Towing a foil behind a boat

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Lessons:

1. Try the foil further forward on the board.
2. If you are kneeling in the wrong place it is difficult to move;
3. Acceleration can pull the person forward and the nose of the board down
4. When the foil comes up the loose hand should go up into a slack-lining stance to help with roll control.
5. Work out at what speed the foil comes out of the water, get to it, then stay at that speed (no faster).

I have three videos of me getting it mostly wrong. I will watch these some more and try to find more things that I can learn.

Foilsurfing beginners.

Two things that are wrong in this video:

1. They are carrying their boards nose first - should be tail first.
2. They are letting the nose ride high on the take-off.
When this happens, the wing stalls then dives.

If James did not have a broken leg he could be out in the water (at North Steyne) telling them..

Kai Lenny breaks things down with key points from how to set up your foilboard, stance and proper riding technique in this video.
naishfoils.com/foil-surfing-101-with-kai-lenny

Wearing a watch - Suunto

I had been getting down about my lack of success with the foil. It seems that every waves ends with a wipeout and that is all I had been thinking about afterwards. Now I have now found a cure.

By recording my activity when I surf foil I am able to see how many waves I have caught; how fast I went and my total time surfing. And I can call up the session and review it.

The one above was a bit under an hour, I caught 7 waves and my top speed was 21.2 km/h

Pumping

I knew all along that pumping was worth doing but I was focussed on getting up and foiling before trying it.

Anyway in today's conditions (3.5+m and 11 secs) the sheltered bay was giving all sorts of opportunities to foil. Most of what I did was use a breaking or broken wave to get going and then as it swelled out to pump to keep going. Left me with a positive feeling that I was getting somewhere. Lots of exercise.

ALSO bumped into a bloke with a SMIK board - see photo.

I took this photo to check his tail rocker against mine. I can't see any difference. The positioning of the foil box was basically the same as mine - reassuring.
A bonus for me was that the board was also 130 litres and could be used as a sailboard.
After 5 years of doing what I do, it was strange to find someone with anything similar.

Resources

Learn how to foil - free
foil-academy.com/courses/surf-foil-academy

Talk to people about foiling
facebook.com/groups/1836444329746160

Picking the right type of wave

Here is the middle of a Kai Lenny video showing that surfers have nothing to fear from foils IF the people on the foils learn to use the waves that Kai uses.

Progress

Since I last posted I have been getting a bit down about the lack of progress.
Some wrong choices; of places to sail or surf; wrong time of day, etc. have not helped.

But the solution has been to make sure I have some fun.
So now I take both the boards in the photo and if the foil is likely to get ripped off in shallow water; if the shorebreak is too heavy; the wind too strong, then I am on the white board (no foil) having a good time.

I may hack it up and put the foil mount on it (properly this time) and a centre fin box for the mast base.