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. 

This is a follow on from my parawing blog post and aims to cover some of the core skill sets that make up downwind foiling (independent of means of getting on foil – plus some specifics for different ways to get on foil). I wanted to write this post as something has been nagging away in the back of my mind for a while and it’s something I’ve been scratching my head about for a while. Gear is getting better. Yet the learning curve for people learning to downwind doesn’t seem to be getting any quicker (maybe the opposite?)…. So why is that? 

Ok, I never wrote a 3 foil quiver blog for March because March wasn’t great for wind so I didn’t have much to write about and ended up a bit busy in April and May. However in April I received not one, but 2 parawings to see what all the hype was and to finally follow up on my last parawing blog post. Both of these parawings work great, so I’m not really going to go into the differences between them (I’ll leave that for the parawing connoisseurs). Now that I’ve had a good amount of time on them, I plan to talk more about the usage of parawings from a downwinding and learning to downwind lens rather than ‘which is best’. The parawings I have are the Flow D-wing 4.2m and the Ozone pocket rocket 3m.

Continuing on from my last post – here’s a quick recap of the foils I decided to use in Feb:

So Dave posted this video about what foils he would choose for a 3 foil quiver which I really enjoyed as this is something I started playing with in December last year. I think it really helps me understand ideal use cases for certain foils (for what I like and my conditions) and it’s also has helped push me a bit outside of my comfort zone with some foils (both over foiled and underfoiled) which is also fun! So what have I been riding? For the last 2 months I’ve been riding a ‘forced’ 3 foil quiver for all disciplines (680R, 850S, 1130S) with a bit of free reign on the fuse / stab combos but primarily using the short fuse and 142 (though more recently also with the XS and the 135) and I think I’m going to continue with a 3 foil quiver ‘challenge’ for the next couple months to get me riding foils that maybe I wouldn’t have grabbed as often. But before I get into February’s quiver, I’ll explain the logic behind my current quiver. 

So you may have seen me posting on instagram about a leaderboard site (https://race.downwind.app/) that my buddy Sibren built. Originally it started as a leaderboard for a part of a local run for a bit of fun, but Sibren quickly realised that this leaderboard was scaleable and we started adding more runs globally (first through our network, and now by promoting it more on social media). This blog post aims to go through some of the ‘basics’ about the leaderboard – but in general we hope that it drives community engagement in all the various DW locations, a bit of friendly rivalry and can possibly even end up as a tool for local events or challenges.

So, another year of racing has passed, we’ve seen plenty of growth in the sport with more races and events and we’ve seen the level well and truly elevated. An element of physicality has been added in addition to the already high skill requirements, that in my opinion adds more credibility to the professionalisation of the sport. Before I go any further in this blog though, I want to add that none of my opinions or statements target any individuals (so if you feel like this is directed at you, it’s not, it’s a generalised view) and also that they are just my opinions based on my perspective. I welcome criticism (in a constructive manner) and debate, but more on that later.

The days are getting shorter as we enter autumn, which despite no longer having the chance of downwinding daily like i did when i worked month on / month off, does increase the likelihood of great sessions when I can go. However, with the change of seasons comes a drop in temperature. I for one am a fan of the colder sessions, but with the cold also comes an added set of considerations when it comes to safety.

So the parawing movement is in full flow and I thought I’d write my thoughts on it primarily focused on its use case as an alternative starting method (upwind ability for me for the focus of this blog is irrelevant) and for learning to DW. I’ll start with my disclaimer: I haven’t used one yet as I don’t want to pay that much for a parawing + shipping + import to the Netherlands, so if any brands want to let me try one, get in touch!