What Great Fun Just Winging It!
For years, I’ve watched other sailors foil with envy. I was there when Jimmy Spithill and the Oracle Team USA boys won the America’s Cup in that spooky-fast AC72 foiling cat off San Francisco in 2013. I’ve seen those skittish flying dinghies—the Moth, followed by the Waszp—scoot uncannily aloft. Then those insane IMOCA 60s made a hot lap of the planet in the Vendée Globe race, irresistible in their uneasy speed and inevitable carnage. There was something on the sailors’ faces and in their voices that I desired greatly: an eagerness of purpose, of tinkering, of testing the edge.
My inner Icarus yearned. I replayed Pink Floyd obsessively. “A fatal attraction is holding me fast,” went the lyrics, “How can I escape this irresistible grasp?”
When I once sailed the Windward Islands, I’d kept a windsurf board strapped to the rail. It was my therapeutic high after working back-toback-to-back charters. Inside the reefs of Tobago Cays near Union Island, I found a mad and wonderful rush. But that retro board is long gone.
At age 54, I wondered, was I done flying?
And then videos of a strange new sport began to appear. At first it didn’t even seem real. A human holding a wing. Windsurfing legend Robby Naish’s 13-year-old daughter foiled gracefully, like a seabird lifting off the water. Another rider soared on big, long, empty ocean swells. I watched that clip again and again; it was perhaps the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was all so new that nobody had settled on a name. Wing foiling. Wing surfing. Wing dinging. As with anything worth pursuing, I felt both allure and angst.
Gear was pricey and hard to get. But with a credit card, some guesswork and a fair amount of trepidation, I scored a wing, board and foil that I hoped would be the right sizes for rookie ol’ me. Each package on my snowy doorstep brought excitement —and also something like shame. In cycling lingo, I was a Fred. In surfing, I was an utter kook.
On the journey south to the Pacific coast of Mexico and my cruising boat for the winter, I did a Google search for how to foil and found algebraic diagrams and cooking techniques for chicken. Amazon asked me,
“Did you mean, ‘how to fail?’” As I lugged my misbegotten dreams out of the airport and into an extra-large taxi, that failure seemed certain.
On Day One, Rebecca, my cruising boat co-captain and now my wing girl, helped me sort out the new gear. The wing floated in my hands like a giant paper airplane, and when I trimmed in, the board scooted forward. I could have been content right there.
But now it had its hooks in me. The next three days, I did nothing else. I kept the board and foils assembled on the deck of our sailboat. Each day at noon, as the sea breeze began to fill, I would inflate the wing, transforming a few handfuls of crinkly spinnakerlike material into a giant green bird. Our boat’s transom was my launch platform. I’d put on my helmet and life jacket and kiss my wing girl goodbye, feeling like a new kind of pilot testing the boundaries of the known universe. More Pink Floyd: “Can’t keep my eyes from the circling sky. Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit…”
Day Two, in a little more breeze, one thing became clear the moment I left the security of the boat. Everything sends you downwind. And all you want to do is get upwind. I
remembered this so-called walk of shame from my early windsurfing days. Here, with an onshore wind, it became the paddle of shame. I paddled my little heart out, swallowing one salty wave after the next, to gain maybe a hundred yards or two to windward. Then, as I tried to get my kite right side up, my board underneath me, and find some semblance of flying order—with everything moving in a dozen different directions—my hard-earned gains were erased in moments flat as each gust blew me back downhill. How to fail, indeed.
Or as my buddy Terry texted in commiseration, “I prefer how to flail, because it implies some degree of success.”
Definitely I was learning how to fall. I fell headfirst, back first, gracelessly spread-eagled. And I kept on kicking the sharp edge of the foils in the same place on my same ankle bone—salt in the wound of my incompetence.
Still, with every run, I got infinitesimally better at standing up from a kneeling position—a key move. I became a little steadier on the board and more confident in my wing trim. By the end of Day Three, I even had a few liftoffs. But they were momentary and violent, the nose rising in a crazed wheelie, then plunging down. I went to bed with seawater up my nose and that split ankle throbbing.
I’d seen the Dunningkruger graph, where the y-axis is competence and the x-axis confidence. With the tiniest gain in competence comes a disproportionate rise in confidence. This is Mount Stupid. Look, I can fly! Of course, it’s deceptive; as competence grows any further, one plummets back to the Valley of Despair, with the fabled Slope of Enlightenment hopelessly out of reach.
Now that I was climbing Mount Stupid myself, I became impatient. Why couldn’t I get the bloody thing up every time, and stay there?
I searched for answers in the shadowy fringes of the sport, the forums where fanatic pioneers lurked. I wanted simple answers about where to position my foil and feet. But these people spoke in tongues and riddles, each guru with their own complex formula for salvation. Others gave me grief about wearing a helmet.
“Forget all that,” messaged my mate Giorgio, who foils like a maniac on the Persian Gulf near Dubai. “Start with the mast bang in the middle, and move it a bit at a time. Repeatable foiling is about fixed schemes and very small adjustments.”
“So how do I get up foiling?” I begged to know. “I’ve been pumping like the videos say.”
“Don’t do it,” Giorgio said. “Those are 110-pound pros. Instead of fighting for hours in marginal conditions, wait for more breeze. When you get a puff, bear off aggressively. Once the board gets speed, reinstate pressure on the wing by heading up again, and you should lift clean out. As you lift, move your weight forward by shifting the hips.”
Day Five was a sh-t show. I launched from shore and paddled out into a maelstrom of choppy seas and gusty winds. I got up a few times but paid the price in hard landings. I’d gone from the beginner slopes to the double-black diamond and got my butt kicked for it.
A week later, after licking my wounds, I spent Day Six anchored in a better place with a side-shore wind. That way I could do my walk of shame up the beach. I found that I could turn the board upside down and push it through waist-high swells, the wing buffeting behind. In the exuberant Pacific Mexico beach town off which we were anchored, it was more like a walk of fame, the locals shouting encouragement as I slogged by.
And then, on Day Seven, the universe shifted forever. I launched earlier than usual, just as the sea breeze was beginning to fill, so I had flat water and a 12 to 14 knot wind. I had gone to sleep and woken up trying to picture a flawless flight.
But I was shocked at what happened next. I had barely let go of the sailboat, stood up and trimmed the wing when the board lifted. And stayed up! That first little flight was like stepping through a portal into another world.
On my last run of the day, I relaxed my grip on everything. And in that letting go, I found the sublime. I looked away from my vexing board and up to the wide horizon, then the sky. In disbelief, I continued to soar. For those long, delicious moments, I felt more bird than fish.
That night, I slept like a tired and happy kid. And for the first time, I dreamed not of crashing, but of long flights over ocean swells. Those were very good dreams. “There’s no sensation to compare with this. Suspended animation, a state of bliss.” Thanks, Floyd. It’s still early in my wing-flailing journey. There’s always the next chance to scorch my feathers and fall back to the Valley of Despair, and I still eagerly dread each session. But then comes that next tiny progression, that microadjustment that brings a reward, and I am a test-pilot hero again, if only for a little while. From what I’ve tasted so far, this new sport is highly addictive, largely harmless (so long as you avoid kicking the foils), and definitely here to stay.
And for now, I’m keeping my helmet on.
Yacht captain and author David Kilmer reports that he’s taking the next long slog up Mount Stupid: the foiling jibe.