Postby OzBungy » Wed May 26, 2021 3:39 am
I have kites from 4m to 12m. Wings from 2.8m to 5m.
More interestingly I have a couple of kite foils but I mostly use only the one 950cm foil with a 120cm board in all conditions.
I have 1400,1500 and 1850cm foils for surf and winging. The 1500 is the main wing. The 1850 is new and I have had some success in pumping it up in lighter winds.
In terms of "successful" sessions I am guessing 99% success rate kite foiling. That means a session where I get to ride and don't have to self rescue or walk back or paddle in. Simply put, go, ride, have fun, pack up, go home. Within that there might be 20% of sessions where I go kite foiling and there are no other wind craft on the water, except maybe yachts or foil skiffs. Certainly no wing foilers or wind foilers. Occasionally there's a few windsurfer LTs cruising about.
I would guess that 20-30% of my wing foiling sessions have some kind of "fail". That's usually the wind dropping out to unusable levels. Sometimes there's a walk of shame. Sometimes a paddle, If I'm lucky the wind comes back and I get to continue riding. It's not just me. If I am stuck on the water so is everybody else. Occasionally there are a few people who are better positioned to ride back to the beach. Sometimes I am one of them. Sometimes not.
What is not counted is the number of sessions where I have wing foiled because kite foiling would be dangerous or difficult or inconvenient due to offshore/gusty winds or storms or other things where flying a kite would be inadvisable. There's not a lot of those sessions, but they're still pretty nice to have had. Some of those sessions include the wind dropping down to zero which would account for the large proportion of dud wing sessions.
What I have trouble reconciling is the massive lack of skill of the average wing foiler. Some get it and progress. Many have not progressed over the past year. There's lots of new gear and fancy foils and brand loyalty and the rest. There's also lots of paddling, walking, fiddling with foot straps, and even not going out at all if the wind is strong.
I also have trouble reconciling the claims of wing foiling with small wings in <10 knot winds. I can't do it. I've never seen anybody else go anywhere near it. I've never seen a video of people doing it that had reliable indications of light wind and that didn't have some signs of more wind in the background (wind lines on the surface, other sail craft moving quickly, offshore winds in lagoons with thrashing trees etc)
While we're at it. My total kite foiling kit cost about AUD$8000. There is a fair bit of redundancy in there. In terms of dollars per hour it is by far the best value for money I have ever spent, about $8 an hour. I'm up to around AUD$12,000 on wing foiling gear and can see another few thousand in there (smaller board, bigger and smaller foil, bigger and smaller wing). That's $120 an hour so far. There's a few wing foiling items I could discard. Part of the expense comes from getting into a new sport when the equipment parameters are not yet clearly defined.
In the interests of completeness, I understand the attraction to the safety of wing foiling. I find I get lots of micro-injuries. Scraping skin off knuckles from seams. Various face and hand impacts with the wing when getting thrown off pitching waves. Getting run over by the board and foil. None of it is serious. All of it is annoying. I have had more serious injury events kite foiling, but they are much more rare. Considering that I like to kite foil super powered up and boost and do tacks onto the wave face the energy and aggression of kite foiling is far higher but the injury count is much lower.
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- jakemoore (Wed May 26, 2021 3:57 am) • airsail (Thu May 27, 2021 12:30 am) • phlow (Mon Jun 28, 2021 9:19 pm)