1 Year in – Progress Update

Author: Jon Mann

After writing about the start of my DW journey, I figured it was probably time to write an update. As I write this post I’m just over 1 year (I guess 6 months of foiling time as I work month on month off) into my sup foil downwind journey and have downwind foiled about 1200kms.

So what have been my biggest takeaways (I’ll elaborate further below):

Riding familiar gear and dialling in your gear as much as possible is the most important. The best gear is the gear you know the best.
Contrary to the last point. Riding as many different runs and conditions is amazing for your foil skills.
Surround yourself with like minded people

Know your gear and focus on skill development

I think familiarity with your gear beats chasing the most optimal set up. Marketing is meant to help brands to sell gear, so they will market everything as the next best thing, sure its an improvement but my opinion is it’s best to not get distracted by this if you are early in the learning curve. Fundamentally you’re still in the skill acquisition phase. So long as you are on a somewhat DW shaped board with a foil of a decent size, the gear won’t hold you back. Sure some gear will make it a bit easier, but nothing compared to any skill gains you make through time invested. As I’ve said before; SUP downwinding is the sum of the parts. The more of the parts you can get basic competency in, the easier it will be. It can be confrontational as it highlights your gaps and shortcomings, but it’s also an opportunity to identify what you need to work on. As an old coach of mine said, a gap isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength that needs improving.

Familiarity with gear allows you to focus on skill. Knowing how your foil pumps and accelerates, how it turns, how slow you can go allows you to make the right calls based on the situation you find yourself in. Knowing your board, where you need to stand to get it to paddle up the best (even if it’s not the ideal board) helps you feel comfortable and at ease whenever you need to paddle up again. All of this means no ‘adjustment’ period each time you’ve changed gear and means more of the time spent on the water is invested in skill development.

Go out in everything

Only going out in perfect or easy conditions will help you with the foiling part and paddle up in the beginning and will quickly help you get better at reading the bumps. But yeh, easy conditions are….easy. In the beginning it’s no doubt what you want, but as you get better you will have to embrace the suck again if you want to improve. My biggest learning jumps have come out of light wind runs where I maybe initially spent 40% of the time waiting for good bumps to paddle up on (improved my bump selection) and also figuring out the best timing, weight shifts, pumping techniques needed to effectively get myself on foil. Beyond that, light wind runs are still some of my favourites. Line choice becomes so much more important, energy conservation (you can’t just pump the whole run) and bump reading gets more critical as the bumps are more scarce, so you get in a deep flow state focusing on not coming off foil.

Community

Learning to DW in a group is so much more enjoyable. I get it though, there are good reasons such as time constraints which mean solo sessions. One thing worth noting is don’t worry about being a kook. Ditch the ego. No one cares if you suck, we’ve all been there, we are all happy to help. There are plenty of people out there who want to get into the sport, so unless you live in the middle of nowhere, the likelihood of finding someone to foil with is pretty decent, especially with how connected everyone is nowadays.

Here are the pro’s of foiling with others:

People who are better than you can help you avoid making the mistakes they made.
People who are the same level gives you peers who you can relate to and who you can practise with.
People who are newer to the sport than you can give you insights to aspects you maybe never have thought about. This can help you up your game and give you new perspectives.

Here are the con’s:

………

Everyone can learn from each other and no one is above or better than the rest (with the exception of in racing…but, that’s the fundamental premise of racing…and is a snapshot of that given time and moment). The single biggest factor in my progression has been the group of guys I foil with and the discussions we have, which have often led to ‘oh I never considered it like that’ moments and the drive we all have to improve and get better as individuals has led to the collective getting better.

So on the topic of progression, in my first post about my DW journey I mentioned that the North Sea was still a minor hurdle as I still wasn’t 100% comfortable so I’ll give a little update on that front.

In and of itself, downwinding on the North sea isn’t much harder than the lakes. The paddle up requires a bit more work and the bumps move a bit faster. The trickiest part is just the current and prevalence of 2 or more swell directions at times (though you can get groomer days where it just looks like the lakes, but supersized). At the time of writing I’m much more confident (almost the same confidence as on the lakes) downwinding on the North Sea having recently completed 20 and 36k runs within days of each other in different conditions without any concerns, major difficulty and in respectable times. The main goal now is to push speed and distance and get myself ready for some races perhaps. The main thing here that contributed to this all, was that my paddle up (big deal for me as a non-supper) has become a lot more reliable and that my flow and ability to carry speed have improved significantly. So how did I get there?

Paddle up rate of success. This is primarily thanks to just downwinding lots and also an increase in the number of flatwater sessions I’ve done to develop paddle power, also on smaller foils. I actually also downsized my paddle from a starboard enduro L (95in2) to an M (84in2). I feel that it has allowed me to use a much higher cadence to build speed when paddling. Secondly (and yes, the irony considering the above, though one could argue I’m past the beginner skill acquisition stage and more in the intermediate stage), the purchase of a KT 7’7” dragonfly has helped add confidence to the added paddle power. Now, I’d like to say that all the runs I’ve done on the KT I could have done on my 6’6”. I also still plan to use the 6’6” to sup foil waves and DW on the lakes. It is far surfier and I enjoy it a lot more than the KT. What the KT offers is peace of mind when I am 1-3km out to sea that I’m almost guaranteed to get up with minimal effort on smaller faster foils as I look to push my speed and distances, so I think a longer board / 2 board quiver will still be my preference going forwards.

Flow and ability to carry speed. Again, this is thanks to downwinding a lot. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on pumping as little as possible or as a last resort. I’ve set myself the challenge on the lake runs to try to always connect backwards and try to use my turns to maintain and generate speed whilst also sizing down on my foils to make this more important to get right. Whenever I do connect forward I try to do this just by using the speed I get from the bump I’m on (helps to have a smaller faster foil). This has helped me refine my timing and understand how the foil responds to being on different parts of the bumps when turning and also has improved my foiling in the surf massively. Hood River was a huge part of this, partly thanks to the groomer bumps, the current allowing you to run smaller faster foils and the sheer volume of runs I could get in. The biggest plus of using a faster foil and being able to carry your flow with that foil, is the efficiency of the pump at high speed, and the ability to cover so much ground when you pump or choose to leapfrog bumps.

Really in summary I think the biggest part of my progress I can attribute to time invested and spent in varying conditions. This has built a lot of confidence in my paddle up which then has allowed me to progress to faster foils, in turn allowing for more progress in other facets of downwinding. It feels like my progress has been exponential, but that makes sense. So for those who are just starting out, have a look at my previous post on the start of my journey and just focus on that basic skill acquisition first. Getting the basics right will pay dividends as you progress further.

As always these are just my thoughts and my opinions. If anyone has any thoughts or questions, feel free to ping me on instagram