Last year, after attending a few events in France and Spain between us, Sibren and I thought it would be a good idea to run an event at home. Since downwinding in the Netherlands was / still is in its infancy with a small dedicated group of foilers learning and progressing across the country, our primary goal was to put together an event that brought the community together and catered for as big of a range of levels as possible. The idea was originally to do a two part event (see the “original plan”), with half the run (8km) being a race and half the run being a fun run (7km). This would give people a chance to have a taste of racing, whilst also being able to enjoy the bumps together, leaving the option to only opt in for the fun run. We chose a run the event on the Markermeer on a stretch between Almere and Lelystad, which when the wind is decent (18+ knots  south west) provides super beginner friendly bumps and hoped that the weekends we picked for the event window in October (being statistically quite a windy month) would give us the conditions we were hoping for. However, it seems that the best way to kill the wind is to organize an event…with the weekends we wanted to run on having pretty much no wind...

The more you downwind, the more you begin to get a good feel for how good or bad the conditions will be based on the forecasts, what kind of foil you need to use for different conditions and can normally make the right call pretty easily. But what about those getting into the sport? In this blog I'm going to try and touch on the tools I use(d) to understand how the forecast and actual wind translates to the bumps that are out there and in turn how I then cho(o)se my foils. 

What a busy 2 weeks for the French leg of the newly announced Downwind foil world tour. I’ll do my best to wrap up my experience of these amazing events and how my races went.

Another year and another whirlwind race season (or 9 days in my case) in Hawaii. A wonderful convergence of amazing people in some of the best downwind conditions in the world. Being in Hawaii during the race period is one of my favourite times of the year as I get to catch up with friends and make new ones thanks to this amazing sport. This blog took a while to write as I couldn’t really find the time to sit down and put my thoughts down for a while and really just wanted to enjoy some cruisey foiling for a couple of weeks.