Kane De Wilde- Wing Foil interview- Blue Planet Show #7

The Blue Planet Show

Kane De Wilde is on the leading edge of wing foiling as both athlete and designer. Listen, learn, and apply it on the water!

Interview transcript:

Aloha. It's Robert Stehlik, welcome to the Blue Planet Show where I interview wing foil athletes, designers, and thought leaders, right here for my home office in the garage. We talk about Wing foiling technique and equipment, and I'm also trying to get to know my guests, their background, what inspires them, and how they live each day to the fullest.

You can watch these long interviews on YouTube or listen to them as a podcast on the go, just search for the blue planet show on your favorite podcast app. This show was made for those of you who are as crazy about wing foiling as I am. I'm not rushing through these interviews. This is like the opposite of a 30 second Instagram video.

They're super long interviews, and I know they're not for everyone. And really I'm just making these for the 5% of you that actually watch the whole thing. So I hope you're one of those elite people at the very top, the five percenters and that you're going to watch the whole thing. Today's interview is with Kane De Wilde

He is an amazing young athlete. And before I talked to Kane, I didn't realize how involved is in the design aspect of the sport, a foil design board design, and also developing an R and D and wings. So he has some really in-depth knowledge, probably more than anyone I've talked to so far. And that's why this interview goes pretty long, but I think you'll find every minute of it is very interesting and I could have actually kept going for a lot longer.

So without further ado here is Kane De Wilde:

All right, Kane. Welcome to the blue planet show. It's great to have you here. So to get started, maybe just tell us a little bit about your background, start from the very beginning. Where did you grow up and tell us about your early childhood memories that kinda got you into water sports and so on.

Hi, Robert, thanks so much for having me on it's super cool that you're that you're hosting something like this and I love listening to him. So that's going to be fun. I started the whole journey probably in middle school, getting into sailing, super into surfing skateboarding and.

Through sailing. I was dinghy racing actually. I have a natural evolution of dinghy racing. I wanted to learn how everything works and how to improve and how I could do my sail better and shift my weight in the boat better to go, to get a slight edge. And so I started researching, how boats workout, how sales work, how your rudder and daggerboard work.

And that's kinda what started it after that. So sorry, but you were born and raised on Maui or? Yeah, born and raised Valley. I grew up country lifetime surfer. Okay. And how old are you now? I am now 20, just turned 20. And and can you also tell us your weight that people always ask about that, right?

Yeah. I'm six, six Oh and 195 pounds. That's very similar to me. So early on you started dinghy racing and then I think glider. Yeah. So it think directing your racing is so much fun and it's such a deep sport. It's crazy how the tiniest little fail tuning or tiniest little thing can give you such an edge.

That's in white Kai on a wahoo new King day in an open Vic. I remember being terrified to go out that day. And my coach is K a K E N, or you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go. And eventually pushed me enough to get in the water. That's probably until that my, my best session ever. So that one was the boat on the right.

I actually have that right here. This is the first thing I ever 3d modeled. Oh, cool. Okay. All right. And it's the first thing I ever glass. And it's what set me on this track. Really. So that's like a model of a like a displacement D sailboat. Is that what, it's more of a planning hall.

But I made three different variations of these and took them to a river and tested the resistance with little scale. And that was my project, my big project for eighth grade. How did you test it in the river? I took it to a river with really consistent flow and it might be a little hole.

There's a little hole on the front here, tied a rope through it, put a a gram fishing scale. I really finally find a fishing fill and just let it sit and took an average over a few minutes. And then why did you take test some variations of it or? Yeah, so I have three variations. I don't know where the other ones are right now, but I just changes in the outline or the rocker changes in the bottom just to see what kind of effect they have.

That's amazing. And how old were you when you were working on that eighth grade? So pretty young. You were a little bit more, a little bit chubby before you got tall and lanky. I was flailing magic, isn't it? I know. There's like a lot of people look a lot skinnier after they started foiling. Yeah. Oh look, I was into kite boiling too.

I, before I, I ever did it, but I made a little model foils. And took them in the river too. Wow. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Super fun.

So we have a forklift and when my friends came over from hood river, awesome. We hooked up a bar to the forklift over the trampoline and I'm aware we're practicing our move

and these posts are super old because I actually started to cover my college thing. If I could document all these different things to eventually show to a college when I want to get them cool. And it just evolved from there. Yeah. You did like glider planes. Yeah. Stridor, planes, kiting, all kinds of stuff there with my rudder cool cards.

All right. And I met you a couple of years ago, you came over to a wahoo and you did that pumping contest where the point was to catch a hundred ways with your team. And I was sitting in the channel at Queens watching you are in the heat before us, and you were just going round and round, pumping back out, touching another way of going back out and kinda so cool to watch you like so efficient.

And then even sometimes you would like rest and put your hands on your knees and glide a little bit to rest your legs and stuff like that. That was really impressive. Do you have any pointers on pumping technique? The biggest thing pumping is finding the right rhythm and speed for your foil.

And being able to learn to have enough control of your pump to be able to vary like your speed and tempo until you find that. And it took a while of telling tuning in front wing and board placement to get a nice rhythm and be able to ride super efficiently. Another cool thing pumping is if you want to go for a super long time, the spot and wave and conditions, make a massive difference.

So all of my longest waves have been on at spots with a good amount of power, right off peak and ideally two peaks next to each other, and a pretty consistent wave. That's why big, bigger waves are good because what you can do is only stay on pump out to a wave and only stay on it long enough to get your speed back up and then instantly kick out again.

And basically do figure eight between the two peaks. And the goal was to not pump between the two. So you just stay on it long enough to get your feet back up, kick out with enough speed. So you can just collide into the next way without even pumping at all. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I've had some like 45 minute ride and it was at that same, the same kind of setup where you dropped down the face of maybe a head high wave and then just two pumps to the next peak and do the same thing the other way.

And the only limiter, which was really how consistent the waves were. So what killed me there was was a big break. So I know you've tried a lot of different wings and foils and you design them as well. So what what's your favorite right now? Which wing do you use for like combination of pumping and surfing?

What's your favorite. I use a 10 80 mid aspects mostly right now. And I vary the tailing depending on the condition. So if I'm surfing and doing some low speed pumping, I'll use a different tail wing. And if I'm at, if I'm going like high feed, downwind, or winging, I'll use the tailoring more suited to that.

But I actually have one of those links right here, the screen share,

this is a version of that 10 80. I have one new carbon, but this is a carbon insert. And just the design up. And I've been refining for a few months. So this is, yeah, this is CMC that a G 10 with with an 11 millimeter. So this is a 11 millimeter carbon insert it's in here or epoxy didn't hear.

And there's no, you can't feel any gap between the two material. And this is all credit to Dennis partner tectonics. He does just an insane job of CMC and finishing these wings so that, and that's where the signature line. No, this is just my own stuff. I originally did it super modified meal prep, but I have it here.

I got everything ready. So I made this fuselage to fit that it's front wings. It might hard to see behind your black shirt. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Yeah, that looks really beefy. It's beefy in the center, but really the fender is. So I use signature old signature uniform mask. And center's just big enough for that connection.

And the rest is pretty skinny. I tried to lower the drag, but still keep it stiff. Yeah, this is the Moses fuselage reference, right? So it's pretty similar in size to the motor. It's the width is the same, but the thicknesses it's thicker. So that gives it a little bit more rigidity by the mat around the mask.

Yeah. Cool. It's just big enough to fit that math connection. So you do foil designs? Right now you're working with signature and Neil pride, right? You, yeah. Yeah. So I, yeah, I've done some work with signature and Neil pride and I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out.

I can I don't know how to explain it. The no private thing was funny. I met Robert stray who was at the time the portfolio guy just at the beach. And we started talking to Zion Oh, we're looking for, we're looking for someone to make a photo. And I heard like you're designing stuff.

And so somehow I ended up designing a full set for them. Or I originally designed to one wing is to called the medium slim. And there's some pretty cool videos of Calgary writing it, but they went really well. So after that I designed a whole line, but. It's kinda being thrown into the fire as far as designs, because we didn't do any prototyping.

So I got one shot, like you got to design something and it goes straight to a stainless production mold. That was pretty intimidating for the first time. But I'm actually really happy with how it all came out. It's available now. I've been seeing some videos of people riding it. Wow. Yeah.

I That's super impressive for you at 20 years old to be like a professional designer basically already. Yeah. And that design was probably one and a half years ago. So you started using 3d modeling software back in eighth grade. You'd said like with that kind of was your first class project that you worked on with the 3d modeling.

And can you, like earlier you showed me on your computer, you had some design stuff. So maybe show us a little bit and talk a little bit about what kind of stuff you do on the design side. The super interesting I find, yeah, I can show a little bit of it. So this is the stuff I'm showing is mostly really old stuff.

So my modeling is definitely trade secrets screen. So here's the, there's two. We did two versions of it, the one on the left and the one on the right is super solid. And it's amazing how much, like a tiny difference around here will make. Oh, it's just a front between the mass in the fuselage. It's a little bit more thick.

Yeah. It's hard to see. I can see it. Yeah. A little rounded in there. Yeah. That's the difference between super solid and just spending until it breaks. Wow. Yeah, they were funny on our wings too. Like having that little bit more especially between the mass and the front wing it's the forces are amazing, like the, so that is a really important area.

And the other thing is having your volume distribution along the length of the fuselage, as smooth as possible, because any breaks in that aluminum doesn't like that would be a failure point. Another big difference is the whole depth was different for this one had too deep of holes.

And that took a lot of material out of the top of the fuselage, where this one has a slightly shallower holes that are still strong enough for the, both the wing on, but leave a lot more material in the top of the fuselage where you really need that string. Interesting. An access fuselage that cracked right at the front of the square mast opening, like at the end of the square mass opening.

Yeah. I was wondering, I guess it makes it more inter compatible to have that square opening, but I was thinking, wouldn't it make more sense to have that mass opening in the shape of the mass, like the then out to back in front so that you have more material around the mask, without having a square rear end on the mass, if you just put the master directly into the fuselage, it would make it stronger between the mass and the few sizes. Yeah. I'm not an expert on structure. Someone smarter than me would know more, but It's probably better not to have sharp corners on your mask.

Insert, I guess it just makes sense. If you want to switch between a carbon mass and an aluminum mass or whatever, or different size masks. Cause if you had, if you add the profiles of mass and you could only use that one mass with the fuselage, I guess so that, I think that's the main reason why they're doing that.

Yeah. And it's a pretty good way to, I think these are based off of whatever cuddle or pro ball pro box insert. So it's a well-proven design. So what about wings? What have you learned about wing design? So yeah, these are tails that is for signature. These both were based off of a pale that I hand shaped and cleaned up the profile and cleaned it up a lot.

But I was riding the stealth of the truck a lot of the time made and would core carbon lay up Hills that I really liked and were awesome with those foils. And yeah, I base these off of it. There they go really good on the Palm itself, especially it's very similar except for the tips, right?

Yeah, they are very similar. This one has a little more span and tips. I made it basically for the one 65 all the trough and this one was pretty much made for the one 75. And so I find the angles and everything like that, the wingtips were needed because the the high aspect links, just like a little bit more stability also because of the math, the different, there's a difference in math placement between the two foil, for people that don't know that much about oil tales.

I always stay like that. Those tips are almost like fins on a board. It gives you like directional stability and having a flatter, you, it just makes the tail more loose, like having basically smaller fins or you can slide out the tail almost like you're saying. Yeah, you can turn on the mask instead of doing that.

The other thing I really paid attention to when doing tips like this cause I've got a few tails is I wanted to make the tips thin enough and small enough that at low speed you can still pivot and stall the tips out or walk, wash them out. And so at low speed coming up the face, you can still pivot the turn, but going fast, they would lock in.

So I made them thin and low cord and pretty vertical. Yeah, low drag probably. Aren't so good for pumping. Nice. Okay. What about front winks? So front wings, these are a bunch of a bunch different wings, but I worked on with Neil pride. Some of these made it to production. Some of these didn't for example, this is the XXL 2300 these are both 17 hundreds, but with different aspect ratios, small, medium, large, extra large.

And this is super interesting and this is where I learned most of my, a lot of my

idea of how I should design foil and how to do, center connection. It helped me a lot. And these are the pills impressive that you're already doing all this stuff at your age. I can only imagine where you're going to go from there. What are your plans in the future in terms of that kind of stuff?

Do you have any professional aspirations to become an engineer or design like designer? What is, what are your plans? For now, I'm pretty happy. I get to, delve super deep into design and I get to surf every day while I'm young and living in Hawaii. So right now I'm pretty happy, but in the future it would be nice to do something other than, because I'm from the surf industry and it would be nice to go to school and further explore this kind of path.

It seems like to me, it seems like you're doing fine teaching yourself. And for things like, in the water, the foiling and winging, it's so much more like Rob widow was saying too it's more about the feel and, you can have the scientific theories to explain it afterwards, but really without the, trying it and feeling it out and trying to figure out what, how, what works and what doesn't work actually in the water, you don't really know what's going to work or not until you try it.

Really. Yeah. So that's what I've been getting into recently is first I went super deep into like simulation and trying to predict how these things work, but. Some of the results I got didn't match up with what I felt in the water. So I've been slowly climbing my way back to finding, okay, this is what happens on the computer.

And this is what I feel in the water. And ideally I want to be able to predict everything on the computer and run through designs. And so in the last month or so I've been getting closer and closer to doing that. It's really hard and I definitely am not an expert on it. By any means, pretty impressive.

I don't know if you're not an expert. I don't know who is. And then you also design boards, right? Like you said, you do some board designs and then you work with Mark Rapa horse. He builds them for you basically. Yeah. Huge. Thank you at the marker up. He's amazing. His construction is unmatched so far, but I'll share my screen again.

So these are some old downwind boards I prototyped. So this is one that actually came out. You could probably feel my Instagram page. It's a blue board, white stripes big step six. So by 20, I think it's 25. And this is what I, this is the first design. I was like super psyched on it on a fucking deck.

But there's the practical limitations to making this, like the thickness of the blanks you need. And so I ended up making this, tried some interesting stuff with the rocker and it worked really well. And it led me to my, my, my more recent board with the pin tail because this board, if there's two, I found there's two ways to get it to wave.

Now you can either pull up paddle and glide into them, or you can move the board a lot. It's pumped into them, right? And this board did insane for gliding into waves. And I found it worked really well, pronoun winning because you don't have the ability to pump up on the flow. But stand up, I had a hard time because of all this volume and with the Mattel and also lower order, it was hard to get it up on the foil.

What's the bottom design on this one? Like the bottom shape. It's pretty flat. I checked some interesting stuff on the rocker. There's a rapper. Is, there's a concave here in the center, rockers different from the rail rocker.

Yeah. The bottom is actually, this is actually the bottom surface of an airfoil. And you're saying that because the, because it's flat and straight on the bottom and is good for gliding in, but not as good for pumping into pumping up onto the foil. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. And I can see it could be fixed with more rocker in the tail, but then at planting speeds, it really doesn't that rocket tends to stick.

And the takeoff speeds for getting to downwind are into the planting speed. So you can't have that. And it ended up with my pin tail design, which still can be improved, but I have basically dead flat rock throughout the tail. So it can release in plaintiff at speed, but not a lot of surface area or volume in the tail.

So it can still move and pump on the foil. I see. So you're keeping the bottom flat, but just by having a narrow tail, it allows you to like hop on, hop up on the foil easier. Yeah. And I think Dave designed to probably have a more refined version of this. But this, the board of, and writing works really well.

And the other cool thing is because there's so little material and the nose and tail it reduces your swing weight a lot and it changes the center of gravity of the board. So on this Pentel board, I pretty much stand in the dead in the center. And so there's no notes in front of you for that. So you might the ride purely like a five, four.

So next board is probably gonna be a six, four. Instead of a six and 22 wide or something. So that's for downwind foiling. What about wink, foil board design, like what's what, w how does it differ from stand-up and foil board design? What kind of boards do you design, or you it's funny because pretty, you could pretty much get anything up on foil, but it really matters in light wind.

What I found is you are not my pin tail board and you want, or you don't want any of my stand-up boards, because they're hard. For some reason, they're hard to steer it's something with the outline. And then the little rocker makes them, like, when you in the parent planning transition zone or speed, they'll do opposite fearing like a boat, or like a race standup board.

Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's probably a low nose rocker or something, but yeah, definitely avoid that. And my pin tail board, so much area in the nodes versus the tail, but the note pushes down, going up wind, and you need to compensate for that with extra pill paling angle. You're saying when you're up on the foil, having that chat knows has like more drag in the wind, basically.

Yeah. Okay. Big time. If you designed a, have you designed a board that's just for wing foiling or what would the design specs would be on a wing for a bomb? Pretty much just take your on board and scale it up. Like direct, like you can scale all dimensions up to five foot and it's perfectly, if you just had one wing board for you that you can use in light, wind and all wind conditions, like what size and volume do you think would be good that you would use right now?

I guess 22 to 24 wide and 70, 75 liters. Sorry. bye bye. So 20 to 24, probably 75 liters. Oh, wow. That's pretty similar to what I have four sticks, liters, bottom shape. Super simple, no concave, no, nothing special, no steps, no concave, just as simple as possible because that I found that gets you up really fast.

I like, and Dave Kalama talked about it too, but there's that theory that the con the convex shapes just releases from the water easier, like the word, when it comes off the water just slides off of it versus concaves and tight edges. Sometimes the water can stick to it or like the surface tension of the water gets stuck on the, on those hard edges, yeah. The other thing with the wing board is sometimes like when you touch down, a lot of the times you're touching down at a weird angle to chop and concave and sharp edges in the front, instead of just going through it we'll create a lift in some direction and shoot you off one way or another.

So yeah, simple bottoms like convex or concave works.

I, I totally agree with that, but obviously there's two schools of thought here. Like a lot of the prone boards have a lot of a lot of concaves and sharp edges and stuff. And I guess, there, there's gotta be some advantage to that. I I guess it has more lifts at lower speeds creates more lift, but yeah, like I said, there's definitely downsides.

So it's so what's your, yeah. As far as my experience riding them, I haven't found any advantages. But they look really cool and they do make a lot of lifts at low speed. Yeah. Does it help a little bit with the takeoff or I guess on balanced, do you think don't think it's worth it to have all those concaves and hard edges, personally, I don't think it's worth it. I don't mean any disrespect to anyone who does it because done right. They can work really well. Yeah, something that's really helped me when I, setting up the board, was when you said, like you, you check your, basically the thickest part of the foil.

Do you have your board upside down? If you lift up the board by the foil, the thickest part of the front wing profile, then it should, the board should be pretty much flat and balanced. So I thought that was really helpful. And then, it's interesting too, because sometimes different wings like have an access for an, I changed from the seven 60 to the eight, 10, and the, for some reason, like the distance of that profile is so much different that after go from the seven, 10 is like at the front of my box and on the eight, the seven 60, sorry.

And then on the eight, 10, it's all the way in the back, so it's like a big, pretty big difference where the foil is located in terms of, keeping my feet in the same position, the same foot strap positions. Yeah. The biggest part of that is, is keeping your, it keeps your front wing in the same position.

So they probably have different distances between the front wing and the mask. So the mask will move, but the frontline stays in the same spot. And and then I was thinking about why it is that it works well like that. And then I guess when you're when you're pumping and unwavering, the board by itself is balanced on, on the foil.

So it's not like it wants to like nose dive or stall or whatever, even if you completely on way the board will be sitting there and gliding. But my, my kind of school of thought around it is ideally you want the board to fly pretty neutral as far as the pressure. And you want that foot pressure to be consistent across all, all speed. You want it to be consistent across if you're in a turn or if you're going straight or if you're pumping. So what doing that does is it puts the center of gravity of the board over the center of lift of the wing.

And that means when you put it in a turn and put some extra T4 on it or yeah, mainly if you put it into the turn with that extra G force, it won't change the balance. If it's nose heavy and you put it in a turn. That center of gravity, push, push down and pull your nose into the water.

And if it's too far back, it'll do the opposite and pull you out of the water. And so that's a baseline and depending on, I always pick a tool with me in the water and change it a little bit, depending on how the foil students, but a big difference. Something that I noticed for myself, like when I used to just stand up paddle surf or pro surf, I used to have my back foot a little bit more forward, but then when I started wind foiling, my back leg always got so tired from always putting more pressure on my back foot. And so what I started doing was putting my back foot further and further back. So basically now I have my feet. So the center of lift of that foil underneath me is right between my feet.

And I've got just equal pressure on both feet and that's something I learned from wing foiling. And now I also do, when I'm Santa filing, I always have that same foot position just because it's way more comfortable and efficient. Is that kinda how you balance out too, or? Yeah. And it's, if you watch a lot of my clips or watch.

I'm usually sometimes my back sits way in front of the master. And you think, Oh, that's weird. Most people have their backs up behind the mask, but my front foot is really far back too. So I try and keep my center of gravity always right over the front line. And if he can see it I just got them downwind clip.

There's a good video clip. Let's click play one of these.

So is the Harbor one of your favorite spots on Maui or Harvard? A pretty good spot. Flailing ruined me. So pier one is my favorite spot now, but just directly outside the Harbor, but there's also a spot on the West side. That's really fun. Foco right off the line of sight of poco. And that's. That's one of my favorite waves ever.

It's crazy. That's obviously an older footage and the board looks so huge compared to what you're writing now. Yeah. I really liked that part though. Sometimes I'm actually going to bigger boards now. That's a, FORO that's on the screen. That's a four by 20 now I'm writing a 42 by 19 and my next board is a four, six 18.5.

And just to be able to catch the wave easier and paddle back out easier. What's the idea behind going a little bit longer. Again, is. Think bigger waves. I want, I live on the North shore of Mallee and most of the spots in the winter are a bit bigger than, and I want to paddle into my, on my 42.

And the other thing is hitting of pitting the whitewater or getting critical and critical sections of the wave. My 42 has a nice rocker curve, but it doesn't have enough rocker. So I basically on my four six, I just extended that rocker curve to the most of the board. Same, but I have a little bit extra nose for recovery mostly.

And yeah. So when you put it in, in a head high bit of foam or the lip, it doesn't really care. Like you can recover weight easier. So actually that's another question I had for you on the rocker, like people have been playing around with the shims underneath the mass blatant stuff like that.

And it's basically, you can put a little bit of rocker in the board and get the little bit of that, is just, what's your, what is your feeling? And I guess it depends on the foil of course too. And do you like to have the mass or the plate completely parallel to the bottom of the board?

Or do you like to have it like a slight rocker to it and then the tail that, where the manual, most of. I do most of it in the doc with the referee, my board. But I know people are put, are going like really, almost negative with their Shem. So that's interesting. And I think it works really well on smaller waves where your front wings running a higher angle of attack on big, I found on small waves.

I liked boards with lower, almost parallel angle between the foil and the deck or the box and the deck and on bigger waves. I like a lot more like my front foot up a bit. Yeah. Like to me especially when you're going faster if like that having that negative angle helps with it's a little scare.

Oh

yeah. Yeah. You're going fast. And especially like on it, like if you're toying in or going fast and you have that, the nose is pointed down a little bit, as soon as you touch down just slightly, you done. It's like your board sucks down when your nose down. Yeah. Yeah. So it depends on the wave.

And I, I just have my boards have a really light tail rock. I can always show the front wing too. This is my setup. It lets me. Shit in the front wing to different angles. So that's useful. Yeah. So I was going to ask about that too. So do you, I guess the wing designs you have are mostly like, where the front wing screws flat onto the fuselage with two or three screws.

And then so it's basically just the screws holding the, holding it down against that flat area. Do you ever have issues with it, like loosening up or like how do you keep those screws completely tighten and keep it from having any play? I use about I they're big torque screws and I use probably six, six inch lever and just crank them way too tight.

But the reason I use that connection is the limitation of how I build the wing. I make the wings out of a solid panel with carbon and on a three axis CNC machine. So there's not a good way to get enough thickness in the connection area or go in from the side to make a male-female connection.

So the on top kind of works really well. For example, I just made the swing fit, active case series.

This is for the access case series and that's a similar kind of fuselage work. Just it just bolts right on top. And the reason I couldn't do like the black series or their old sq floss is just because it's too thick for my panel. The wing, the wings are too thick and the connections too thick.

So this is the only thing that would let me get thin enough.

Yeah. You're going super thin with your foot. For design sounds crazy for us for higher speeds, right? That's basically less drag. Is that the idea behind it or, yeah, you do. You do sacrifice a little at super low speed. But I, if you use the right foil section, you don't sacrifice that much.

So do you on NASA foil sections or how do you use this, modify them or what you come up with your first sections? I designed my own sections, just trial and error. What works for you and no using trailers, inverse design. So I specified the surface velocity of the fluid over, over the top and bottom of the wing basically.

And that'll give you your shape. Wow. The maximum velocity you can fly at with your wings. Like that 800 probably top, it has a low tops size. It probably pops out at 39. Just because it's a fairly blunt foil, but the good thing is with that one, it's super stable until that speed.

So I actually, I've never hit the tough beat on it. I have one right here,

600

insanely fast, and it's basically a

super, super fan. So what's the idea behind having that pointy tip on the front? It looks like a, like an airplane,

the fuselage being too long for the quarter. I need to get it in. I need to set it in the right spot and otherwise I would end up with kind of an ugly front connection. Yeah. So the tip it's not like it's just to make up for the length of the few slides that either the design.

Yeah. Yeah. If you're going really fast like the America's cup boats use it, it's called a what is it called? Where it raises keeps the pressure more, even around that connection. And it reduces cavitation around that, around the interface of multiple wings, but I'm not going fast enough and I'm not designing it to do that.

He droves. Do you put the hydro into your wing a little bit or do you just keep pretty limited? This one has some freedom. Very slight dihedral on the center. Oh yeah. I've got some freedom with winglets. And the winglets on, these are more for a, more like a bit of a locked in feeling because if you go dead flat, it can, it gets washy sometimes.

So you can play with changing your oil sections at the clip you can play with changing your like winglets or a neutral up a tip. Or you can do some fun stuff with twists to get a bit more of a locked feel. It's slightly turned up wingtips. Is that so you can breach the foil easier in terms?

Yeah, it makes a really big difference in, in breaching terms. It's way gentler and upward one tip what you breached breaches tip at a lower angle. So on a following, in a turn, you can breach it. It doesn't matter if you have a wind load or not, but if you're a little straighter up, so like this will breach, but like this you want a little bit of a wingless if you're super worried about.

Okay. Just so the tip comes out first and the, and disrupts the water surface less. I've found the angle between the wing tip and the water surface is super important. So the more perpendicular they are, the general area of a wingtip reach you'll have in general for section makes a huge difference.

For example, like the oil foil section is insane for breaching. Like you'd never feel it. Yeah. The velocity across the top surface is really consistent. There's no pressure spikes and it's pretty impressive. So it turns out my buddy Derek comma does on the psyche on the geo and then those go for wings.

Is this amazing? Like how are you coming out?

Yeah, cool. I'm having a lot of fun on this. That's super interesting. I could just talk about design this hole for a couple of hours, but I guess we should probably move on to some other things as well. I don't know. I think everyone that's listening is going to be super interested in this as well, but let's talk a little bit about a wing design.

In terms of, wing foiling wings, it's, this is supposed to be a wing foiling show more than anything, but what's your experience? What kind of wings have you tried and what do you like the best and so on? So I. I work with with a winged pretty talented wing designer.

And so get to try a lot of prototypes from, for a lot of different brands and a lot of different materials and styles and handle them all kinds of stuff. And it seems like

they're going to more and more attention to the Cathy of flutter shape a stiffer shape, and you can get a big increase in speed and efficiency from that. So I really like having you like having a flatter wing shape, less profile, basically. Yeah, definitely. A flatter profiles are nice just because the apparent wind angles they can handle it.

It makes it nice for the wind or going up wind have really high are tight angles. It doesn't let her as much when you're going at a tight angle, yeah. Another thing is stability. I'm not an expert on wing design, but having a stable wing that's that, that flies neutral and wouldn't be powered is it's pretty important.

And makes a lot easier. So I've been liking the wing rides and the emphasis. I tried some PPC stuff that's insane. And also the BRM. I really love the BRM wing. I think tested and helped with the design and so on.

The BRM. Yeah. So talk about the BRM. What's what makes that one special? So my dad's had a BRM link for a long time now and the way they eat Gus is super impressive. That's what kind of surprised me the most when I wrote it in gusta conditions, it's just smoothed out everything.

Your power is really consistent and they can handle high speed, low wingspan sense for surfing too. I haven't tried the wings. What is it about it that you think makes it work like that? Or what are the design features that you think work well on the BRM? They're pretty low aspects. That probably helped I really don't know.

The handles are super solid pretty low flex and they don't have any windows, so it's a really consistent reaction or material across the canopy. Personally, too, like after trying wings without windows, I like it, I like not having a window, but what's your take on that windows versus no windows?

That's always one of those big arguments. If you're riding around a lot of people especially a lot of beginners use the windows or windows really nice. Being able to easily check your tack, like before you do attacker drive is great. I tend to ride like at hook Keepa where there's not a ton of people and there's a clear rotation, so I prefer window windows.

Yeah, it's also better for packing them up and you don't have to worry about creasing it and so on. And a lighter way. And I don't know, there's a lot of dependencies to not having a window, but yeah, definitely the safety aspect. Although I find that it's pretty easy to just look under your wing, right?

You just lift it up a little bit and it is, the best windows I've tried are on the new Cabrina wing. The windows are massive. They're really the first one or one of the first ones that you can actually, you can see everything through. Yeah.

One thing I really like about the wing is the handles. It's a soft handle, but you have probably a good 10, 12 inches to move your hand around. And that's really nice for adjusting to different conditions and different kinds of writing. Like a boom. Yeah. Having the longer handles, it does help with tacking and stuff like that.

Cause you can put in right next to the other one and stuff, but do you find that sometimes the longer handles have a little bit more give so there's less control with your risks? Do you find that at all? Or? Yeah, I do. And some of the newer styles that I've handled I've tried or are stiffer and have a lot less of that you definitely have more control.

The one thing I really like about booms is in the last week, I've started riding with a harness and having a boom is really nice to hear if you're riding with a harness and harness line. I've never tried harness before, but like Alan cages talked about it and I'm interested in trying it. I definitely would do want to try it out.

Yeah, it's nice. Because I started doing it because I've been doing up winners from on Maui and I don't know how many miles that is probably five miles upwind and it was just, it just destroys your arms and your hands. So it's nice to have something stick a load off, so was this from your knee when you had your knee surgery?

Ooh. When did I have my knee surgery? Yeah, that's uh, right after I, I injured it. I've done that a few times. I originally did it surfing. Just went up for a top turn and busted. My knee was out for a few weeks. Doctor said after probably three weeks, he was like, Oh, you're good. You should be good to go back in the water third way of doing it again.

So without, for awhile after that did a ton of PT came back, was good for a few months. I think I did it again in boarding. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear what you said. What was the injury? Originally, so that the injury originally was from surfing. I went through a tough tournament, dislocated my kneecap.

So my knee cap went from the center all the way to the, basically the outside side of my knee. Like from overextending it backwards or like what happened? Like how did it happen? Not really sure. After all the x-rays and stuff, it seemed like just, it's just like a genetic thing.

Like my kneecap far off, far off to the side, especially on my back knee, which got stressed a lot from surfing that kind of tuck knee position you do surfing. It's not good for your knee. So it's basically kneecap slips off the front of the knee. Is that what happened?

Like sideways it slipped. So if this is the top of your knee and you're looking from the front or from the bottom of your leg, it's slipped off to the side. Outside of uni to the outside. And there's just a little a little whatever ligament holding that in as well as your quad.

But when that happened or the ligaments probably stretched the first few times, and then the last few, it probably broke. I know in the last one it was broken. And then, so the surgery, they had to replace that ligament or, yeah, the surgery is called an MPFL reconstruction and or replacements. And there's two ways to do it.

Where the one way they'll take some of your hamstring and replace that ligament with your hamstring. And the other one is where they take a cadaver from an Achilles or a hamstring and do the same thing. And luckily I got the cadaver. The cadaver is really strong. It's like the third and put it in a good way.

It's like upgrading from accomplish to a jaws leaf. So my old ligament, like on my left knee is it's accomplished and the other one is the job. So it's pretty cool. And it's it's an amazing surgery. You can actually it's full weight bearing 45 minutes after. Wow. Pretty until you had to recover for a while.

And yeah, it took us probably a week to get walking again or walking comfortably. And what'd you say you were hunting back to a hundred percent now. Like he can do everything. Yeah. I'm at least 95%. Now

your quad does a lot of work and keeping, keeping your kneecap stable. And as long as you, you pay close attention to how tired or exhausted your quad is. And I've been doing like yoga and using the foam roller as the ways of managing, managing it, managing my leg and keeping everything stretched out.

And it's a good way. Good way to recovery.

Yeah, definitely. Sorry, go ahead. That experience and doing that a few times definitely taught me a lot about paying attention to my body and knowing when to stop. I think that's a valuable lesson to learn knowing how to recover, because when my age, like I'm 53 and it takes a lot longer to recover from stuff like that.

So it's good that figuring it out at your age. Yeah. There's been a few sketchy moments, but the last probably few months have been awesome. Nice. So in terms of other, do you do other legs, sports cross-training hobbies other than foiling and water sports and so on? Not too much. I tried keep a good variety of foiling.

I've been doing yoga recently. That's actually been super fun,

but yeah, occasionally I'll go mountain biking. That's a good bit of cross train. Okay. Do you have a routine that you follow every morning or like what's a typical day in your life? Starting when you get up out of bed? Nah, I don't have a, I don't have a super, super strict routine, but generally I wake up and I do a little bit of stretching in the morning.

I do maybe a little bit of rolling depending on the amount. Depends on how I feel. And then. Whenever you either try and get a good breakfast and do some work shift, shift tales, or do some designing. And then I usually go for an afternoon session. So then your busy time for getting some mornings, generally my busy time and also late at night, I do a lot of computer work.

So most of my designing stuff is after dinner. So when you work on the computer and you're really into something and like how long will you stay up and work on your computer? Are you like an all night?

It depends. I try if I'm really into it. I try and go to bed before at 12 I'm like, okay, I got it. I got to stop now. But sometimes I'll get really into it. Especially if I have a big project I'm working on or make a breakthrough and I'll go 10 to 14 hours just locked in on the computer.

You're more like an, you get creative at night and in the nighttime, huh? Yeah. For example, a foil I just designed, I spent. Probably 10 hours a day straight for a week, just like on it, super focused remember in the future, like what, where do you see wing foiling or foiling going? And do you have any new ideas or new projects that you're working on?

Anything you can share stuff that's coming in the future or things you, you can imagine or see for the future? Yeah. So my, my favorite part of wing foiling is probably the accessibility of it. And that you can get so many people in the water learning to fail, going fast, having a ton of fun, and you can do it in so many places.

I like, I'm at the Harbor a lot and that's the Mecca on Maui for learning to win foil. It's cool to see entire families that, that sometimes don't even surf. And I've never done a wind sport getting up and you can watch them improve. And in two weeks they're up and going up land and having a blast.

It's definitely pretty cool. This video is at the Harbor, right? Yeah, this is pretty cool. Where you're handing from the, doing a takeoff from the boat ramp and then grabbing the wing on your way out. Talk a little bit about why that was funny. I showed up one day with my weighing I'll to go.

I think I just got that sale. And it was way too light to go out. But luckily I ran into Scott Mackey and Jason Hall and I was like, Hey Scott, can you start at the end of the pier and hold my way. Instead of beat started managed to somehow make it and actually thought that was a super fun session.

Yeah. This looks like you just had to get out to the wind line, pump out to the wind lane and then it was windy enough out there. Yeah, it was probably like 15 that day and back on the generation. One way. That was pretty light women. Yeah. That's cool. Let's see. Oh, this one. This is cool.

People talk about that one a lot. That was a fun session out on a board of Sean. It looks like your friend is almost on the nose of the boredom. Yeah. He had an old belly board. They put some foil tracks then. And I forgot how long it was. I think it was a two foot board. So the front of my front foot was basically off the edge and my back foot was pretty much the same.

And it was just like a good, consistent day out a thousand peaks. And later that day I had my longest drive ever.

That must be pretty hard to take off on that board though, right? Yeah. The only you can't catch the wave on it pretty much. So you have to beat you started, Oh, that's what you did. What was the beach started? That was the only way I could get it up on foil is the beach start. But this video is a little deceiving.

Like people are like, Oh my God, how do you pump that far for that long on the inside. There's a rock wall and there's backwash coming off the wall. And so most of the way out, or pretty much all the way up back to the peak, you can get a decent backwash of so the whole time like pumping, I was less focused on my pumping efficiency and more focused on all right.

How do I stay in the power of this tiny little backwash wave. Cool. So you basically time your kick-out with trying to find the pump. That's going back out again to take you back out. Yeah. And one thing that saves a lot of energy pumping back out into a wave is trying to stop pumping super early and glide into the wave.

I catch myself a lot pumping all the way up until I'm going up the face and then turning when really I should be stopping 30 feet, 15, 30 feet before. And just gliding into it because then once you turn, you create more lift and then once you're on the face, then you don't. Yeah, I'll get the part, you can save a good three or four pounds.

Interesting. I find like when I first started connecting ways that if I stopped pumping too early or turned too early on the wave, then I was basically drop off before I got on the wave. So it's kinda, you do want turn pretty high on that. So the other thing was pumping is staying as high as possible on your mask because by thing as high as possible, you store you story or your gravitational energy and you ranked in the possible glide slope and your wings also more efficient.

Plus the surface. But if you come into doing that really high on your math, you can use that all that gravitational energy you've stored to collide into the wave. And then once you're on the wave, you have enough power to bring it back up again. Yeah. That makes sense. And so I guess that's the reason why you do do those kinds of short, quick pumps.

So you don't like, you basically keep the mass pretty high out of the water and the foil closer to the surface. Yeah. Part of the short, quick pumps is they work really well from a body mechanics point where by changing how short, quick or long, like a shorter long your pumps are, you can stress your body in different ways.

So a really long pump will be easier on your muscles but your heart and your lungs will work harder. The short pump are harder on your muscles, but don't stress your heart or lungs as much. So explain why do you think the foil creates more? It seems like the foil creates more lift when it's close to the water surface.

Is it, or is it, is the reason why it's more efficient because there's less mass than the water and has less drag or is it because it just creates more lift when it's close to the surface? What's the, I don't have a solid answer on it, but I have a few theories. So one of them only left master the water that makes a big difference to you are moving, the foil is moving less water around itself, right?

So th the low pressure side of the foil makes a lot of the lifts and it pulls a lot of water in that water column, above it down to make that lift. And by being closer to the surface, there's less water available to pull. And so before I was actually doing less work and making less drag I don't think you're making any more lifts, but you're definitely making less dry.

The other part of it is by bringing your foil close to the surface. This is this the part I'm really not sure about this. You could be end plating the tip vortex, especially on really flat foils where. There, there might be some kind of interaction with the wingtip Portex and the surface of the water that reduces it.

I see. So basically you, because you're closer to the surface, there's less room for it to create turbulence basically on the table. Yeah. I'm not sure about that because if you're really close to the surface that actually creates a wave and that could use more energy than I'm not sure about it, but definitely moving less water around appending, less water or less mass in the water.

It makes a difference. Interesting. Yeah. I've been trying to figure out why that works. I've also noticed that there's definitely a ground effect. If you're pumping over shallow reef and the Reese right underneath you, you can go to push it. Yeah. Yeah. Something I do a lot winging is especially if there's a Sandy beach is go really fast towards shore and put the foil in six inches of water and try and glide down the beach as far as possible.

So you got to stay super high and almost touch your foil. The bottom and see how far you can glide in ground effect only works for the flight wings. So generally I don't do it in six inches of water, but we have a spot where you have to go over the shallow reef to go come in, and and definitely, yeah, you feel like basically, even that lower speeds, you just got more lift off the foil when you're right up right over the grief.

Yeah. I think the general rule on plans is that if you're within half your wingspan from the ground as a real effect or a noticeable effect, we can have your wingspan. So how long is this video? This is like a half minutes and you're still flying. It's amazing. I guess that was the dog that can't believe his eyes.

Huh? G P is hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. The AI, if you haven't seen this video, you got to listen to the content comments commentary. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I almost want them to just hire the film and commentate on it because it's great. So hard to see this, but yeah. So yeah, so I actually started passing the wing behind my back when I'm going upwind on the waves, but I guess you're going downwind and then you're passing it in front of you on a bottom turn.

So yeah. Talk a little bit about that. The technique. Yeah. It's mostly, I mostly do it. To control my upper body rotation. So by, by passing it to my front hand on the bottom, turn it left my shoulders, open up towards the face of the wave. And by switching it to my backhand on the top turn, I can actually twist my body around and point my front arm more far, farther, backwards.

And more recently I've been, I've been using the wings power and leverage through turns. And my limitation is still when I do that I'm still working on it, but I like using the power of the wing on the top turn. But then your wing is still on your front hand. So on the way down and you have to switch it and open your hands up again, and it's hard to get your speed.

You need a bunch of speed to get out in front of the wave for your next bottom term. So it's in progress

to get some video of that soon. Let's talk a little bit about wing size. Okay. Do you what wing size do you like to use? Do you like to use a bigger wing for jumping or do you like to use a smaller wing for handling or what's I use, I have a two, five. I love when it's nuking and I have a bunch of sizes, but pretty much 99% of the time I use my two, five, or my three, five and the two fives.

Great. But hard to get up, you need a seriously. And with the three, five, I can get a prone and probably 18 knots and I can get up, stand up in six months. Yeah. I guess probably you're always trying to, my theory is always try to use the smallest swing I can get up on, basically, because once you're up, you don't really need much of much wing size.

Recently I found I don't need anything bigger than a three, five, three, five will get me up in the lowest wind. My foil can fly in. Which is about how many nights would you say six nights with the three, five wing? It's funny. Cause there was Rob whittle was saying that he likes to use like either a three more three meter for me here in that four meters is the biggest he uses now.

And he can get up and tend to 12 knots. And there was a bunch of people that were commenting that's impossible and blah, blah, blah. But I have to agree that you can get up with a small wing and pretty light winds. Sometimes you might have to wait for a little gust or, and just really work at it.

But once you're up, then you don't really don't need that much wing. It's really all dependent on your board. If you have a good board, you can get up with a much, much smaller wing and way less wins. So what kind of board is that you would use? I use my downwind stand up word.

Didn't you say you need to have the planning speed to get that thing going. So you get it up to planning speed with a small way. Yeah. On my take off speeds, like eight, eight, nine miles an hour. But if I check in like when they get the different tailwind that probably lowers that about a four mile an hour.

So a bigger tail wing or more angle on the tailwinds are both different funds okay. So a little bit thicker. Oh, okay. It's just a different, yeah. A different floor section and a little more cord. Interesting. So Lakeland like the front Wayne compared to the tail wing like in terms of, the effect it has on the foiling experience, like how would you compare it?

Is it like 80, 20 or 70 30, or is it hard to start to hard to quantify? Steph would be 30 or 60. 40 is probably a a good number. Actually, no 70. So basically what I'm saying is, with the same front wing, about how much can you change it by changing the tail wing? It depends on how well tuned the rest of your setup is, but I'd probably give 50% or 60% till your full board box placement.

And you're telling to me interesting. Wow. Yeah, those are good. It really makes a difference. Like it doesn't matter what frontline you're on. It'll ride good. If you're killing a student. And you're in, it's in the right spot on the board. And if it's off, then you're gonna, no matter what front line you're on, you're going to have a really hard time writing.

Okay. I think we're going super long, but it's super interesting to me, so I'm sure other people will find it interesting as well. So I'm just going to keep going. So what was I going to say? Sorry. Oh, beginner. So if you have a friend that wants to learn how to wink foil, or you're taking out someone what are the, what are your tips?

And what are some common mistakes people make and so on? So when I, every time I teach people first thing I do is put them on a reasonably sized foil, but put it all the way back in the box and further first few waves or for half of the first session or until they're comfortable have them take off and keep the board on the water, just have them keep the board on the water, ride, the wave like that don't even think about coming up.

That'll get them. Wander their safety position and safely that's their safety safety move. They know how to keep it on the water. And the other thing that'll do is get them used to riding with a mask big mask at foil under their board. So once, once they're comfortable riding the board touched down on the water for the wave, then it's time to move the file forward a little bit and slowly start bringing it up on foil.

It's nice to have a consistent way of the Harbor that, that, that is smooth water and decent power for a long time.

And at least teach them a little bit beforehand. So they understand a little bit about how the field works, because that's another thing too,

on the beach before they let them go in the wall. Yeah. Big time. Yeah. Yeah. Wing handling on the beach is huge. A big problem I see is people try and control the wind too much. Really what you want is your front arm is your anchor and your back arm does most of the control and just the weight of your back arm will keep the wing fine.

So I, I teach people the way I learned cutting, which is sit on the beach and learn how to put and hold the wing in different positions. One, o'clock three, o'clock, two o'clock, one, o'clock 12 o'clock in the wind, the window. And and vary the power and just get comfortable and familiar with it before getting in the water.

Because for a lot of people swinging they're getting on the foil board for the first time too. And it's a totally unfamiliar space where you're not comfortable with any part of it. And having some baseline understanding, and experience and building a tiny bit of muscle memory.

We'll make a big improvement in their learning. It is said that he puts people on a, on the old wind surf board with the daggerboard in the middle, and then he just makes, and once they can go back and forth and stay up when then they're ready to go try the foil. And that's how he does it.

And I've also heard people say that they put people on the board and just take the foil, the wings off the foil. So it's just the mask. So they can't busy, they can foil, but the mass has enough. It's like almost like a dagger board because it keeps you from drifting too much. So I thought that was a good idea.

I've never tried it, but that's a good idea. Those are all good ideas taking the wings off the mask and make it a lot less stable though. So it would be interesting to make something that would bring that stability back almost like a keel for it. Just use it in Oakland. What if you took off the tail wing, but then would make it just I'll take off just the front link.

Could work take off the front wing and the front wing. Yeah, that could work. Or maybe use a really small wing that doesn't, this is not going to lift. Cause I think even if you tell people don't lift off the water, once they start going fast and hard to control it, keep it from them. Yeah.

That's the other thing I do teaching surf foiling is I never put them on a really big front wing. The first time I put them on like a front wing I would surf on. So that if they do lift, not like they can bring it back down and it's, they can control it. They can handle it, they can handle it.

But I think for learning to wing foil is definitely an advantage of using a bigger wing because you end up having it's more stable and you can fly slower at lower speeds and you can take your time through transitions and stuff. So once you're comfortable going in and out yeah. If you're buying a new foil, don't get a big foil that lifts at low speeds basically.

That's, is that what you would advise as well for beginners? Yeah, just get something easy to ride. My advice and a good board at the board table board, right? I think the new phonetic boards look nice. It was real simple bottom. The customs are always nice, but almost shapes for third grade.

A lot of stuff out there works. Yeah. The equipment is definitely improving a lot. Like just the second and third generations of the wings are so much better than what we survive in the beginning, yeah. Another thing, a lot of people on the beach asked me about packing. A lot of people have trouble packing attacking you.

Yeah. The biggest thing I noticed and actually Allen could, he's taught me, taught me how to attack is people switch the, switch, their hands on the wing way too late and that, so they'll go into attack and forget and don't switch their hands. And then they end up falling backwards or there's too much drag so an attack. If you come in with a decent amount of speed, you can actually switch your hand super early. And by switching your hands and bringing the wing over your head, it'll force the rest of your body and foil to follow and keep you in control the whole time. And that actually usually does the trick for people.

So if anybody out there is having trouble typing, switch your hands super early. Yeah. That's a good tip. Usually works. And then talking to my dad because he learned to pack on his own. And he said, riding behind people who are going attacking and watching as they do it really helps. Yeah. I think what I've learned too is you want to throw the wing over your head.

And with, I think with the backhand before you let it go, you kinda throw it so that it tips over, so that when it, when you grab it on the other side, it's already in the right position, you don't have to like, bring it over to the other side. Yeah. I, when I pack, I always give my backhand a little like push right.

And let the momentum over the wing bank it over. So that way, when you grab it on the other side, it's already in the right position, you got power right away. You don't have to like, bring it back into the power position. Yeah. Totally. Those are good tips. Yeah. What about for the foiling part of the turn, I guess you want to keep the foil high, but not too.

Like when I started attacking, I noticed I over foiled a lot. I would breech, I would go into like too fast, too high, and then I would focus on the wing and I would just breech cause I was going too fast. So I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Just be comfortable with the foil and if you're comfortable breaching the tip.

Of your waiting in thirds just a little bit, that'll help a lot because generally if you come into attack that the tip is going to come up a little bit I know just being comfortable and be comfortable with your drivers, be comfortable to be comfortable with your wing handling. And you should get it pretty fast.

Yeah. Especially the front side tax, I find pretty easy, but the guy going backside is a little bit more tricky. Like when you have to throw it behind, grab it. Yeah. And then for the more advanced riders, if you want to get a better acceleration of your tax as you come through the wind and down use progressively more back foot pressure.

If you come up, when you get back on the power, you want to be as high on the mask as possible, because then you can accelerate down the math and yeah. Your gravitational potential energy. That's a good pointer. I've noticed too. Like when I kick out of a wave and attack, kicking out, like once I get over the tip of the wave, I actually point my nose down and they pushed down the backside and then you get, get a little bit of speed coming off the back of the wave.

And if you don't do that, you can end up easily breaching. Cause your flow will come up too high. And then as you're kicking out, so the same thing as when you're kicking out. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting about also about the wings jumping, I've jumped really big wings and some really followings, and it seems like a three, five is a pretty good balance or four meter.

Because I noticed on the big lane, if I can't get enough speed, there's too much drag on it. I can't get enough speed for a good high pop. Depends on your foil too. But and I'm on too small of a wing. You just come down super hard and it doesn't have the power to rip you up also full dependent.

Like the dispensers foils must be crazy, pop new stuff, new foil, insane pop. And that really helps you in that initial acceleration. Yeah. Soil matters a lot. And then, I've actually gotten some of my biggest jumps on a five eight, like a really big wing in relatively light wind, but being so powered up and the thing is this like a parachute pulling me up.

Like it's almost like kite surfing, and then you can just put a lot of hang time too. Cause you got that big canopy over you and just that's true. I'm used to jumping in a lot of wind over here. Definitely a web link, but in light wind. Yeah. I can see the tree outside your window. It looks like a kind of coming up.

Huh? It's getting good today. Today. It looks pretty glossy on the North shore. Can you see the water? But I could see the water from here, but I think it will come up enough. It should be should be a fun day of swelling. So I talked to Annie Riker too, and I guess you guys go out together sometimes or you flow together.

I fear all the time. I'm not sure to coast. She's down there a lot sensors. Yeah, amazing. I have to say for, the stuff she does, pretty impressive. Yeah. No, that, that whole area too. And it is crazy. It's just unbelievable for progression being around that good of writers and seeing inspiration from what everybody else is doing.

It's pretty special. Who else do you think would be good to interview for this show? And I, in particular, I'm trying to stick with wing people that wing foil and can share some experience on wing foiling, especially. Yeah. You've done Alan Cadiz who maybe Damian, Jordan, who does they did the wing right wing and would be good designer, Tom.

He's a lot. He's had a lot of experience designing wings. We'd be good. All the kids are great.

Yeah, it's tricky. I always recommend, I could just say interview Mark Rapa horse. Oh yeah. Mark would be. Mark would be good too. He's an interesting guy in and has so much experience building boards. He's a funny guy to

run the show for sure. I know it's more wing swelling centered, but Dave Kalama's is an amazing guest. Yeah. I'd love to have him on the show too. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Kalama wing filing at all. Has he done tried it or not really? Not really. Actually. Alex, it might be interesting. He's been obsessed with going and like breaking his own speed records. I actually saw him leaving for a D w I was leaving for a downwind there with a few guys yesterday and we saw him at a Malia pumping up as a way with his high speed front wing and getting to go do some speed runs over there.

Pretty amazing. Going really fast. Yeah. I'd love to talk to Alex too. That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. All right. So another question I always ask everybody is during the pandemic, a lot of people are struggling either showing lonely or depressed or anxious and so on. So what do you do when you have a bad day or like how you have any kind of pointers to keep your positive outlook and stay happy for me?

When lucky we live life, I was able to get in the water pretty much every day. And that's the biggest thing for me is just getting out in nature. Getting some exercise every day makes a huge difference. And yeah just having a passion you can follow helped me a lot.

That's a good answer. Yeah. It's yeah. Getting on the water is like therapy, right? If you're feeling down, it's hard not to be happy when you're on the water. And Valley, especially, and whinging, even more winging on Valley is a fairly safe COVID wise thing to do. You're out in the open in 25, knock the wind in the water and, you can see these people, you can make friends at the beach and see these people every day.

And yeah, let's talk a little bit about the pandemic. I know, like in the paper it said recently that there was a church on Maui, like that had a COVID outbreak and they still wanted to have their Easter service and whatever. So how do you feel about that whole thing? That's tricky over here, but we've been having a lot of cases recently, but on the upside I see, I hear about and see and meet more and more people every day that have been being vaccinated especially locals and that makes that'll make a big difference as far as just people's overall comfort and helping control it.

The other thing that seems like a big problem, it's hard to get actual sexual numbers or information on it, but walking around tourist areas is pretty pretty shocking. There's a ton of people. Like I, I went through China recently or Polly, and there's a lot of people, not really mine.

So I'm on vacation. Do whatever. Yeah. I just got my second shot yesterday Oh, nice. Yeah. I get my second shot on the 12th. Oh, nice. So cool. Yeah. We're lucky in Hawaii that, or, I guess in the U S that we're able to get vaccines, a lot of places in the world don't even have a lot of that.

And Hawaii has been doing really well. I heard LA is doing amazing. They have 200 cases a day. Just in LA, which compared to home, why is this such a low percentage of the population? Yeah, I think California right now is actually pretty low. But there's other spots in the country that are still really bad.

And then in Europe they have an outbreak too. And then those new, the new strains are nasty to more. They spread. I just read an article. You might find that interesting too, in the economist that was talking about bees, honeybees, they actually vaccinate their babies. Like the queen bee gets.

Yeah. They just had some research. I guess the worker bees feed the queen bee, like this Royal jelly and that contains like some virus particle protein particles and it make their own vaccine that they inject into the baby bees or something. I don't know, but it's pretty cool.

So they have the original vaccine vaccination program. What I love the great thing about this vaccine in particular is just the huge jump in technology. It created so much money was put into it and so much effort, but it's affecting it. It's affecting other things too. So I think I just saw they're developing a way better HIV vaccine and

What's they're using some part of a recent development to prevent you from having to inject insulin. So you could take it as a pill. So things like that are amazing. I'm definitely a big believer in putting money into it to science and development, because that's where you can do amazing things with enough funding.

Earlier you touch that you're pretty happy right now doing what you're doing, being a designer and being going on the water every day and doing both together, which I think is awesome, and I don't see a reason why you shouldn't just do that. And why go to school if you're having fun, but if you went to school what would be the the university you would pick?

I'm not sure yet. I didn't like, I didn't like school that much. I didn't do great in school and I spent most time thinking about boats and then kiting and surfing. Yeah, I'd have to find a school that would fit me really well in that way. I definitely thought about, I had a dual citizenship with the Netherlands because my dad was born there.

So I could go study in Europe for an EU price. Definitely not attractive option. Yeah. You can go somewhere and I can live there and I'm a citizen. So

do you speak Dutch? I understand it better than I speak it. And it definitely helps my understanding. If I spent two weeks in Europe, then pop back up and I can order food and understand both the conversation. Yeah. No that's definitely cool. That would be a good experience too, to live in Europe.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I guess you've got right now though. You can still wing for it. Yeah, not right now, but yeah, I guess you could still wing foil as this kind of gets freezing cold in the winter. So we're definitely pretty lucky here in Hawaii that we go out every day of the year without freezing our ass off.

Sorry. Where my grandparents lived in a small town on the Island there in Holland. Yeah. North sea downwind thing. There would be absolutely like unbelievable gorgeous level. They get a lot of windows. You could go for a hundred miles down the coast. Yeah, pretty Epic. The one, one day, my fingers I get to go for down winter there.

I love Holland like Amsterdam, it's such a cool city. If you could live there for a while, but try to be here to get experience. It's they're ahead of the rest of the world with everything like pretty cool legalization or, just being tolerant of things like gay marriage and all that stuff there.

They were the first on everything, one of the, and one of their big exports is just technology. So they definitely have a good thing going. I checked out like Delft university and they actually, when I was over in Holland last time they had a student design competition for solar electric power, electric foiling boats.

Wow. That's they were doing all these different races with her link book. It's pretty cool. She, I saw on your Instagram feed on the bottom, there was like some kind of weird design that you made. What is that one? Let me go back to that. It looked like he built some kind of model or something here.

This thing. What is that?

Oh yeah. That was an old drone. I broke and put it on a little skateboard. And I don't know, he may have made a car out of it because it worked fun. They were great. Actually, no, I saw that. I thought of something interesting back then too. I would crush my glider and break the fuselage part and have all these extra wings.

And so I thought what if he just connected the wings to the center? And put them on a big, like an A-frame with a pivot point at the top and had your wing pivot back and forth as a sale. So you pack, the wing would do this and it would do that. And you could use an airplane wing for it.

I didn't really catch that. Okay. Thanks. So this is your airplane wing, right? Okay. And you have a boat or a car or something. Something that can move. If you take your airplane wing and put it on a pivot point of here, it would pivot and you could run that way or pivot and run the other way.

I thought of using my airplane for that turns out.

I didn't live in thinking maybe I could build a like an airplane way and use it for winging. Solid wing. That would probably be the fastest. If you, it would be so fast if you just want speed. Yeah. Then there are obviously a rigid, the inflatable wings are really aerodynamically, not very efficient.

Cause there's so

yeah there's totally some improvements that can be made on a racing side. I don't think it needs to happen because it would be bad from the accessibility side, ease of use side. And that's probably the most important part of the sport is making sure everybody can do it and everybody can have a good, competitive fun time.

So that's where the current design is. They really Excel, just the ease of use, easy to use, easy to transport, you can perform at a really still perform at a really high level with it. Look at, yeah. Look at the jumps. People are doing Teton and Spencer's and Kai and balls Mueller.

He's unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Some crazy stuff. What are some moves that you're currently working on or do you have anything that you're trying to do that you're not yeah. Getting better three 60 with the wing. And then going into some flips,

spinning with the wings. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've been trying those two and I've been like, you basically turning the board into the wind and then bringing the wind around what's this secret. I struggle on the landing and I having a hard time pulling those off what works best for me was first of all not pointing super high up wind before you do it.

So bear off a little bit, maybe started to reach practice in light wind, and don't use a super short math. So it's probably an 80 centimeter. Math would be good for more, would be good for it. Make sure you can do a three 60 in the surf off the back of the wave. So if you have just pump out, get your three 60 down, off the back of the wave and then for the wing part of it, it's tricky.

What I like to do is jump and basically shoved the wing back as I'm writing and then bring it over my head as I come around. But that first initial rotation where your body rotates before the wing will make a big difference. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's like you turn the board before the rest of the body.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm starting to. I want to do a more and more tweaked out. So instead of just a flat three 60, I want to do like a more, yeah. The ones Baltz Mueller does those backflips where you goes up and then you flips the wing and then throw them with the rest of the body. And that looks super cool too, but I'm just not brave.

I think. Yeah. The biggest obstacle for me with COVID because it's way more intimidating before you do it then after you do it yeah, just pointing the wrong way and doing the three 60 is way scarier than the crashes. So what I like to do is go into one and just, you just have to get in your head and be like, okay, this crash, isn't going to hurt.

Realistically, you're going to be fine. And you do one and you crash, you do another crash and get used to crushing. And then once, once you do that, you're comfortable sending it harder and harder. It's a different patient video. Is it where you're doing a three 60 on a prone board? Do you know, is it this fun or this one, or I wasn't going to ask you, like you doing three sixties on the wave with the prom board.

Yeah, perfect. Three 60. Let's talk about you doing the three, three 60 on the wave. Walk us through that move a little bit. Yeah. The first few times I had a lot of trouble. What would happen is I pump way out in front of the wave and I felt no matter how far it pumps in front of the wave, I couldn't make it back around in time.

And I tried that forever could never do it, but the tricks that helps a lot was to pump out in front of the wave and then wait, like a second where you just stopped pumping for a second when you're way out ahead. And that'll slow you down enough that when you do the spin, you don't you can actually make enough turn for the wave.

The other thing is you don't need to lean over super hard if you do that one second, wait you just do a normal bottom turn and it works out interesting. I think Clinton had some,

I've watched watch, watch how he comes to the bottom and then wait.

Yeah. I, this is just a question out of curiosity, like how much of your skills would you say are from like pure talent and like natural ability and how much is from just hard work and repetition and keep trying and practicing. I don't really like to believe that you'd like a natural talent, but I credit a lot of my skills and knowing what's going on with the foil.

I like the first few times I tried, but what I thought of Oh, this is just like flying a plane, I'm flying a plane under water and knowing how the foil works and how it will do it, what it will do in different situations helps understand. What I'll feel when I put it in a situation.

Like what happens when I put it in the foam? Or how does my board redirect water or just really paying attention to yeah. What, you're, what you feeling and what's happening with your gear when you do this thing also, it's, so it's not just talent and practice. It's also like understanding how it works and mentally basically in visualizing it basically, or the thing that helps everybody obviously time on the water.

I've had so much time on the water, but I'm watching video of yourself. And you want, no matter how good you are or how new you are to the sport, getting someone to take a video of you and watching that. And either, either having someone who's better than you look at it and tell you what they think or just comparing it to videos of people who are good at it.

And just pay attention to what they do with their body, with what they do with their head. Yeah, mostly body positioning. That'll make a big difference, but emulating other people's like the card to do the move you're trying, right? Yeah. That's a good one. We were talking before the interview too.

And I thought that was really interesting. You said that if you listen to a podcast or listen to that conversation like this, that we're having then on the way to the beach and then you go out and you just in the right state of mind already. So can you I always get super stoked either.

If I meet someone sometimes I'll talk to someone who's like a aeronautical engineer or something. And after that, you're so psyched and it's such a good mindset to go foil. Or you listen to a great podcast or long form video, and it puts you in that analytical Headspace.

Where, when you foil you, you can pay attention to exactly what you're doing. And as you're doing it, you think about what's my body doing my foil, doing how's my setup feel. And it definitely helps with your focus. I think one of my goals for every move every way is simplify it in my head as much as I can, but the less I think, and the more it goes on subconsciously the better I arrive.

So I try and boil everything down to where I look. You get everything subconscious controlled in your subconscious. So when you want to do something, you just look in certain places and it happens. So I can cut back instead of thinking about what my, instead of actively thinking about everything, I just look back and train your body to do everything it needs, because that frees up a lot of head space for learning new tricks or it frees up a lot of mental space for quick reactions to things.

Yeah. I think we all know that feeling that you get when everything just works out perfectly and you're listening, listen sync. So how, like, how would you describe that? Like the perfect mindset and where everything just meshes together and your body and mind just worked together perfectly in stuffing and with me.

Yeah. That definitely lines up with the less going on in my head. So sometimes, yeah. That's all right. You were just saying you try to analyze it and stuff like that, but in a way that you analyze it can be counterproductive. You don't analyze it a moment. That's the important thing you got to analyze it before and after.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. When you're doing it, you just have to let it happen right. Or something not yet. And that's why I also heard a big part of everything I do to just having a really well-tuned stuff. If you're set up as well, you don't have to think about compensating for it and it doesn't do anything unexpected.

And that, that helps you get in that kind of flow state of where everything just lines up and works perfectly. Yeah. I love that. That's another thing I wanted to ask you cause you, you obviously try a lot of different gear and change things around and test different things. But the flip side of that, to me, if I have a setup that works, I just like to just use it exactly the way I used it last time don't change anything and then just know how it feels and right away I can get into that slow.

Versus when you trying something new, then you always have to spend some time learning it, figuring it out. And it, like after a while, if you using the same setup over and over it, then it becomes almost like part of you. Yeah, totally. That's part of who I explain it. I try and do it a lot.

I try and change that up. Even when the waves are really good. If you ride one set up for too long, you I feel myself losing perspective on how it works in the general world of things. So by changing things up a lot I'm trying a lot of different here. I, it kinda gives me a good reference of how other things work and it's important that you tried new stuff when the conditions are good, as well as when the conditions are bad.

If you see this, it's easy to say, Oh, the wind sucks today. I might as well just try to try my different telling her or move the map. But when it's Epic, it's hard to do that. And also if you don't have much time, because you don't want to have to come back in to chip or something like that, right?

Yeah. Yep. So for example, I've profiled a few times, and that's just such a good way to dial in your gear because you can bring to bring your wings and your tools and your, whatever, everything on the sea, in Epic conditions, you get so many waves that you have your fill. And I usually start. With trying the most.

I tried the most experimental stuff first. I tried the stuff that doesn't work first. And then I figured, Oh, this doesn't work. If I'm not fresh. And it doesn't feel good, fresh. It's not gonna work then slowly you change. And I always try and end my session with something that does work really well, because that puts you in that positive kind of thinking where you're like, Oh, that was such a good session versus.

Ending on something that doesn't work ruined. Yeah. I see. That's always what I always try to end every session with a good wave or good move, or you don't want to if you just crash and you're like, I'm going to go in and it's no, I gotta do at least one good wave or one good move.

And then once you do it, you just see, once you do that good mood, you have to cut your losses there and just go okay, I can't this tops that I'm not going to do anything better. That's exactly. That's always the best way to leave the water. Then you can't wait to get out again the next time. But yeah, I, especially as a designer trying to set up that other people like is important and trying new gear from other manufacturers it's important and it all, it gives you a good idea of where the sport's moving and what people are happy on, what you could possibly improve on.

I have a question about that actually. So has, have you tried something that you thought in theory, this is not really gonna work? I don't think this is going to be good, but then you got on it and you were surprised. It's Oh, this is actually has merit. Like as, have you had anything like that in the experiences like that?

I would say my current surf wing, that. I just like the profile I used on. I was like, let's just try it. Let's just see what happens. Because it's just totally again, when you showed earlier. Yeah. This one, the airfoil totally against what I felt would work well, and same with the detailing I tried, but it ended up working amazing.

I think a lot of people would have been more secretive about that. So super cool. Yeah. The whole spirit of the sport and sharing and enjoying it together. That's super cool. I think, yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. Yeah. All right, Kane. Thank you. Congratulations. You made it to the very end of the interview.

And like I said before, if you're still listening now, this show is for you. You're part of a very elite group of about 5% of the people that actually watched the whole thing. So congratulations, you are as crazy about wing filing as I am, and I hope you enjoyed every minute of it. As much as I did. I think I could have kept ongoing forever.

And I actually did. We did keep on going a little bit. So if you're interested in printing 3d shims for your foils or designing your own. Foils and the programs I can use as, and so on. Super cool. How much he shared here and he didn't really hold back anything. So thank you again, Kane for being so open and sharing, I really appreciate that this show is made possible by blue planet customers that support our business and make it possible for me to make shows like this.

And I want to say a special thanks to customers who ordered the PPC wings over the last week. Since I posted that review last weekend. And two weeks ago, I posted the interview with Sam loader, the designer of the PPC wings. So I just want to give a special shout out to those customers who order the PPC wings.

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If you look at the ship section, there should be a download link to a Google drive. I have a bunch of STI STL files. If anybody wants to design their own tail. I try and I think I have the MSC connection on there at the Armstrong connection on there. That should be compatible with the A-plus.

And I try and keep everything relatively open because I don't see why it's all public stuff. If you go in and look one, you can measure it. I like helping anyone out who is looking into designing their own gear. That's super cool. W would you be able to coach someone if I wanted to learn how to do this kind of stuff, would you be able to do like private coaching on how to use the 3d software and stuff like that?

Yeah, maybe. And I could definitely direct you to some good online resources for it too. But yeah, I'll try and make that part of my site and give a lot of good information on foil design and choosing different designs and what they do better or worse. I'm pretty good. So people have the information you're good at using shape 3d design boards.

And I guess you made, then you're able to design foils on there too. I just haven't really played around with it yet. What actually I use mostly XFL or plain whatever analysis kind of design program. And I used like a rhino seven for surfacing and for actually creating the model, but one program that I really like, it's called tinfoil.

And it's this guy on Instagram who had a there's an app on the website that you can use, but he made it, he made a program or a website that he designed fins really easily for windsurfing. And they have all that. You can export it in all these different file types. And he just has been updating it for foil design and actually for just designing wings, aside from connections and everything, it might be the best foil design software out there.

Because you can export it into , which is the analysis, which is an analysis program. You can export it into solid works FPL for 3d printing. You can do a whole lot with it. And he's a smart guy, so definitely check out. Yeah. Since coil. That's a good tip. Appreciate that. Any other cool stuff you want to share that?

If you're interesting, cool stuff. Yeah. Tinfoil is great. Anyone looks for it for the, cutting out like those you said Dennis like Hawaii what is it? What was it called?

Oh yeah. Like way back in the day when surfing. Yeah. So he has like a CNC machine and he cuts up the . He is, he has a few, a couple of temps and CNC machines and yeah, I sent him, I did the design of testing and he does the actual construction of it. So tons of credit to him, because he's definitely, wouldn't be what they are without his insane perfectionism.

Do you have to hand finish it or is it, does it come out of the machine almost? No, he hadn't finished, but and that's what makes a big difference. It's just the Hanford finishing on it is perfect. Whatever I designed the file down to the down to 107 millimeter, you can see. And in the finished product.

Yeah. I, my, the first wing I designed and prototype, it was like, real thick beginner foil. Basically, four there. And the sample I got that was G 10 fiber gossip was like, it probably weighed like 30 pounds, the front wing. And I maybe not that much, but it was super heavy.

And just getting to the water is really hard. And I thought this thing is not going to work. It's just too heavy, but then sliding at the first time, I was like blown away. It felt so smooth and steady, and it was just really nice in the water. And it wasn't really a disadvantage. Like how have you had that kind of experience with those real heavy?

Yeah. One thing this materials I really liked because it's super consistent. And plus with the CNC, machining, like every telling you get is going to feel exactly the same. There's no differences due to layoff or they're all the same strength. They'll all flex the same. They're all exactly the same shape.

And I've been riding heavy gear for a while. Actually, this set up pretty obvious, an aluminum fuselage and a solid T 10 front wing, like for example, my 800 hotline weighs one point almost 1.2 kilos. Just the wing and twice as heavy as say an Armstrong boiler or set up or something like that.

But yeah, my downwind front wing is a beef and I don't really notice it. So in the water can make a difference. Yeah. Unless you'd only be hairs or something like that, hold on. I'm also doing pretty big. I've been doing pretty big Arizona and it's fine. Strapless era, different story and maybe like crazy rotations, probably different story.

But but for most of your writing, it really doesn't make a big make a difference. Yeah. Yeah. And then what about the compete comparing aluminum mass to carbon mass, and different? I guess I like the feel of programmatic more because especially tapered design paper for master grade, you can, because the flex is really important.

It's near the base plate and when a carbon mask you can have that sick and have the bottom still fin for what a dragon it's a much reactive feel, limited master grade, the national LeWitt, a master is pretty impressive because reasonably stiff, but insanely light. And even, I've wrote the act eliminate mask and I'm problem with it.

Especially for telling if you're not in the air, like you can write such a heavy set up and it works just fine for towing. Actually. It's helpful to have a little bit heavier gear, especially the boards get to have a little bit more weight in the board and the foil, I think actually. Yeah. And like smaller surfing, pumping as long as your board light your board, actually not even your board doesn't even have to be light as long as the nose and tail light.

You're pretty fat, mostly about low swing weight in the board. Yeah. Swinging that, swinging a big, heavy board around, it will take way more energy than a big, heavy foil. And that'll make the biggest difference to your writing.

The board. The board makes a bigger difference than a lot of people realize

you can ride anything once you're in the air bodyboard you're writing. Cool. Cool. I'm I'll let you go now so you can get in the water or do something fun. Yeah. I got to go shifting, so yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much. Take care. .