I was excited that the wind forecast for Wednesday suggested a nice SW thermal that would generate enough wind to foil. Yesterday’s conditions were glassy, which did work well for our WeCanFoil tow foiling demos.
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| The WeCanFoil (sponsor) money shot! I’m on the easier to sail gear in the front |
IQ foil coaches Anna and Jonathan de Vries asked me to set up the Severne Alien 145L board and foil and I rigged up the 5.7 Severne Foil Freek for the first time. I was asked if I would ride the demo gear to hopefully get some content for the WeCanFoil social media. Well, YES!
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| Heading out of the Portsmouth harbour |
We launched from the dock in the harbour and worked our way up a little bit into the St. Lawrence. Aug came out in the boat to try and take pictures but it was too wavy to capture video from the boat. He suggested to Anna that we sail upwind and get close to the Wolfe Island shore. So when I got close to her, Anna just said “follow me”.
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| Out on the water |
Anna was #1 at the 2019 IFCA Foil World Championships in Switzerland. She helped test the gear that is being used in the 2024 Olympics. She works at North Sails and easily won last year’s foil Kingston event. So it was a bit hard for this old guy to keep up with her. But I managed to get upwind just a bit behind her. The Alien board was relatively easy to use and had the footstraps in the right places. I didn’t need to adjust a thing. The foil underneath was quite stable and reminded me of the one that I used in the Gorge last September that was Svein Rasmussen’s favourite windfoil setup.
We did a very high speed run in the flat water and I got quite a good top speed for the day. 17.5 knots or 32.3 km/h. Almost as fast as last week on my Duotone gear but over a much longer time.
Aug did get the picture he was looking for (above). Here is a video:
And my videos:
And a bunch more photos…
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| Got the social media content! |
| Detailed course map |
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| Decent top speed! With only one wipeout the whole session. |
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| Teamwork makes for dream work |
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| Graphic showing how close we were to Wolfe Island |
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| Happy coaches: me Jonathan and Anna |
We were out for two hours and I did 25 km. We were pretty stoked when we were all back on shore!
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| Of course the wind dropped after this… Just as I was going out wingfoiling |
Around 3:45 I decided to try wingfoiling. I launched from the rocks in the parking lot but that wasn’t a great idea. I took the Duotone 5m Echo and 125l Sky board with the 1080 foil underneath.
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| Didn’t get going with the wingfoil |
Another WeCanFoil demo session that evening made for a long day! Details on that will be published on my Launch Pad Academy blog.
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