Aloha, this is Robert Stehlik with Blue Planet Surf. Today I'm gonna talk a
little bit about our Easy Foiler boards. We have four different models
available. Before we get into that, I'm going to talk a little b it about the
whole design concept behind the boards and the history. All right, let's go in the shop.
Hydro Foiling has been around for quite a while now; it all started
with the air chair which was a strap in chair that was towed behind a boat.
Then that was adopted to surfing, they were tow-in surfing
with those foils and the kite surfers got into it with with smaller foils.
But I think when Kai Lenny posted his video of him foiling in a
downwinder, that started a whole new era of the of the sport.
It's basically Alex Aguera from GoFoil who pioneered those foils that fly at lower
speeds. Basically thicker, bigger foils that don't need as much speed, so you can foil on a
surfboard or stand-up board. Foiling is probably the most efficient way you
can move across the water, it's basically what flying is to walking on land.
The foil lifts up and you're totally off the water.
The only thing that drags is the foil that's underwater, so it totally reduces the
amount of drag and it's very quiet also; and the speeds you can achieve are
amazing on just small waves, so it's kind of a little bit addicting, that feeling
of flying over the surface almost without any sound and just
very little drag, it's it's a very cool feeling; hard to explain.
It's an exciting new sport! I got into it about a year ago and have been
working on making boards that are specifically designed for for foiling.
A lot of the boards that were available were basically just regular stand up surfing boards
with a foil box put in. That works to learn on and so on but
then once you get into it you want something that's more specific for the
sport, because basically when you're surfing a stand up board the
board is what's surfing and controls everything.
But on the foil, you paddle out on the board, you catch the wave with the board,
but as soon as you lift off, the board becomes a totally irrelevant.
The board is just a platform for your for your foil, so the foil is what you're surfing
and your feet are controlling it through the board but the board itself no longer
matters, because for turning and surfing you don't really need the board.
So what we found is that the smaller you can go with the board,
the shorter and narrower, the more maneuverable you are on the foil because
you have less swing weight and you can fit the board into tighter spots.
There board is less likely to touch in different spots and angles, like when you are turning on a really
wide, big board, it will touch in the turns versus a smaller, narrower board that is
designed well, it won't touch as easily in the turns. So the design philosophy behind
our board is obviously to make foiling as high performance as possible, but
also I wanted to make it accessible and easy to learn, safe, and efficient as
possible, so that's kind of the philosophy. Basically everyone's still a
beginner at the sport because it's really only a little over a year old that anybody's
really been doing it; maybe a little bit longer some people, but to me,
everyone's still beginner, so making it easy is kind of a priority.
We'll probably, in the future, have boards and foils that are more high performance,
but right now the focus is on making it easy to control and fun to fly it and
as easy to get into as possible, basically. Alright, so I'm going to talk a little
bit about the design of these boards and the philosophy behind it, and so on.
I'm gonna start on the bottom, because that's what touches the water and is
probably the most important thing. So basically, like I said, when you're
foiling you're riding the foil, so the most important part of the foil board
is when you're paddling out, back out into the surf, and then catching the wave.
The most important thing is catching the wave, making it easy to
catch the wave, you know. What makes it easier to catch a wave,
especially on a shorter board, is if you have good tracking, meaning you can keep
your board going straight to catch the wave, and then creating a lot of lift, so
you got that take-off lift to get you up to speed so you can fly the foil.
So, some of the things behind what we did is to have a fairly low
rocker all the way through the back of the board, so there's a little
bit of rocker in the tail but it's a fairly low rocker and then there is a
nice little kick in the nose. Basically, when you're catching
the wave you don't want the board to go under as your tail lifts up, so it's just
to keep the board on the surface of the water. Also, if you do breach and you come
down hard, this is what kind of keeps the nose from just going underwater and
helps you get recovered and come back up out of the breach.
Then you'll see there's on the concave in the nose and it goes into a double
concave in the center here and then a V or double concave V in the tail.
What what the concaves do, obviously, is channel the water and that helps you
with tracking, keeps the board tracking more straight, and then it also has these
beveled rails, these tucked under rails that have
a fairly sharp edge right here, so that helps you with lift as
the water just kind of gets sheared off of that edge and you start
to plane earlier, and you get more lift, and that helps you take off sooner.
These boards, even though they're smaller, they're fairly easy to catch waves with.
It's kind of surprising, and they're also surprisingly stable. Basically we chopped
off the nose and tail, so the outline is pretty straight and then these
rails are even more straight than the outline because they're kind of pulled
in a little bit. This also helps a little bit when you're doing sharp
turns, when you're carving on the foil there's less board to touch the
water and when you're carving. By tucking it under, that also
makes the underside of the board a little bit narrower, a narrower board, basically.
Then when you're paddling, you get more stability from
these fat rails, the volume is also pretty high you
can see that from the from the side here. These are pretty thick thick rails,
so there's a lot of volume for the small size of this board. So yeah,
these down rails kind of transition into a regular tail in the back so by coming
back to a point here in the end, that line is more straight which helps
with tracking, basically. Those really straight rail lines here
help the board track pretty straight and we're still able to pull the tail a
little bit more, but you know overall, the tails is really wide and pretty thick.
It's got a lot of volume in the tail and that helps when you step back to get over
your foil as you're taking off, the board won't sink off. If the tail is
really thin how we like it- narrow tails are great for surfing,
bigger waves especially, but on a foil board it doesn't make sense because
as soon as you step back to get over your foil, the tail sinks off and it's
the opposite of what you want you wanted to lift up and get you on the
foil so more volume and a wider tail helps with that and then has a sharp
edge back here. I've seen some boards that have a lot of
tail rocker or like a kick in the tail I find this having having a little bit
flatter in the back helps generate speed on the takeoff so it seems to work
really well, the shape of the tail here. So let's look at the top of the board
yeah obviously there's a lot of volume in the rails, so when you're paddling back
out, you got that volume and stability even though the boards are very small.
This is the one I'm riding personally, I'm like 195 lbs, my weight, and I
ride the 6'6" by 28.5", it's 116 liters of volume.
It's plenty volume for me and once I got used to it,
it's not a not too much of a problem to balance, but for starting out,
probably one of the bigger models is better, just more stability makes it
easier to to learn on. So, what's really important, when you're foiling, is where
to place your back foot. So one of the most important things is where you put
your back foot, so we designed the deck pad to have a little
arch bump here that that's basically over the foil and kind of ends about an
inch behind the back screw. The back screw is really kind of where you want
to have your foot you want your foot on that back screw more or less and then it
has that tail kick so you know when you're back here you're getting too far
back, but you know as you get more advanced, you can put your foot kind of
behind the back screw a little bit and that helps with maneuverability and
fine-tuned control of the foil. It creates more lift for the foil but
it makes a little bit more tricky to ride it at the higher speeds, because
you have to put more weight on your front foot. So when you're starting out
you'll probably put your foot like you're right in the middle of this arch bar or so, or over
the back screw, maybe. But this is super important, basically you want to be
able to feel where your back foot is without looking, so that's where
this comes in really helpful; and then of course we also have foot strap inserts
here, so we have two rows so that you can mount the front foot strap diagonally
that's what we recommend and then the back foot strap you can offset it a
little bit to the side, that way you're more centered over the board. I recommend
for starting out not using foot straps, I think it's just easier to to learn and
safer to not use foot straps when you are starting out. Just use your
tactile feel for the back foot. The front foot you can kind of orient yourself by
that Blue Planet logo and try different positions. If you feel that it's
breaching too much just get your foot a little bit more forward and keep your
weight more on the front foot to keep the board from coming up too fast or too
high that's kind of the biggest biggest issue in the beginning, when you're
learning, is that the board just shoots up because you put too much pressure on
your back foot and then you crash back down because as soon as the oil comes
out of the water it has no more lift. You always want to keep that foil in the
water. So this was our first shipment of boards and it only has a Tuttle box, it's
an original GoFoil Tuttle box that we put in our boards, it has the screws are
recessed into the board so there's no chance of scratching your shins or
hurting yourself on the screws; the screw heads that are sticking out can
sometimes be quite sharp, so that's nice. It fits any deep Tuttle box foil
and then our next shipment which is coming in Mid-January is also going to
have both a Tuttle box in the middle, and then the two
US boxes on the sides, so you can use it with a Plate mount as well.
So that pretty much covers all the foils on the market today, more or less, either a
Tuttle or Plate mount foil, you can use with these boards, so it's very versatile.
The other nice new feature we have is the new SUPGrip handle that for our
2018 boards we have these new handles that have a vent plug integrated into
the handle, so that eliminates another installation on the board, saves a little
bit of weight and also it's one more place where the board could potentially
leak, so we eliminated that, and the vent plug is inside the handle and the handle
is slightly offset, so that it, the vent is over the stringer, over the
stringer line. That way the vent vents both sides of the foam board. The stringer
kind of separates the two halves of the board.
We have two different constructions available in the Easy Foilers, this is our bamboo epoxy
construction. It's actually a hybrid construction using glass, carbon, we use a
carbon fiber deck where you stand and most of the time, and most your
weight is absorbed by this extra strong carbon deck; and then, on the rails, and
the nose and the tail, everywhere where you tend to hit with your paddle a lot
we have a Kevlar band that goes all the way around. These Kevlar rails
make it the rails very resilient and strong. Yeah, especially on foil board
it's important to have a strong construction, because when you
come down hard. If you breach, the board is up pretty high
and then all of a sudden you lose the lift and you come down crashing pretty hard,
so you need to have a board that's pretty solid
also that foil puts a lot of torque on the board when it gets worked in the
whitewater or something, like if you get thrown around by a wave, you want a board
that can hold up to that, to those kind of forces.
So this is our other construction here. This is the full carbon construction, so
basically similar features it actually has a sandwich deck with bamboo veneer
sandwich and then also has the Kevlar rails underneath the carbon here, so it's
I would say it's not super light but it's a little bit lighter than our
bamboo construction but the main thing is this very strong and rigid and
holds up really well. So carbon construction is like our premium
construction, but either one will work fine for the average user.
So right now, the easy foiler, we have it available in four different sizes, so
there's you know this we the biggest one is the 7'6" by 30.5"
We are actually sold out of it right now, we are getting another shipment in mid-January,
so we anticipate those to sell pretty quick, so if you're interested in getting
one, put your name on the list as soon as possible. Then we have the next size down
is a 6'11" x 29.5" by 128 Liters, this is a great board
even for beginners that are a little bit lighter, the 6'6" x 28.5"
by 116 Liters, this is the model I'm using. It's a nice size, very
compact, really nice performance board. I'm like 195 lbs; I wouldn't recommend using
this as a begin ner at my weight, but once you get a little bit of experience,
this is a great board to use. The smallest one we have is the 6'0" x 27.5"
by 98 liters so it still has fairly good amount of volume which make
just makes it a little bit easier to ride a smaller board, especially in
choppy conditions but this is basically for a lighter rider that's
pretty experienced. Alright, so I'm not going to get into all the pricing and
details too much but if you look in the description below you'll find a link to
our website that shows all these boards and the pricing, they're also
going to be available from our Australian distributor soon. As well as
in Europe. You can get these all over the world we
can also air cargo ship boards to you, if you're interested, from Hawaii. Basically, this is,
I think that if you want a good foil board, it's hard to beat these
boards right now, there's not much else on the market that's gonna work as well
as these boards. So we're really excited, our new foils are gonna be available
soon too, and we're gonna have a package deal
where if you buy a board and a foil together; we'll give you an extra
good price so it might be worth waiting for that and getting the foil and
the and the board at the same time we hope to have our first shipment of foils sometime
next next month in February. Yeah once we get the foils we'll post
another video with the features of the foils and and explain how to order them
if you're interested in getting a package deal if you want to put a hold
on a board that's coming in we can do that with the $200 deposit. You can call
our shop at 808 596 7755. All right, and that's it, thanks for watching, this is
Robert Stehlik with Blue Planet Surf, have a great day, Aloha!