Yeah. And and just to be clear, zero angles for a front wing does not mean neutral lift. It's still giving a lot of lift even at zero degrees, right? Because of the shape of the profile, right? Yeah. Yes. And I found it was relatively easy to get it up. I was worried that it would take really high speed to get up on foil, but it wasn't too, it worked fine and it just came up just fine, it wasn't like a big thing. We I mean I tried to erase it last Sunday and none of us were able to get going because the wind was too light and we ended up having to get a bo to take us back in But but yeah but it had nothing to do with the foil. Was this not windy enough? I should mention that my friend, my buddy has the same exact foil you have and that's his favorite. And he just arrived to Los Baja and he was gonna go out. And he did. And he said, oh my God, this s water is really wild and it's a little bit less stable. And then he comes in and he sends me a message, I'm so stupid, I put on a kite foil . So he went out on his standard kite foil on a wing board and thought, everything is good. And then he comes in and he's totally shocked that he was able to do it. . . Yeah. So talk a little bit about the tips here. Had, it's like a little bit, what do I call it? It's like downward, but then has a little bit up, up curved at the end. So what's the theory behind that Is say down and then back up again? Yeah. Right here in the tip. To make sure that the ventilation doesn't, if you breach a tip so that the ventilation doesn't propagate back down the wing. I see. So when the wing tips comes out of the water, this tip doesn't create ventilation at the tip. Yeah it doesn't allow the low pressure or the detached flow from the top of the wing tip to then propagate down towards the root. It helps shed that sort of bubble and shed that ventilation. Okay. And then I noticed on the tail wing you have these little winglets. What's the purpose of those? Yeah, all those curves on the front wing, which go straight button, then down, and same thing on the back wing. They bring stability and directionality. So for example, our most accessibility kite trace wing, front wing had a lot of these curves and it was very stable. So yeah, you could make a straight wing straight across, but it's gonna be pretty, it's gonna feel like a banana peel stepping on. So that the first purpose is to get it away from the surface, right? If you curve it down, then you don't bridge the first surfaces often, and then the directionality and stability comes from that as well. And then the tip is relief that as step said, it shut the. . Okay. And then, yeah, it was three . So the other question I had like the tule bo tu mount I guess all your masks have tu mounts and it seems like in, in surf foiling and wing foiling, most like the new standard is the plate mounts, right? Yeah. The plate mounts with the two, two US boxes. Why are you sticking with the tu mount and yeah, what's the theory behind that? Yeah the, Mike will give his opinion, but my opinion is that the total box is in incredibly rigid, in any well-built board where you have tracks, you have to tie it to the top of the deck anyway, and the total box does that by itself anyway. So from my standpoint, a 240 gram box is a lot lighter than tracks. And that's not even talking about hydrodynamic issues of the plate underwater versus the total box as well. Okay. Okay. So it's more efficient and you have the connection to the deck of the board and like the whole box is basically different, stronger, yeah. A lot less draggy and it's lighter. Yeah. Yeah, I in, luckily in our floorboards we have the foil strong box, we call 'em, it has both ATU and a plate mount. But some of my newer boards, like the, this one behind me only has the plate mount. So I guess I'm gonna have to either use a plate mount adapter or just use just for this prototype. But I'm gonna have to start putting total boxes in all my boards. Again, or bo, have both, but we also sell adapters and I also make custom carbon plates for clients that really want to have the plate. I'll do it. It's not like we're we don't do it, but Right. We just prefer the box. Makes sense. Yeah, it's, it, I think it would be pretty difficult, at least for me to build in the plate because you can imagine the resonant fiber running out of the end of the mold now on a vertical situation. So the tunnel is a lot more simple and a lot stronger, and I think it's the correct way to go. The plate has a huge advantage by adjustability back and forth. In fact, I think even Nickleson from Lift gave me the credit that I was the first one to put two tracks side by side because he used to use four balls drilled through the board. and attached, from the deck, that's how he was attaching this plate mount system. . And I just, I looked at it and I go, oh, I've been using the windsurfing pin boxes long enough that this could be a lot more elegant and adjustable and it wouldn't leak. And sure enough it worked and then everybody adopted it . Interesting. Yeah, what you said makes sense. Basically, when you're laying up the carbon inside the mold with the total, you can keep all the layers going straight and basically the strongest direction versus having to curve them out in a plate mount. So is that And resin dripping out , sorry? And resin would be dripping out. Oh yeah. Yeah. So you would have a big mess when you're try to lay it up. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And then I guess why there, why are there so many holes? Is it just cause so that it's adaptable to different types? OFTU boxes, . Okay. That came from kite race foils. The foot strap had to be incidentally right over thet box. So that was a disadvantage. So people who had tracks for kite race foil, which was very bad sock, unstable, flexible, but they could put a footstep anyway on it. On the deck. So once we had to deal with the th with the tunnel, I figured, hey, we can go to one, at least one of the inserts or mounts for the footsteps straight into the tunnel. And that's why this is adjustability for footstep mounting. I see. You can, so basically you can put the foot strap, the one that goes through the footstep into the mass in different positions. That makes, now do kite racers, you just use two screws or do you sometimes use multiple screws to hold it in the total box. I was gonna say that. So for winging, I do two screws up front and one in the back. Not only, it makes it a little bit stronger if you hit big fish, like people hit whales out here, , or I hit a dolphin and some other people actually broke off a wing not mine. I think it was spots back then hitting a dolphin. Anyway, so the two screws put it in with lot more strength, right? Because even wind first, you imagine the big wind board with a rig and rider on it if they hit a sea or rock or anything. Now the foil is at the bottom of whatever. So if they can use more than one screw, it helps. But they are still using at these locally little string for the center screw. , if you really hit something and the foil falls out, it, it hangs on the little piece of rope of the center screw. And also, I like the system because if people damage the barrel, not, or if it breaks the barrel not breaks, they can just pop one out and put it in the appropriate place, the damaged one. So it's like a spare built in spares. , yeah, exactly. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you, like with the total boxes, one of my pet peeves, and I'm not sure if I'm just not doing it right, but it seems like no matter how tight I put it in, like sometimes, like when you're on the water, you're pumping or whatever, all of a sudden you get that little, and it loosens up a little bit because I think it just slides a little bit deeper into the box. Like how can prevent that from happening? It doesn't loosen up, it actually tightens up so the connection gets more secure between the foil and the board. But your front screw may be a little bit loose, but nobody cares until you hit something like a big fish, right? Because there is always pressure going up from the front way. So you don't care if the screw is a little bit loose at this point. And that's why two screws, because I can crank them against each other, one and the back one and you can hear it cracking and going in and maybe. If you would use two screws, it may not happen. The little cracking what happens to you. And oh, sorry. Ahead sfa. I was just gonna say, a little bit of candle wax rubbed on the side of the head. Also gets it into the box with very little friction and allows you to tighten it from the get-go really easily as well. That's a good tip. I'll try that. And Johnny also developed this technique for the race fos. He really wanted the total sitting Absolutely. Exactly how he wanted it. So his board height at the deck for the front foot would've to be in literally millimeters. He hated it if it was even colder in chalk. So he would put it in, put screws in, then he would grab the foil, put a board upside down and hit the nose of the board, the deck side against the ground, like grass. And you could hear this crack, what you describe happens to you on the water. So he would prepack it on the beach and retighten the screws so nothing could move afterwards. Ah, okay. Yeah, that's another technique, . Basically attach the foil, put the put, put it with the foil down on, and then have the board on top and push it upside down. Okay. And just hit the gently and just. The front of the wing holding the foil like this and just top the nose of the board. Oh, okay. Like you are stepping on it type thing. Okay. You will hear this crack and then you can reit the upcr. Interesting. Check with your board maker too. Yeah. That . Yeah. Yeah, I mean I'm, we make most of my own board but I guess another misconception too is like that I guess if you hit something, most of the pressure obviously is on the front connection, on the front screw. But when you're riding the Yeah, the lift of the front wing, actually the most pressures on that back screw. The back screw. Because this lifts up and the back screw gets pulled down basically. Pulled out. Yes. When you're writing. But the huddle box is designed so that the radiuses, the vertical radiuses are taking the load. So it's not really, it shouldn't be the screws that are bearing that load. They cinch it in there, but once it's in there, it's not depending on the screws. Okay. So just to be clear, like you're saying the kind of these, the, this sites takes the vertical load. Yeah, because it gets wedged into the board basically. Yeah. Yep. And then, yeah, another thing too, people sometimes say oh, my board thet box doesn't go all the way in, but basically there's supposed to be a little gap in the bottom of it, right? Like the, basically it sits tight on these ends and then the sides are just parallel, right? Yep. Yeah. That was the design with this by Larry to have those radis at the ends, jamming in at 10 degrees each side, and that's where the load was basically taken up. And yeah, there must be a gap between the top of the tunnel and your board deck of it, because if there was not, imagine your full body weight would be pushing out a little nomination detail out through the deck, and you would just cause leakage. But in the meantime, starboard brand for foiling windsurfing, they had so many problems with the total box, probably not built properly, that they ended up using the roof, basically the top of the box and issuing the shims. So you would install your box just the right way. So as Johnny was sensitive to the height of the deck up front for the front foot, now the top athletes for windsurfer are doing the same thing with shimming, the top, like you said, on top of the tunnel, and they can adjust the rake of the foil itself against the board. Ah, okay. So by, by basically shimming this top, you can change the angle of the mask slightly kind of thing. But in my opinion, it totally defeats the purpose of the radiuss getting jammed into the box. But their box kept stretching so bad that they had to do this. So now you don't have the ends cinched, or only the sides are holding the foil and it's sitting on the top. It cannot go any deeper, which I think it's crazy, but they are doing it . Okay. Interesting. Interesting. All right, thanks for thanks for that. Something, I'm gonna try that like you were saying, Johnny Heineken just like cracking the foil on the beach before getting on the water and retightening it. That's a good idea. They should, you use two screws up front, the two front ones, and if you smack it and you crank both of them, no way you're gonna do it by sailing it anymore. It's gonna be okay in there. And for the, to put in the second screw. My box only has two screws in, it's, two holes in it. So I just, I guess have to just mark the exact spot and drill a hole through the tu box basically. Correct. I don't know. We use quarter into G 10 on top of the tunnel, so we can actually put the screws in anywhere we want and counter seeing them. So in case you are not using the pad, you can still comfortably step on it. So in case you do have some solid support for your second screw, yeah. You can just drill it one and one eight back from the front hole, and you're gonna be exactly in the right spot. Actually I was just thinking like on my, on most of our boards, the deck is thicker than the tunnel, so there's a hole for the screw to go into the board. Into the board. But anyways, yeah something to play around with, oh wait, are you using like Alexis boxes? It's similar to the Gulf Foil boxes. Yeah. We make our own with a full strong box, but oh, and does it have the screws vertical, like 90 degrees or are they Originally it's taken from total design. It's it's like like the straight, like the Gulf foil. Yeah, so be careful when you are first putting in your foil, you need to rotate the barrel notes by those few degrees because original total design is about 10 degrees right back. So yeah, that could be a little issue. But yeah, I'm trying to give enough space for the front and back to be countered back by 10 degrees. It was originally designed for windsurfing and windsurfing decks for slalom boards. They were sloping down. They were getting thin as you go towards the tail. So that's why that 10 degree slope. Yeah. I'm just sharing like this is what our, we have a box that combines like the tunnel and the interesting the plate mount together and then the top has this only the two holes though. Yeah. Then just use the two holes. Don't bother with there's screw. Good enough. Yeah. No, I mean it seems to work fine. I think just like getting it super tight before you get on the water is the key, I think. Or even maybe breaking it, bringing in a screwdriver. Yeah, tighten it on the water if it's necessary. But as I said, you never need to tighten it on the border as far. Having a secure connection. The only reason to do it is if it feels uncomfortable stepping on it, if but it's never bad. It shouldn't even matter. I think like when you're pumping, when you're pumping and there's a lull and there's no wind and you have to pump through the lull, sometimes that pumping will it's right. But yeah, then you don't want that rocking thing of your mass rocking. Oh, so you are saying it actually goes back out until it hits the screw? think yeah, like you said, it goes a little bit deeper, but then the screws loose. So when you're pumping there to be a little bit of wiggle back and forth on so you can feel the foil doing this. Yeah, I've never seen that. Never. Yeah. I dunno. Yeah. Maybe didn't put it tight enough, yeah. Title box should be tighter than that. It should go in there with a friction, and that friction should stop this. If the back through is tight. I don't think it'll pull out the front, but I never heard of it yet, okay. Okay. All right. And then I also noticed that the whole thing is pretty light. I know I also have access to access foils and it just it just a little bit more weight. And the this whole foil feels pretty light. So how do you achieve that, I guess you just minimize the amount of materials needed by just making that smaller or like how Yeah. How do you keep it light? . For starters, our sections are much thinner than what people are usually used to out there. When I see the profile thicknesses of some of the other brands that like 15, 16, 17 millimeters we're at 12.3 13 millimeters, so already there's less volume there. And then we also have core materials in order to get, good compaction. So it's not solid carbon all the way through. So that's, do you use wood inside, wood or foam or what do you use inside the foam? Is it secret? That's proprietary. proprietary. Ok. We got some, we have secret sauce. Secret sauce, yeah. Yeah. No, that's good. I respect that. . Okay so the, and then what, like on this mass, it has a little strip of unidirectional part of the way I think it stops at some point. Oh, that's just for fun. That's another one of those pictures. . Ok. That's another thing along with these co funky colors and stuff like that. Yeah. . Okay. Cool. All right, so yeah, what else about the foils that's, that you wanna mention that's unique about your foils? I'd say what's unique is you don't have to do anything. They're plug and play. In, into as Mike was saying before, the incidents, you don't really have to adjust it, especially not with wing surfing relative to kite surfing. The speeds and the balance is a little bit different. So the, our foils are definitely just go have fun. And in my opinion, the less you do something to it, the better. A lot of people ask like, how should I sand it? How should I, eh just don't do anything. The less is, the less you do, the better. . And then I would say one unique characteristic that a lot of people tend to say or be surprised by is just how easy they are to use. I think a lot of people since they know we come from a racing heritage, are maybe afraid that, oh, maybe the foils are like, difficult to use, or something like that. But the reality is a good race foil is easy to control cause that gives you the confidence to then push it and go fast. And it's no different with all our wing foils as well. They're just easy to use. . Another thing is I'm basically demoing the foils to anybody who's interested to hop on it and usually. , all it takes is once and some people have to order it right in and there because it's lot speedier, less drag, more stable, more fun just to use it than anything they tried before. I, we have people which claim they have tried everything there is on the planet made and they say, yeah, we just buy yours and multiple models just because it feels unique. Yeah, Alan Ez actually on this interview he talked about the Mike's lab foils and winning a race with it last summer on Maui against all the young guys and stuff like that. So that kind of convinced me that, okay, I gotta try one of these foils. . And yeah, definitely what you said about the, being able to control it. Basically every foil has that kind of a max, it seems like a maximum speed that's built in almost. And you want to try to get as get and stay as close as you can to that maximum speed and then Yeah, the how easy it's to control it at that speed is really important because yeah, I mean it's hard to push it to that limit if it's really hard to control it at high speeds. Makes sense. Yeah. . Okay. And what about the fuselage length? I guess that's just something you tested and came up with a good length there. That may have been the worst design feature because again, we have to have it made out of aluminum to be able to properly assemble the mold and build it and cook it. And coming from very short fuselages on kite oils, wind surface will try to use and they were not happy. So it kept growing from super short kite fuselages to super long over one meter for windsurfing, fos. And then winging came on the scene and now we started trying the windsurfing on a wing board wing foil, and that was way too long. So this whole harmonic, the fuselages was very frustrating because I had to have so many molds made and then you still have to test it and people get better. The wings sizes, like the foil wings get smaller, bigger, and they work differently with each other. And then the wings, handheld wings, they get better, faster, and different size. Push differently on a four. So that's definitely very frustrating or worse. But now it settled in for each wing. I like to use certain length and it seems to work. Yeah, that's not to say it's not gonna change still, but hopefully. And yeah, and I mean there's different geometry configurations based on what front and rear wing we have. And then one general comment I'll make a big difference between wing foiling and kite foiling is there's just so much more based on people's local conditions as well. In the sense that with kite foiling, when we were developing the stuff, the kind of mentality was if it can work well in San Francisco, it's gonna work well everywhere. But the reality is with wing foiling is you've got, one guy who wants, a shorter mass because the amplitude of his waves. And then you've got another one who wants open season high water, another guy who wants a longer fuse because that's what he likes and is used to, and another guy who wants a little bit of a shorter fuse. Yeah, on one hand things are settling, but it's never gonna settle like it was with kite foiling where you have a very sort of specific size that everybody can get into. I think personal preference plays a huge. Roll here. Interesting. Also, whether it's saltwater or freshwater, that, that makes a big difference in that amount of lift or like the, a little bit, but that doesn't affect our geometry shorts. That does, that's never affected, like what front wing we're gonna pair with what back wing and what fuselage length. But us generally speaking for freshwater, you probably need a slightly bigger foil a little bit with a little bit more lift. Is that right to or because it's hot water's denser, or is that not really that Sure, yeah. In, in, in theory. But then at the same time, it's all trade-offs. So you're talking about such a tiny little window to play in right there. That, that, okay. So it's gonna be a little bit faster in the freshwater
Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:18:16 +0000 https://insidetheworldofduotone.podigee.io/17-new-episode 01c83724bcdeb4afcf622760c5f4b561 World class athlete over decades, World Champion, Austrian skiing legend, Hannes Reichelt is one of the greatest the Skiing Circus ever had to offer - and he loves kitesurfing! duotonesports hannes-reichelt 17 full World class athlete over decades, World Champion, Austrian skiing legend, Hannes Reichelt is one of the greatest the Skiing Circus ever had to offer - and he loves kitesurfing! no Duotone,Hannes Reichelt,Skiing,World Cup,Downhill,Giant Slalom,Super Ski,Slalom Duotone Sports
After growing up in Maui and traveling the world as a professional kitesurfer, Shawn Richman speaks about his new life in Kenya. Shawn reveals how special and diverse the kitesurfing is in Kenya and Lamu Island where he and partner Anna run a luxury eco retreat. Here they share their passion for yoga, wellness, kitesurfing, nutrition and the beauty of mindful living.
Lasse Walker is a professional Kitesurfer from the Netherlands, a team rider for Duotone and he is the winner of the 2015 Red bull Megaloop. Skywalker https://www.redbull.com/int-en/videos/skywalker The Kite Mag - Clinics https://clinics.thekitemag.com Support the show: https://ko-fi.com/megapod Follow us: http://www.kitesurf365.com https://www.instagram.com/kitesurf365/ Brought to you by: Aluula Composites Push your boundaries with lighter stronger materials, taking wind sports to new heights https://aluula.com TheKiteMag, bringing you the very best in kiteboarding. Become a subscriber today and get 15% off by using the code “KITESURF365” at checkout. https://www.thekitemag.com/
Wer nicht gern die Glaskugel bemüht um in die Zukunft zu schauen, sollte sich mit Menschen unterhalten, die jene ganz entscheidend prägen werden. Als Unternehmer (Flysurfer) und Kite Designer (North & Duotone) hat Ralf Grösel die Kite-Branche in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten stark mitbestimmt und neue Standards gesetzt. Wer wäre dann besser geeignet als er, um die anstehenden Entwicklungen in der Kite Industrie zu diskutieren. In unserem Gespräch geht es nicht nur um ausdifferenzierte Shapes und Anwendungsfälle, sondern insbesondere um die Themen Produktion, Nachhaltigkeit, neue Technologien und - ja, ihr werdet richtig lesen - Farben. Also dann: Hit play and enjoy the the ride to the future! —— Ralf Grösel findet ihr bei Instagram rgd_ralfgroeseldesign oder unter www.ralfgroeseldesign.com
A NEW series of LIVE podcasts where we bring on Experts in the field to answer your questions.You can do it LIVE or comment on the social media channels before it happens.Let me know if you like the concept... and don't worry the normal podcasts are NOT going away.This week we have a Slalom giant, fresh from competing in the Defiwind. Super fast in all disciplines and a hell of a nice guy.He rides Duotone and fanatic... so fire your questions in.Who is it.. it is of course Jordy Vonk
Welcome to the Gwen and Damo Show! We are going in depth with JEREMIE TRONET a long-time professional kite surfer, elite instructor, and legendary waterman. Hands down the leader in mind blowing clips on social media. We are going in-depth about wingfoiling and kitesurfing on his island paradise, UNION ISLAND in the in the heart of the Grenadines. More about Jeremie: https://www.kitesurfgrenadines.com/jtprocenter/https://www.instagram.com/jeremietronet/Support this Youtube channel on Patreon ($5/month for exclusive content): https://www.patreon.com/damienleroyFollow us on Instagram:Gwen Le Tutourhttps://www.instagram.com/plantpositivefilmsDamien LeRoyhttps://www.instagram.com/leroydamo/www.damienleroy.comOrder your wingsurfing gear, kiteboarding gear, foiling gear at https://adventuresportsusa.com/?ref=DAMO and support us and the YouTube channel!Get 5% off any gear using discount code DAMO5My set up:Wing https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/02-collection/products/mantisv2-window?ref=DAMOBoard https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foil-boards/products/01-code?ref=DAMOFoil https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foils/products/00-fusion-carbon-70-base-kit/?ref=DAMOhttps://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foils/products/01-fusion-h-series-wings?ref=DAMOhttps://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foils/products/01-fusion-h-series-tail-stabilizers?ref=DAMOHelmet https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foil-safety/products/helmet-freeride?ref=DAMOImpact vest https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/foil-safety/products/surface-vest?ref=DAMOWetsuit https://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/mens-tops/products/mission-skin-top-2mm/?ref=DAMOhttps://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/mens-wetsuits/products/mission-l-s-springsuit-fz-3-2/?ref=DAMOhttps://adventuresportsusa.com/collections/mens-wetsuits/products/combat-bz-s-s-3-2-0/?ref=DAMOSupport the show
Full Site Editing; we're almost there We're almost there with Full Site Editing in WordPress core. During the meeting that was happening the same day our last episode went live, the team made the decisions for WordPress and the parts of Full Site Editing hitting version 5.8: Improvements from Gutenberg 9.9+.Introduce new blocks (Query, Site Logo, Navigation, etc).theme.json mechanism.Template Editor for Pages/Blank Template.Widgets Screen & Block widgets in Customizer.Design tools: Duotone, Layout controls, padding, etc. What won't make it? Global Styles and Site Editor. If you're left yearning for some Global Styles, Frank Klein's got you covered with an in-depth tutorial on his YouTube channel and the fine folks at WordCamp Miami hosted a livestream Mega Meetup which covered all things Full Site Editing. Okay okay, still hungry for more? Gutenberg Times has a complete wrap up, be sure to listen to the latest episode of the Gutenberg Changelog. It's time to get down to business. Popular WordPress caching/speed plugin WP Rocket is joining group.one a large European internet services conglomerate — including one of the largest web hosts in Scandinavia. WP Media is joining group.ONE as an independent brand. Each company focusing on what it does best to the benefit of our customers. we are maintaining our own identity and organizationour entire team, including the co-founders, will stay the samewe'll continue to develop and maintain Imagify, WP Rocket and RocketCDN GravityFlow has a fantastically detailed overview on how they put customer service front and center for impressive year over year increases in product renewal. If you're looking for two interesting (with air quotes) tools to uncover what WP businesses are for sale or you just wanna snoop: Check out PluginRank Acquisition page and Shahjahan Jewel's PluginStat website for some fun data. Do it Live! With events. I thought it would be useful to mention some events that caught my eye — but you don't have much time left to register. GoDaddy Pro is hosting a slick looking online event called Expand 2021 kicking off on April 27Elementor is putting on a training about Google's upcoming web vitals a mere 1 day later on April 28thPage Builder Summit, which you have plenty of time for, is opening it's doors on May 10th – 14th Now time for the honorable mentions Go to the WP Weekly Sponsor page and support Davinder — he has an opening for you. I can't stop learning about the no code movement and the opportunities around it, check out my latest Matt Report episode with Kieran Ball Lastly, thanks to Lesley Sim the co-creator of Newsletter Glue, the fantastic plugin I use to put this email together. I know I didn't have a link last week and she quickly opened up my eyes to some of the amazing templating features it has — using native Gutenberg. ★ Support this podcast ★
For more information on Alan, visit: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKTLpvmGrT0JN_NGHv4BNQ/featured Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AlanCadiz/posts Lesson business: https://hstwindsurfing.com/hst/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hstmaui/ I hope you enjoyed this episode, more interviews coming soon! Episode Transcript: Aloha. It's Robert Stehlik with blue planet surf. Welcome to the third episode of the blue planet show all about Wingfoot foiling. And this episode is with Alan CodeHS and he is such an inspiration from the very early days of wing filing. He's put out great videos and content and all is always on the latest equipment. So it's really cool to be able to talk to him about the history of our young sport. And I just wanted it to say, honestly, that, I'm a little bit of an introvert. So for me to be able to reach out to these people and ask all these questions and what I want to know about. Yeah. And all that from my home office in the garage is such a cool thing and I really enjoying it. But to be honest, also, it is a lot of work to, set the appointments, prep for the interviews, film it, edit it, and then post it. So I'm not going to be able to do this on a weekly basis. But I'm shooting for every two to four weeks. I'm going to post a new show. This is my third show and I have another show lined up with Annie Reichert another interview coming up soon, and then I have a few more in in the works. Definitely going to keep them coming, but just not on a weekly basis. And of course, if you can't watch this whole video on YouTube, it's, it is a long interview. You can also listen to it as a podcast and on Android or Apple devices, you just open your podcast app and search for the blue planet show, and you'll be able to listen to it while you're driving or doing chores and so on. You can do other things while you're listening as well. So without further ado, please welcome the third guests to the blue planet show. Alan, Kunduz welcome to the show. It's great to have you. You've done so many great videos about wing filing and teaching people out to wink. I really appreciate that. And thank you for joining me on the show. So can we start a little bit about your background and just tell us a little bit how, your background and how you got into wink foiling eventually. Thank you, Robert. Thank you for having me on the show. I've enjoyed your first step. So it's yeah, in a wing foiling for me, like so many people have been, life-changing, it's so addictive and my path to wing foiling has been by chance, really. I come from a background of water sports But it turned out that my neighbor put together a wing to try on a foil board. Let me back up yeah start with how you grew up and all that, like way from the beginning. I'm from Kailua. Boy went to Caldwell high school grew up right near Kyla beach, just a short 32nd walk down to the beach and We lived in enchanted lakes when I was I think I went to third grade elementary, and then we moved down to the beach when I was 12 and it didn't take long before I started surfing. And the neighbor had a Hoby cat that I had access to. And when I. Turned 18. I started wind surfing. I worked at Froome sailing company. I don't know if you remember that little boat store, as you come into Kyla. And Dean was my mentor in the early days, taught me how to sail, set me up with my first wind surfer. Gave me time off to go winging or sorry, wind surfing. When the wind was up on and back then wind surfing was the rage, the addiction. And I. I went to college, but then I dropped out so that I could go wind surfing. I had a opportunity to go to Malaysia, to compete for Neil pride back then. And I thought this opportunity doesn't come along too often. I'm going to take a semester off and go to Malaysia and wind surf. And that turned into about a 10 year career in wind surfing, competitive wind surfing. And I ended up on Maui. The wind is so strong over here. I came over for a month to a two Winser for a month prior to one of the contests. And after the contest was over, I was pretty settled in and there wasn't any need to rush home and ended up staying on Maui on. And I had spent a number of years training and competing and, but I wondered, am I going back to college? What am I going to do? And I fumbled into teaching wind surfing and discovered I had a knack for it. And before too long, had a nice little business going teaching. High-end wind surfing, mainly jiving and water starting. But then people wanted to have their family and friends learn. So I started a beginner program and. The school grew. I've been based in high-tech surf sports for the last 30 years, but I worked with the majority of the shops here on Maui, teaching their clientele, the different water sports. So windsurfing was the main thing, but of course, when there was no wind, we'd teach them just going back to Kailua, growing up in Kayla. That was when Robbie nationals grew up in Kailua too. So did you went surf together with those guys? Robbie and Pete Cabrina and those guys, or? Funny, he has Pete Cabrini lived right next door, right over the next fence. Yeah. And I remember watching him wind surf and doing his first jumps and he. He was shaping boards and he was an inspiration. So I thought, okay, I gotta do this too. Robbie traveled in different circles. He was a little bit younger and it seemed to me he was always off on tour, but he brother, I went to school with his brother and Randy. Yeah. And we were partners in crime going over to windsurf diamond head. And I spent more time with Robbie. I'm sorry with Randy. Okay. Okay. So when, or how did the transition to wing foiling happened? Actually? Do you still windsurf or are you just mostly wing foiling now? Not so much wind surfing. I still run the wind surf school, although COVID has changed that right now, but my daughter is more into wind surfing than whinging. Although I'm trying to convert her to wing surfing on. From wind surfing kite surfing came along and that was all the rage. So I jumped into that and I live the kite surfing, eat, sleep tight surf, eat, sleep, kite surf did some competitions and did the whole peak, but then got over it and got more into sub paddling. We did a lot of sub. In fact, I got a picture here I can share. Yeah let's do some screen sharing. So we get a little bit of more visual stuff too. This was, we did a lot of competition. I don't know how many hundreds of Kosta runs I've done from a LICO down to Kahoot Harbor. Wouldn't be the equivalent of Hawaii, Kai to diamond head kind of thing on. That looks like one of the early SAC boards. Is that the one? No it's styrofoam, but yes, you're right. It's one of Mark rapper, horse SIC boards or sandwich Island construction. Yeah. And Mark is good. Friend of mine known him for decades. He and I, we did the sup paddling and then Kailani. Showed up with that sup board with the foil on it, that kind of rocked the world. And we looked at that and we're like, wow, that looks so cool. And backing up a couple of weeks from that video review Mark, perhaps worse. And my neighbor, Ken winter, and I were having dinner. And after a couple of bottles of wine, we've talked about. Taking one of Ken's foils and putting it on my board and Mark would do the classwork and we thought about, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to put the foil on the set board and we're going to try it out. And it never happened. And about two weeks later, Kai comes out with that video of him going down the coast now putting it together as one thing, but making it work, what Kyle did was exceptional, and I don't know if we would've had the. I don't think, I don't think we would have stuck with it as hard as it was, but after watching him, we were inspired. So we did get some foil boards, both Ken and Mark. And I, we got the foil boards and we started going from Alico when it was blowing 25, 30 knots. And right away, we learned it was really hard. And I had no foil experience and people were telling me, Oh, you got to learn behind a boat. You got to learn in the surf. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. I just want to do it going down the coast. And I was convinced I could do it. And eventually I got a LICO 200 and I could do it and I could stay up for hundreds of yards at a time. And at that point, everyone else was getting pretty good. I can remember one episode where we went. Was that on a really long race board, or what kind of board were you using at that time? At that point we were using I think they were like eight foot sup boards and we were just starting to figure out, and these were Mark was making them custom boards. We're just starting to figure out that the shorter, the board, the more easier it was to pump you didn't have that swing weight up front right on. We were getting smaller and smaller boards. And I have another picture here. Let me see if I can cue it up here. This board here. This was my latest sup board that Mark had shaped for me. I think it was just under six feet. That's about 85 liters had just the front strap, which I use to help pull up on the board, trying to get up on foil. And so it was about this time. That we were trying to go down the coast and having some success. Ken winner was right there with us and he actually was a skilled foiler. He could win sir foil. He could kite foil, but sup foil was tough for him. And the board he had was 130 liter fiberglass board. It was pretty heavy. And trying to pump that up on foil was really taking its toll on his shoulders. One afternoon he was out there in the driveway with this little inflatable wing and, we had seen wings have been around for a long time. And Ken winter is your neighbor, right? So you can see him in his, in your neighbor's driveway playing around with his inflatable toy. Yes. A little background on Ken he's been involved in wind surfing and water sports, his whole life. I first met him in Kailua and the, I think it was 1981 or 1982 Pan-Am windsurfing world cup. And he actually won the event. So I didn't really know him. I knew he was the winner. Kan winner was the winner. And then later on, when I went on tour, I competed with him the number of different venues. But he's always stayed with it as a board designer. Is that kite designer, windsurf designer, and probably the last few years more kite surfing. So he's he's getting new prototypes all the time out there, testing them in the Maui waters and the of wind. And so I knew he had access to, to prototypes. So anyway, he's out there with this inflatable wing and my first impression it was something like you'd get at K-Mart, a little blow up toy. And I thought, what is he doing with that? Can you explain that he was going to use it to get up on foil and go down the coast with us? And I thought he really wants to be out there with us. And then the entertainment began, we'd go out and Alico. And Mark and I would make a left turn and head towards Colley Harbor, and Ken would be going out to see like, where's he going? He'd go over the horizon before we'd see him. And then we'd seen him coming back and I didn't know it at the time, but he had a hard time. I'm going deep, a goofy foot. He needed to switch to regular foot to go deep or to go straight down, wind. And so it was difficult for him and he didn't like most of us, we go to the Flatwater spot, in the Harbor or maybe down to canola, I think on a wahoo, you go over to where is it near Pearl Harbor. I've seen some videos that K lagoon Island. Yeah, that's a good, big, beautiful spot there. So remember we're going out in 25, 30 knots, and he's trying to figure out how to go down wind. And it was entertaining for Mark and he had incredible yard sales where it's like, Oh, is he okay? Wait. Okay. Yeah, I see him. He's back on his board. Did our, Oh no, he's lost his wig. You'll give chance. We'll get the ring. And that happened a few times. And so this went on, I think it was may of 18 when you start. So not that long ago, really think about how quickly the sports progressed. That's true. So it was later towards the fall that Mark and I were waiting for him. And I saw him coming down the swell and he was surfing right. And surfing, left and surfing. And each time he would turn the wing. And I just looked down. I said, that is poetry in motion. I'm ready to try this. And at the end of the run he let me try it. And I fumbled out and fumbled in. But just that short little run, I got to my feet and got it going for a few seconds. And I'm like, okay, I want to try this some more. So that first wing was that like a prototype made by duotone or was it like who, how, who made it and how was it made, built and stuff like that? Duotone has a factory and they, I'm not even sure where it is in Asia or wherever they make their product. And he dials up a plan on his computer, sends it off via email and a short time later he's the FedEx truck is pulling up. Okay. So that first one, did it have a boom, like the wing foil or very first one had a stretch on it. Okay. And the, they had sewn some webbing on it. That was so flimsy that just after a couple, three or four runs, the webbing has had peeled off. Not, it just deteriorated. And then his first one with a boom, I'm not sure what he did. I think he went to the hardware store and he bought a mop or something and removed the, he had the dowel and the little brackets, and then he had lashed those brackets on. And then not too long after that, he was getting a guy here on Maui to 3d print a front end. It was about that time that I took an interest in wanting to try it. So we went down to canola and the first day I, like so many of us that got my knees were rubbed raw and what I was getting rides and I was staying up wind. And remember, I'd come to the sport with knowing how to foil and. Knowing how to sail both wind surf and kite surf. So the wing was pretty intuitive for me and knowing how to foil it came together. And I'm sure I've seen other people just step on and go right from the beginning, but Yeah, I think you have the background in wind surfing and you know how to use a foil, then it's a very easy transition. That's what Zane was saying too. Like the very first time he jumped on it, he was already trying to backflip and civic guts. Yeah, but that's in St. Schweitzer. So yeah. Anyway, the first few the first, second day I tried it, I fell on the boom and broke the front end, the 3d 3d printed front end. And I said, Ken, I can make one that won't break. I've got a TIG welder. And I welded up as simple front end and we were able to lash that on and that that made a huge difference. In the tightness of the rig now, coming from a windsurf background, I've always preferred the boom. It just feels more natural to hold the boom on. And I think Ken he's do a tone, has a couple of different models. They have the unit which has the wing, the handles as well. But I prefer the echo style. Yeah. I'm the same way. Cause this is my windsurfing background. I really liked the boom. And just being able to move your hands around and describe the boom without looking for the handle and stuff like that. But I guess recently I started using wings with handles too, and I kinda got used to that. And there's some advantages to to that, to the handles. I think one thing about the duo Tom booms is that they're add quite a bit of weight to the wing. And you do notice that when you try a later wing. They are coming out with a new model here soon, but the time by the time this interview airs, I think they'll have announced their new product. And I've got some video of that. Yeah, let's talk about that new that's the duotone slick wing, right? We've already seen the videos and stuff of it, which is an interesting concept. So it combines a an inflatable struck with a stiff boom kind of attached to it. Yes, let me see. So it's the slick incorporates the boom into the strep. One of the it's a lot lighter. Yeah. I don't know all the details, but I can tell you that the length of the boom here is the same for all the different sizes. I think they're going to go from a two and a half meter all the way up to a seven meter. With half increments. So four, four, five, five Oh five, five, et cetera, on. And the same boom will fit all the models. So you can just buy one boom for your quiver, or you can buy a boon for each one. Now they also come in carbon as well as the aluminum and the aluminum boons are gonna have a little bit of a oval shape to them, which are very comfortable on your hands. And it gives you a sense of where the wing is without looking at it, what position that wing is in. I know that the carbon one is about a half a pound lighter than the aluminum one and just the size of it is going to be considerably lighter than the echo. And the boom just slides into these nylon pouches on the front and back, I guess it looks like it. Yes. Now the, when you S when you look at that front, let me see if I can get a little bit better angle here that front attachment that's going to be changed slightly. There's there's going to be some padding, some webbing straps that actually Velcro to hold that in. Apparently the guys in Europe, when they were doing tricks, where they back winded that was coming loose. So they've modified it. This is it. This is actually not a production wing. It's one of the prototypes with the logos on it. So there's still a few more changes to make, but for the most part, this is what the wings will look like. So I'm wondering you're saying the boom is the same length for all sizes. So on the bigger wings, have you. Like sometimes I like to put my hand way in the back, like when you're doing a duck jive tag type of turn or or going steep up when you, you want to put your hand way back sometimes. Is it, do you ever feel like you want to put your hand further back then the boom goes or does that no, it's not an issue because the wing is so much tighter. That the range of sheeting in and sheeting out is very tight. It's very tight wing. I don't think I haven't had that problem. So how does it feel on the wave when you're luffing it behind you? Attracts really nice, better than the unit was. I haven't written the unit. I'm sorry. I meant echo the echo, the one. Yes. It's better than the echo. Now that the, if you think of the center strut as on, but the center stride is like the keel in the wind, or like the tail on a kite, it's going to keep the wing pointed into the wind because the strut acts like the rudder echo never had that. And that's one reason why it oscillated so much. Oh yeah. That makes sense. You have to remember a little bit back in. It was 18 that can started and the fall of 18 on it started to get out in videos and social media. And all of a sudden everyone was interested, not just Enthusiasts, but manufacturers, can you make a little video of it? Like action or dispensary? So one of the Delta things with, unlike the echo with the center, strut, it floats. Now if you're used to, that's nothing new. If you're using a wing that on has a center structure. But it's really nice compared to the echo when it sits on the water. It doesn't say that the bloom doesn't sink in when the wind catches it. Yeah. That's nice. Now, when do you think this will be actually in ready in the stores? When can we get our first shipment at blue planet? You're asking the wrong guy here. That's the one thing that's been frustrating me with the duo times is they're kinda hard to get and hard to know when we can actually get them, I think it's not just do a Tom. I think some of it can be chalked up to, the worldwide pandemic, they had to shut their factories down just like we did to, shut our restaurants down and on the supply chain was effected. I know that they were having trouble getting cloth. And this is just secondhand information I'm hearing from my neighbor. I think he did tell me that they have produced a number of units already. But then there's shipping, if it's coming by boat and you heard about that content container ship that went down well, not went down, but all the containers fell over. Yeah. Apparently high-tech had a number of F1 wings. In one of those containers. Oh, wow. So a lot of products was lost there. So it's, I don't know if it's just duo tone. Maybe the other manufacturers have different sources, but no, it's the same. I guess ozone has their own factory, so they're Little bit more it's more clear, like how long it's going to take and when they're going to ship it and stuff like that, you can, it's easier to predict, but yeah, I know. I know. Everybody's I know just the materials you have to order six months in advance. So this is a video that I put together with the little GoPro speedometer. And what I can tell you about the performance of these wings is that they are head and shoulders better than anything I've written. They're super tight. They go up wind unbelievable that the outline. You know that they have a square shape, so that wing tip, you can bring it right down low to the water. And it's really efficient. If the wing tip does catch, it clears really easily. Yeah. They're really tight. Now this is a four or five though that I'm using. And this was just a couple of days ago. The wind's been cranking here. And I was really powered up with this four or five or 20 miles per hour. That's pretty fast. So that's a port or starboard. Tack is my weak side. I'm a regular foot. So this is my stronger side. And this is costly Harbor that we're looking at. Turn the sound down. Whoa, there you go. At 26 miles per hour. That's. Yeah, that's impressive. What foil are you using? What, yeah. What do you have any advice on the foils on I'm using a GOFO? Gofoil on, I have all their I have a lot of the different models on I mentioned earlier. I have the 200, that's where I started and it's where I start. When I'm teaching people, I use the 200 on. I also have the GL series as well as the NLS and the one I'm writing in this video is it's actually a custom on towing. I think Al's only made a few. I think he, he gave one to some of the big wave to tow surfers on the North shore of Oahu. Slick. I heard about that. I think Derek Hamas, Saki has one of those, maybe I think I've seen it. So it's not one that's I don't know if he's planning to bring that to market. Let's see 28 miles an hour was your top speed. It looked like that's pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah. Now here's another wing. This is from more recently and it's turn the sound down. This is one of the prototypes. From several months ago I'm lucky enough that can, let's meet, use some of the older the stuff that didn't make the cut and, he'll make a wing and he'll figure out, okay, this works really well. And this doesn't work so well. And there's been a number of people on Maui that have been recipients of the seconds on the really bad ones end up in the trash. The really good ones he keeps. And then some of the others like this one, and this is a three-three and it's blowing. Gosh, it was gusting up to 40 this day. And my first run, the wing was under inflated. My wife was using it. I don't think she pumped it up hard enough. So I came back and pumped it up and then did another run. Now the foil that I'm using is I don't think it's going to be available unless out puts it into production, but he is working on another wing that another foil that is foils are underwater wings are in the air working on another foil. That is considerably faster. He, let me take a run on it and I didn't have the speedometer when I used it. But it felt really fast. I'm hoping he'll get me one of those when they come into production. Yeah. And then, I guess faster foils are usually smaller surface area and thinner profile, that's and then. More high aspect type of shape. Is that what makes them fast? Would you say? Or what's how did it look? Smaller, thinner equals speed, but of course you're going to need more wind and more skill to get up the speed to get going and get up on the foil. Yeah. One thing that I've found now, when I first started teaching, I had them LICO two 80. I don't know if you have one of those. Yeah. That was like super bouncy when they went on the original mass, right? Yeah. I read that in the early days. The two 80 I thought would be really good for teaching people and it does foil it about a walking speed, but there's so much drag that you really have to push the thing hard. And for people who are, excuse me, for people who are just learning, how to use the wing, trying to power that wing, to push the board up on foil it. And actually the 200 people did better on the 200 because they, there was less drag and they could get it up to foil speed easier. And what I've found is that in my own learning, as I've graduated down in smaller and smaller wings, that. The tiny wing does take more speed to get going, but there's less drag to push it through the water. So it seems like you can get up to that takeoff speed. Easier. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Makes sense. Yeah, I've got that same experience. So when you say you still use the Maliko 200 for teaching people how to wing. Yeah. Yes. Now I did do one modification. I cut the mass down from 24 to 15 inches. Oh, wow. 15 inch mass. Okay. Yeah. And that's nothing new, there's been other foil manufacturers that have made different mass lengths for beginners. Is it safer to, right? You don't when you breach it on crashes from as high, sorry. Yes. In fact, when it does breach it's a rude drop, but usually. They'll maintain enough speed to kick it back right up again. And the importance, you know of not too high, not too low. That makes sense. Do you have so many good videos teaching how to, to wing foil and and then yeah, actually also you're you have that Patrion channel and to sign up for this yesterday and it's really cool. I don't know if you mind me sharing some of these posts, but I guess yeah, if you pay like $5 a month or so. You can choose what, how much you want to contribute, but then you get access to all these really detailed tech, technical videos on how to wing foil, which is really cool. Like this one here about attacking. I watched yesterday and it's I'm going to turn off the sound here, but it just has really good instructions. I have to say. It's ex what really well done, Alan, and And yeah. So if you're learning how to wink fun, I guess that's something too, like maybe talk a little bit about how the pandemic has affected your business and, like how you transitioned to doing more of this kind of virtual coaching and things like that. Sure. Thank you. I I've been running the winter school since 85. No. I came to Maui to wind surf, but like I said, I skipped college and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. And I fell into to what I love to do. And that's teach wind surfing, then develop the business and it's grown over the years. We've diversified into surfing and kiting and sup and although wind surfing and sup is our bread and butter. I'm sorry. Windsurfing. Kiting is our bread and butter. When foiling came along on it sorry. It's just, the video is distracting me when when foiling came along wing foiling on, I thought, Oh, this is something I could teach in the school. And you remember Ken, he had this stream of prototypes coming into the neighborhood here and. People were really intrigued by foiling that's my wife, they were really intrigued by foiling and they wanted to do it. And Robert business was really good. I was the only one that had the wings, none of the shops there were, there was nothing available by them yet. Yeah. So I was sharing the wings and giving lessons and turning people on anyone that asked, I'd let them try it. And we were poised on. I was getting boards and sales and training instructors, and we were poised to, teach wing surfing and then COVID hit and changed everything. Shut everything down, turned Maui into a car park, full of tourist cars on all of the restaurants were closed and we just hunkered down. We went to Costco's everybody else and load it up and So during this downtime, besides doing the house maintenance and the things that everyone did, I thought that I would put together some videos or do a video on this is how we teach wind foiling. And that was, I don't know if you have that one. That's a, it's on YouTube. It's my daughter's to star on, but that one put it up and. This one very hard to get up in Seattle. It's older. It's older. Huh. Oh, maybe on all the videos. He, Oh, part one part two. That's it right there. So I just took my daughter down to the beach nearby and took my dog down and took the video camera and just put together. This was the introduction. That's my prom foil board that I use for regular surfing on. And it works on the wing too. That's anyway, on. We just went down and had some fun and my daughter, at this point, she was able to foil and go up wind and we were just going to use the big board. Yeah. So I put her on the big board and we just went through, this is how we teach. And it was the idea was a infomercial on what we're doing at the school. And there was so much positive feedback that I thought I'd do part two. And that's the one where I'm getting up on foil in the Harbor. And people were so appreciative that I was doing that. And a friend said you should have a Patrion account now, which I didn't know what that was. And I went home and looked at it and realized, this is me right now. Because again, COVID had shut down the business. And I thought this is a way that I could take my skills online and teach people and not just one at a time at the beach, like I normally do, but be able to reach everybody. So that's what I've been working on through the COVID thing. It's I'm still in the red, but I'm getting close to, paying off my equipment, but the. Appreciation far outweighs any monetary support, that, people telling me that I've helped them do this and do that. And thank you as well. You do the same thing with so many of your videos. I How many videos have you done that helped people? It's awesome. Yeah. Thanks Alan. For me, it's different though, because for us, depending on it was actually like boom times because everybody. And nobody could travel. People had extra spending money that stimulus checks, and then they just, bye. Yeah. You could go out in the water. That was the safest thing you could do. So it's been actually very good for our business in terms of equipment sales, but yeah, in terms of tourists, there's nothing right now. Still, I think it hasn't really recovered at all. Let me let me do a couple of quick screen shares as well. Okay. Let me turn mine off again here. Hold on. Okay. So yeah, I'll let you do the screen share. Okay. This is my daughter and this was her first session with the wing on a winter Ford with the daggerboard on the wing she's using, this was the first. I guess you'd call it a echo prototype. This wing was really solid. This thing really changed everything. It has five buttons or something. Yeah. It had battens prior to the battens. Ken was using these wings just to go down wind and you didn't meet any battens because he was holding it like a Spinnaker sale. It wasn't until we started sailing at canal hall, going up wind that they were flapping. And that's really where a lot of the changes began. I met my wife, wind surfing. This is an old picture. I met her in 87 and we have two daughters together. My oldest one on my left. She's living in California, married my younger one. Is living at home here with her boyfriend and she's having a really good time. She works up at the crater. I don't want to say it's a as a park ranger, but she's working up at the summit with people up there and she also winged foils. But she prefers to rock climb, free climb on. Let's see, where do you go on Maui for free climbing? Is that there's a number of places. There's one over in key hay and over on the backside. And I don't have any pictures of that cued up. This is my wife when she realized that my old board, her board. Fits in the back of her car. Big smile. Yeah. He loves wing foiling because it's just so easy. You pump up the wing and you're ready to go. Yeah. Assuming you have a car that fits your foil and she's also COVID has. Changed our relationship for the better previously she would man, my office at high-tech here, our office. I don't know if you can see this. So I have this little kiosk in high-tech and pre COVID. She would spend her days in there meeting and greeting people and everything to do with the school. We have a. A school van that goes down to the beach for the wind surf year on. And when COVID hit, that was all shut down, but we could go to the beach and wing. She's been putting her time in, out on the water. There's my old sup board, which is perfect for her. It's about 85 liters. She's got the a that's one of the prototype wings. That's the one that I was doing the speed run on earlier. A lot. And she's, she's making about almost nine out of 10 of her jobs now, which is something that she didn't quite do in winter. If you, even though she's been a lifelong windsurfer, In a lot of ways, like I always struggled doing tax on a small wave board windsurfing, but on a wing. It's actually, I find it way easier to do attack because you don't have to jump in front of the wing and stuff like that. So in a lot of ways, when winging is actually easier than windsurfing, I find one of the things that makes it so addicting besides the feeling of floating on air of snowboarding and powder, if you've ever skied or snowboarded, the feeling of powder is exceptional. On there's no pounding. But the, besides all those great things, and it's quick to set up and an easy is that each time you go out, maybe even each run, do you learn something new? And it doesn't matter if you're a beginner, just holding the wing for the first time or floating around on a big board. Forget the foil, just sail the board around. I've had people. Do the lessons on the big board and say, this is so fun, and it is, but you haven't even got on the foil board yet and you're loving it. It gets better. It's truly addicting. Th this being up on the floor that sensation of flying over the water, it feels more like you're flying than going over water. So it's this, that is so cool. And you know that, I don't know if you've been watching any of the America's cup racing last year with the catamaran and this year with the monohulls. It's absolutely incredible how fast they go. Yeah. And us mere mortals will probably never, ever get the chance to ride on one, forget owning one on, but you can have your own personal hydrophobic yacht right there. For relatively inexpensive and in a way it's, I don't know, to me it's almost more interesting because you're basically controlling it with your body weight, not, it's not like a mechanical control. It's like you're controlling the foil, it's your body weight. I would say it's one of the more freer feelings that you can have and the. Again, it was in may of 18 that Ken first got that blow up wing. Now he's not the first handheld wings have been around for a long time. And there's another guy flash Austin. He deserves the credit for being the first one on Maui to put a wing together on a foil board. And he went out and foiled out and back and got some video. And then I think his wing broke apart and he never put it back together. It didn't stick with it, but prior to him, I saw the footage of him doing that. And I thought, no, that looks crazy. Yeah. Nobody really thought that it could be what it is today. And I believe it's Tony Lugosi that sometime around 15 or 16 made an inflatable wing, not necessarily with the intention of foiling, but I think he just, put together an inflatable weighing instead of ones with struts and spars and on. And he. Apparently put that on the foil board and made it work on a foil board more as a novelty on, I don't think he thought that it would take off, but he was ahead of his time there and nobody has a patent on it or anything like that. So it's just nice that's open for wide open for development and stuff like that, where people don't have to worry about licensing it and so on, right? Yes. So it's on. Really since I think Ken is probably responsible for this resurgence or, this round of it anyway, but he, it was only may of 18 that it started. Yeah. Yeah. And I always wondered why you, how you got the all the new wings and the new prototypes so early, but now I know it's cause you're Ken when there's your neighbor. So no wonder, but obviously also, you're a really good spokesperson for duotone. I think that's that? Your videos are one of the reasons why I got into Wingfoot foiling too, I'm not an official spokesperson for duo tome. I'd rather think of myself as an ambassador for the sport right on. I'd like to see everyone, try it and Excel. It's just that my position is that I've been using these duotone wings. Okay. Let's go talk a little bit more about equipment. You said, and I don't know if you have some video of yourself using your board and stuff like that, but you said you only use a front foot strap. You don't really jump because because you're worried about injury and you often use a harness and things like that. So can you talk a little bit about, for myself, I've never even tried a harness. I felt it's not really necessary. I feel like it doesn't, there's not as much pressure in the wing as when you're windsurfing. So what made you start using a harness and and yeah, maybe talk a little bit about the gear you use and why you set it up the way you did. Now? I did do a video on YouTube. Maybe I can screen share on how to use the harness, all about the harness. Okay. And this, I did this last year. Maybe even longer initially it was the boom is right there and you're sailing along and you think I could probably use a harness here, so yeah. So let's talk a little bit about using a harness and why yeah. Why you started using it and so on. First I thought, let's just try it and see if it works. And I went and made a custom harness line and I pulled my old windsurf harness out there. It is, and put it on and went out and gave it a few runs and decided, yeah, it was possible, but I didn't really need it. Didn't you know, it wasn't really happening. And. What I realized now is that the harness I made a custom harness line, a real long one, thinking that I needed a long one because the wing is way up here. But when it's over your head, there's no load on the wing, it's when you're going up wind that the Boone comes down the wing tips, low to the water. And when you're going up, when there's a lot of lateral pole and it's at that point that you need or you. Would find a harness line comfortable. So I gave it another try. I pulled out the regular harness line that decline just regular windsurfing harness line and got my old kite harness out. That's the one we're looking at now. And maybe later people watching can watch this video to know what we're talking about here. But the main thing is that you have a hook that allows you to quickly get out of the. The harness line. Yeah. You don't want it as small as a kite surfing hook yet, or the yes, but more open, not yet. And then, when you have the hook getting on your board, you can damage your board with the hook. So I go through a couple different methods to get on the board. And there's another video that I have on YouTube as well, where I'm riding my prone board. And I talk about how to get up when you're using a harness hook. Talk about the length of the harness line and the placement. So would you say when you hold the boom it's about where your elbow is? Is that about the length or the middle? Yeah. The, we used to grab the boom and then pull the loop down to your elbow. And that was, or to the crotch in your arm here. And that was a good general ballpark. Some people like them shorter. Some people like them longer. There's only a handful of people using harness lines over here at Ken winners, one of them on, and. There's a few other people that have tried them on and I'm getting people online talking about them. And there's certainly a lot of chatter online. Yeah. A lot of people talking about it online here on a wahoo. I haven't seen anybody using a harness, but but yeah, I find it interesting. Not intriguing on it's not necessary. You don't have to have it. There are some drawbacks, it often it'll hit you in the face when you're trying to pump up on the board. But if it's swings a lot on you're wearing the harness hook, you can't lie on the board unless you unclip it. Because you'll damage your board. You just can't lay flat on the board if you have to paddle or something, but it's easy enough to unclip it and let it hang to the side on. And like I said, it's a little harder to get on the board sometimes, but there's ways around that. When you're in the harness going up wind with the bigger wing on, as soon as you get comfortable with it, you'll love it. Yeah. I can see that cause you're basically just using your body weight to, to power up the not you don't use your arms any more, really just for control. Same as when you went, surfing it in higher wind with a smaller wing. It is a little scarier to hook in, we haven't had that many light wind days over here on, or I haven't had that many sessions out on my six meter. I do have a six meter wing and going out in 10 to 12 knots with the harness and going up wind is a dream it's so comfortable and steady. Your weight does the work. Your arms are just relaxed. It's a really wonderful feeling. On, you're not gonna use the harness going downwind, just the way that, excuse me, the way the wing folds out. You're just not going to hook in. It's really just for going up, wind on. And I there's a shot of my foot straps on, I only have the front foot straps. I switch like a windsurfer I'll switch tacks after each run. Sometimes I might do a short run where I ride switched or tow side. I don't have a back strap because I moved my back foot around a lot and I did have it for a while and I fell and tweaked my ankle. And I decided that I don't really need the back strap because I'm not jumping. And. It just was getting in the way and I don't want to injure myself on, and I made a pledge early on to myself that I wouldn't take this sport to the air because where does it stop? And I'm really glad I did because seeing balls Mueller doing those loops. He's inspiring, and in the beginning he was throwing himself up in the air and let's try this or let's try that. And just coming down in the heap. In fact I made a comment on one of his Instagram pages that you have nine lives and that one just costs you one. The one where he goes in the shore break, it just gets eaten up in the shore break. Yeah, with the foil County going over him and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I. I injured myself a number of years ago. It was pretty serious back injury and I've healed up a hundred percent, but you told me about this injury yesterday. Can you tell us a little bit more how exactly how that happened? So I was surfing at hokey-pokey on a relatively big day and I did a late takeoff and I free fell head first and I put my arms up. To protect from the board. And I landed on the water like this, instead of, like this let me stop the screen sharing so you can show us what you're. Yeah. Okay. So how did what happened? I was surfing Keepa and I just did a late tape off and went overhead first. And I put my arms up in the air to keep from getting hit by the board. And I impacted the water like this instead of, like this. And it was a compression fracture on my spine. What paratroopers get landing hard in their bone. And it was, I've healed fine. But it was pretty close to what they call a burst fracture, where pieces of the bone enter the spinal cord and paralysis occurs. So I had a near life-changing experience there. And I think that was when I was 55, 54. So since then I've kinda I've just decided not to take it to the air. I've stopped kite surfing. I don't kite surf anymore because I don't trust myself on to not jump. And on wing foiling is something that's less. I it's a lot safer than so many other things out there. And I see Some older folks down at the beach and the oldest relative, I'm 59. I know when I paddle out at who Keepa, I'm like the oldest one out there. Now that was kin winter catching a wing tip while he was in the harness. That's one thing that if you're going to try a harness, you want to be aware of, if that wing tip catches again, it doesn't end up well, And I talk about this in the video with sound yeah. Catching right here. And then you're in the heart instead of falling on the wing, you can't get out, you can't unhook. So if you're going to try the harness, that's something to consider. This is not something that, that you're going to go and use the first week of wing foiling. You want to have some skill. All right. So yeah. The other thing I wanted you to talk about was this cool move that I really was intrigued by. And I still haven't been able to pull it off, but that's the starfish. So how do you get into it in the first place? So you I kinda, I sorta did this by accident. Just hold it right there for a second. If you will. Yeah. Yeah. I was giving a lesson to a novice sailor and he was out, I believe he was on the, he was on the big board. I don't know if it was the wind surfer or the big foil board. And he went out and he did the turn and he had flipped the wing over any came out of it the other way. And I'm like, wow, how did he do that? He did it by accident. But the way he jived the wing and spun the board right around. I said, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to go try that. So I went out and I was trying to do what I saw him do. And I'm not sure what I did, but I was flipping the wing over just like this. Okay. And the wind got behind me and something like that. And I said, okay, I'm going to. Try and do that and get the wing behind me. So I went out a few more times and I was able to flip the wing over. And as you turned down wind, you might back up there a little bit, as you turned down, wind, you're moving with the wind. So the amount of pressure on the wing is minimal. So if you want to do this, it's relatively easy. You start your job. You turn the wings so that the wing tip drags in the water or starts to invert. So you flip the wing over. Okay. And then here, turn the corner so that you're going with the wind. And at this point, as long as it's not blowing a Gale, so the wing is almost weightless because you're moving with the wind. At this point, you're coasting on the foil. You get your hand on the handle and you can bring it up behind you. Now at this point if there's enough wind. The wind will keep the wing against you, just friction. So I did this, I was goofing off with it and I was going down the coast thinking, okay, this is pretty cool. How am I going to get out of it? I don't know. I'll figure that out when I get there. And so I got down there and I reached up and grabbed the handle and flipped it over and sailed away. And I thought that was cool. And I had put in a full day and I packed up and I was driving home and Alex Garrett calls me and says, dude, I went to get my camera. I got to get your new move. This is Alex. Yeah. Filming this. So I'm like, nah, I'm like, no, I'm good Al. And he's Oh man, you gotta do it, man. Someone else is gonna do it and claim your move. And I'm like, eh, And I'm halfway home and I'm looking, the wind's blowing. It's a beautiful sunny day. And I thought, we should do this. Why the sun's out. So I turned around, I went back, called them up and said, I'm coming back. And I went out and did this. So it's a fun move. It's relatively easy to do and easy to get out of on. The trick is you turn down when, and you've slipped the wing upside down and then get the handle and pull it around behind you. And then to get out of it, you just reach it up and bend over it. It's flip or jive over your head. So cool. I've yet to do it, on a coast run. I think we're going to go today. It's blowing pretty good over here. I think we're going to do an illegal run windy day, for sure. Yeah. Oh, okay. So you ended up going back to the beach, setting up again and then pulling it off like that. That's a good sign. Yeah, that's awesome. All right. I think we already went over the time we allotted. So appreciate you talking about all this details and What do you do? Like to stay healthy? What are your secrets to staying fit and young at your, Oh, just trying to stay active, just trying to do something every day. I I haven't been doing much cross training lately on, since I started doing the videos, I've had a lot of time sitting in front of the computer. What I have been trying to get out probably like four times a week to wing foil on. So that's been my main exercise wing forelimb. How long do you go out in the, on the water? Like I find sometimes when I go out for too long, I just start hurting myself. Do you have a certain amount of time? That's good for you or you just stay out as long as you can. Usually I'd say around two hours is my average session. Remember I have a harness. And when I did that speed run with the little yellow wing, just a couple of days ago, my wife was using it and she doesn't use the harness line. So I'm like, okay, I just it's really windy. I want to go get the GoPro speedometer going. And I. I went out and I did my first speed run and I turned around and I'm going back up when, and I'm like, Oh no harness line Ang. And just those two runs without the harness line, my shoulder was starting to hurt, and I don't know how many miles I've paddled surfing and how many times I've wind surfed. It's my shoulders. I'm not going to get a knee replacement. It's going to be a shoulder replacement. Yeah, that's pretty common. If I have to, I hope I never have to do that, but my shoulders have more miles than my knees or hips on. But. I rely on the harness more than I realized, trying to go up in there. It's just that time of hooking in and resting your arms, resting your shoulders. Just that one leg up wind, then you're fresh to go downwind. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. For me too. Yeah. Sometimes I just put my arms straighten out my arms and hold the wing over my head and just relax a little bit. And even without a harness, you can, but the, I can see how, if you have bad shoulders, it's not an easy thing to do after a while. All right. So anything, do you have any sponsors that you want to plug or anything that you want to mention like that? I I'd like to thank Alex Guera for taking care of me with the foils. He makes a great product. Ken and duotone have been very generous with their products on, and I have to admit that I haven't used a lot of other stuff, but there's, a lot of everyone has a lot of good stuff out there and it really doesn't matter what you use. The main thing is that you're using it, that you get out there. And this sport you learn every time you go. And it's a good physical workout. And you think about it too. So it gets you thinking on you won't regret it on. I. If there's one thing one negative thing. And that is that it's very addicting and it's gonna it's gonna take some of your time from something else, which for better or worse and yeah. And your wallet will feel a little bit lighter too. There's that aspect. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you want to leave people with? And any last words? Just to get out on the water and give it a try, you won't regret it. And if yeah it's good to try new things. And living here in Hawaii, living here in Hawaii, most of our days are like other people's vacations. Take advantage of where you live and what you do. You certainly living your dream and that, and I hope That things get back to where you can actually make money with your business. Again, sorry to hear that you're struggling right now, but hopefully people can support your patron account and your great instructional videos online. Keep posting that kind of stuff. That's really cool. Very helpful. I think for people learning, I think we're starting to come out of it here. Then you can see light at the end of the tunnel. I think we're going to, we're going to be all right. Yeah. All right. For this for the boots on it, show who do you think I should interview next? Do you have any any ideas on who I should talk to? Let's see. I can think of a few different people while Ken would be interesting on, but you said he's you might not want to talk to me. Can you ask him. Yeah, I can ask him. In fact, I can I'll try and send you his email Mark rappel, Horst. He's a very interesting guy. He did SIC. He did the paddling he's into whinging for sure. Alex he's got a lot of history on yeah. Robbie Nash is of course an icon on some up and coming people over here on Maui. I think probably one of the best foils here on Maui. And he's an exceptional winger too, is came to wild. He's amazing. He has some really strong sweet moves. It was down at the Harbor not too long ago. And he goes, Hey, Alan, I figured something out. And I'm like, what is it? Can he says, when you bring the wing down to the rail, you can go so much faster up wind. And I said, Oh no, you figured that out. Okay. It's like closing the gap on a wind surfboard right now. Yes. And I talk about it in the video for how to go up wind. Yeah, but he is so fast and so maneuverable, he's just a real pleasure to watch. And he always uses this pretty small wing too, right? He's just like smaller wings and just once he gets going, then he doesn't need as big of a wing. You're talking smaller foil or smaller wing, a wind wing. He does use a smaller wing. And some of his foils are pretty small, but I've seen him like glide exceptionally far. He's making his own foils and really working at it. Yeah. I've listened to some of his interviews on the progression project and he's like very thoughtful. He thinks about everything and has a lot of interesting theories and tests out stuff and he makes his own tail wings and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, he'd be definitely, he's definitely someone I want to talk to soon. Yeah. And he's just a kid too, so he's got lot of future there. Yeah. Other up and coming, let's see. There's a whole bunch of kids that are getting into it over here. Yeah. I think one of the cool things about wing foiling too, is that it's such a diverse group of people. Like you have a lot of young kids getting into it, people with a surfing background, wind surfing, kite surfing background, a lot of different backgrounds. Plus I think just people are so intrigued by it. Even if they have no water sport experience, they're interested in it. So yes, it appeals to everybody. There's a lot of old time wind surfers that I haven't seen for years. That are down there, like the old days wind surfing, but they're down there trying to figure it out on. There's another guy on nice gentlemen. Ileka 250 pounds. Oh, I'm not suggesting him for an interview, but he is on he's down there all the time. But the point is he weighs 250 pounds. And he's almost as graceful as cane. He's really smooth. He can do a lot of tricks on, there's no such thing as a 250 pound windsurfer freestyle stylist. You just, you can't be 200, 250 pound sup paddler. The big guys, they're just, I'm sorry, but there's a disadvantage when you weigh 250 pounds, but it doesn't seem to affect him. Now. He uses a little bit bigger wing than everyone else and his foil, it's an access foil. That's got a really high aspect. It's got a huge wingspan on it on, but the, the, and that I've been teaching kids to Winser for decades and it's pretty easy to put them on the raft. With the little wing and they drift out and they turn around and they drift in and with a lot of effort, you can get them planning on a little board and a smaller sale, but generally they just don't have the weight to make it work. But with foiling, I'm seeing these little kids on little wings going out and foiling and. And doing it quickly, there they're up and foiling in a matter of days. And they're out there riding around where trying to get them to do that on a wind surfboard would take a year or two. I have always felt like on for me personally. I brought a lot of background, wind surfing and kiting and everything to this sport. And I was one of the guys that just stepped on and went, made it go. And I really got a head start on everyone else. But when I see these kids that are coming on there, where are they going to take this sport? Not just, in their maneuverability, but when they start doing these tricks in the surf. Really just starting to stress the surface of what's possible. I think I, there's going to be so much progression in the sport, it's just amazing. But actually I wanted to ask you if you have someone that has no experience in water sports, no foiling background, and they want to learn how to wing for like how, what is your progression and teaching them like, like how do you start them out? I start them off on the big winter Ford with a dagger board. And we didn't talk about this in the video. Maybe. I don't know if you can add that in later, but a lot of people show up with a sup board and the support has the volume to get them out there to float around. But without the daggerboard, they end up downwind very quickly. The daggerboard does two things. One is it prevents lateral slip and it's at a pivot point. To steer the board right on. I know that they, some of the shops, I don't know if high-tech does, but I think some of the shops have like glue on or strap on daggerboards that you can put on your set boards. That, excuse me, that might be something that you could offer even as a rental, take your board that I sold you last year, put this on it, take the wing. Go down to someplace. I don't know if has landfall on the downwind side, but someplace like Kyla Bay might where go out and learn how to sail it out, turn around and sail back with the goal of coming back to the same spot. And when my students are able to push that wind surfboard almost onto a plane. That tells me that they're loading the wing, that they've got enough sense to sheet in and sheet out. And when they can come back to the same spot, they know how to turn around and they know on how to steer the wing to get the board to go up wind. Once they can do that. Then the next step is to go on the foil board. And, I wanted to ask you about, and you never take them behind the boat or anything like you don't do the full practicing behind the boat. You don't really need that. I guess once he know how to handle the wing, that's your power source right now in a perfect world behind a boat would be great. Maybe an eco oil might be the next best thing. Have you done much equaling? Yeah, I have done it a bunch. Do you offer it lessons at all? Do you have them in the shop? No longer offered lessons or rentals, just because of the cost of liability insurance, but we refer that. We refer people. There's a company called experience here on Oahu that we refer people to not see it. . I ideally, in a perfect world behind a boat or jet ski, or even on an equal would be great. But the reality of I'm sure it's just as hard on Oahu as it is. Maybe it's worse here on Maui on to get permits, to do. Stuff behind a boat. You have to go through the state and get the permit to the state and Oh, just to, yeah. Not many places you can do it actually. That's true. And then even here on the North shore on the rules and regulations for jet-skis during the winter, during the whale season, you need to have permits and license, and it's a thrill craft. If you're going to go in the surf, you need the toe thing and it's just. Yeah, it's the reality, but I've had a lot of people who come with no foil experience, get the get the feeling for the wing on the big board and then apply it to the foil board. The big flow with the short mask, with the big floaty board on a lot of people have learned that way on. And then they're off to get their own equipment and practice on their own on. Awesome. Yeah, I and I think whinging is probably the easiest way to learn how to foil, other than behind a Boulder on the NFL, probably. It's definitely much easier, I think, to learn how to wing foil or it's a four line with a wing then in the waves, cause then there's a whole. Additional complication of calving to catch a wave and get up on your feet and all that kind of stuff. If you're surfing and even stand up, paddle surfing is not that easy to catch the wave and feeling. I had that discussion with a guy this morning. Who's actually our email is actually a winger that can foil and it's too windy over here. The last couple of days, it's just been smoke on the water. So he says he wants to try prone. On his set board and I'm like he's got an 80 liter board and I'm like, no, that's too big. You need to get a prone board if you want us if you want a prone and yes, it's easier. It's going to be easier to prone in the surf than it is to suck in the surf. He has no sup experience and trying to sup for the first time you need to have a real easy Waikiki style way, but of all the sports, whether it's kite surfing, Or wind surfing prone, surfing sub foiling. If you've never done any of that, that it's going to be easiest to learn. I believe with a wing. I agree, ideally behind a boat or a might be the next best thing next easiest way. But again, the logistics of. Getting a boat you need to drive or you need a place. I have a boat and I took my wife out. We did a snorkel trip to Molokini and I brought the foil along and my daughter and her friends, and we all took turns on the foil. And my wife got up and scissored Oh, Damaged your ribs. And she was out for six months. And then, so she's better. So we'd go back to the beach and we're going to Duane foil. And she goes out on the wing full board and neither one of us thought of a vest. And she fell and did the same thing another six months. So she's got a late start. Oh, she is determined though to happen and she's still going. That's awesome. Yeah. Wow. I've watched a lot of your videos and you do a really great job of, filming and editing and it's really easygoing and the information is really clear and concise and Yeah, that's a lot it is a lot of work too, to put out good content, but I try, just try to be consistent, tried to do one a week. That's my goal, and then, we definitely see a, I see a lot of rewards from that too. People appreciate it and people support our business because people know about our business because of the videos. So it's yeah, it's a win-win. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That again, that was the whole reason why I started the YouTube stuff. And then. Then the Patrion stuff just fell into place. And then I think once, once people started coming back to Maui, it'll definitely, you'll see a lot of returns from that. People are going to seek you out because of your videos. People will be like, Oh yeah, this guy knows what he's doing. So I'm sure your business is going to do well. Going forward. It's going to just get better and better planning on coming to a walkthrough to visit my dad. Oh, probably in the, he gets his second COVID shot on the 3rd of March and I thought I'd give him a week to, get solid. And then then I can come over without worrying about bringing anything. Okay. Yeah. Let's let's meet up when you here. And maybe we can do a video together to do a collaboration. Yeah, maybe I just would like to wing it. Okay. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Flat Island is super fun actually, when the winds are right direction and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And might be too early for a South swell, but Is it Kahala? Where is it? That's where we ended up going a lot, just cause it's easy. And there's like showers and stuff like that. But diamond head is also really fun. We like going out at diamond head it's kinda like the old days of windsurfing. When there's a South swabbed diamond that gets good. And there's a few other spots like Hickam air force base. I have a, my wife is in the military so I can go there. And that's I just went there for the first time, a couple of days ago. And it was amazing. It's like a super smooth wave there. That's protected from the wind, so right by the airport runway. It's awesome. Yeah, there's a few good spots. And then on the North shore guy to go out at reviews and stuff like that, and there's some good winging on the North shore for sure. Got a lot of good spots on the wall. I got a lot of that over here. I'd rather just, I'd rather just cruise around and Kyla the mellow stuff. Yeah. And that's what Kahala is pretty nice. Kayla is good, like a lot of times for beginners, I don't really recommend it that much, especially if you're regular foot, because first of all, you're going out on your diff opposite side. So it's hard to get going. If you're not used to Being switched, having your stent switched, and then you ended up going downwind and then you have to walk back up the beach and it's, it's can be quite exhausting and it's hard to get off the beach in the first place. If you don't know how to go Upland, so it's not an not actually I find it not a great
Tom Hebert is the founder of ‘New Cal Style' – Tom Hebert was a big part of the professional freestyle circuit in the mid 2000s and he became Vice World Champion twice during that time. Tom is also team rider for Duotone kiteboarding. Follow me: http://kitesurf365.libsyn.com https://www.instagram.com/kitesurf365/ https://www.facebook.com/The-Kitesurf365-Podcast-343360602847915/ To support the show; Rate and leave a comment on iTunes or To receive 1 FREE audiobook and 30 day free trial go to: www.audibletrial.com/Kitesurf365
Lorne Hale Is the Tech Rep for Duotone North America We sit down and talk all thing Duotone and he gives a real inside to what's happened over the last 3 months. https://www.duotonesports.com Follow me https://www.instagram.com/kitesurf365/ https://www.facebook.com/The-Kitesurf365-Podcast-343360602847915/ http://kitesurf365.libsyn.com To support the show; Rate and leave a comment on iTunes or To receive 1 FREE audiobook and 30 day free trial go to: www.audibletrial.com/Kitesurf365
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