To me it is very exciting. The initial buzz is that you are really flying over the water. It is very different to windsurfing. You position yourself with a totally different pressure point. You use your feet and toes more than anything else. You really are on top of the rig rather than leaning out on the side. It puts everything into a new perspective, muscle memory changes and the whole feeling is more exciting and more fluid. You go through the lulls with a lot more ease. It is still a challenge and a rediscovery of a new sport. The fact your board does not touch the water does not get dull, you start to look at new challenges in the way you adjust your weight. What it does is definitely increase the amount of time in the water with light air, that is one hundred percent. That said foiling is not just for light wind! Guys have foiled in 40 knots on a 3.2! You basically just use a mast and a boom that is all you are doing. It is a great challenge and a new progression of our sport.
If I had to make a call for our sport I would open it up as an alternative discipline that would be complementary to slalom. I think it would be wise to lower the wind limits for the foiling and make some hull, foil and sail rules that could be respected in favour of convenience and budget. Maybe limit the top end of foiling to 15 -18 knots. For slalom maybe we would need to look to raise the minimum over 12 knots or higher. The only reason we develop a 9.2m is for the racers! It is not that we are selling many of these to the public, 75% of the equipment we make that size goes to our racers. What is the point to develop this type of equipment? It is not like F1 where the development of these cars actually brings some sort of know how about where the new technology frontier is going to be. It is not a new electric engine, a new brake or a new wheel or something. We are basically developing something bigger just so a 100-kilo guy can fly along with 10 knots of wind. Looking at the market and if we want to do something good with our sport, then we need to develop equipment which is consumer orientated. Firstly I would limit the size of the board for foiling. We are still windsurfing so we need to limit it to maybe 91cm wide, which is the size IFCA has limited the size of their slalom equipment to. So the racing board of foiling could be used for IFCA races in the future. That could be a good point. We need to limit the width of the wings and fuselage also, otherwise we will be riding around on gear nobody will buy!
