6 Tips For Beginners of Best Wing Foil

In the beginning, we will have many challenges as wing foil beginners. Therefore, we need more tips and advice to give us direction. This article presents short tips that can really help you get started with the best wing foil. Hope that helps.

Firstly, let me tell you about me. I’m 49, first wind sport, 100kg and riding Winghier wings. I’ve just started reliably getting up on the foil and riding for 15-20 seconds per time. My god, what a feeling!

Here are some of my experiences of starting getting up on foil:

1. Depower the wing a bit when you come up by bringing it a bit overhead. Otherwise, it just gets too fast and too quickly to process. And another thing I learned which I found really good (sounds stupidly simple though!) is that for deposed or balance, you shouldn’t forget that you can also pull in your front hand… it’s a really effective and fast depower if you’re getting pulled hard.

2. Weird one this: back foot way more forward than you think before up on foil. For ages, I had too much weight at the back of the board trying to get it onto foil. Actually, I was just causing the board to drag its ass and never pick up speed. Get it flat with your weight near the centre so that it can pick up speed.

My concern about putting the mast all the back is that I would need to be more rearward on the board, and that seems to really slow the board down before you are on foil. Or am I wrong? Ultimately I guess, more water time is always the answer!

3. The foil at the back was just to find the balance point. Once found the foil can be moved to align with desired foot position on the deck.

4. I can’t pump the foil yet. Not sure I can pump the wing too well either. But I did notice two things… my board flies at tiny speeds when I’m not on it; and as soon as I get on foil, everything speeds up fast. So instead of trying to pump, I just get some board speed and then use the pull on the wing to just suddenly pull my knees up to unweight the board. With a bit of board speed, it breaks away, and as soon as the board clears the water, you get more speed. Sometimes it foils the first time, sometimes a couple on the bounce gives enough pace to keep it flying. I guess this is a kind of pumping, albeit a very inelegant one!

5. Front bootstrap really helps with the above.

6. 12’6 race sups are ridiculously fast with a surf wing.

I hope more and more people can join us in the future. If more experienced chaps want to help me out by pointing out if I’m talking bollocks, then please do. Wing foil is a funny sport, join us and get fun.