Aloha, it's Robert. Today we're gonna go over how to foil behind the boat, how
to learn how to foil basically and its really good to do it behind the boat
first to get the feel for it, get the feel for flying the foil before you try
to go out in the waves so I have my two staff members here Luca and Tyler who
are gonna try it today for their first time. Before we get on the water we're
gonna go over a little bit safety and you know how to do it and all that kind
of stuff. So first of all, one thing that's really key before you start
taking off on the foil is the foot placement so you know this this is the
two bolts been a Tuttle box and like I like to use the back screw as a
indicator where to put your back foot so our back foot is gonna go right here and
the board has an arch bar right over the screw and centered along the centerline
of the board and then the front foot kind of close to the Blue Planet logo in the
front and then also centered over the center line of the board. On a foil
board as soon as you were a little bit off balance you got to just bail out
because the risk is that the you know try to catch yourself and you go too far
the foil will come right at you and you can either hit it like you know forward
or fall backwards onto the foil so you don't want to get to that point where
the the foil is coming towards you you know
so as you can see it can be dangerous so it's a really good idea to wear impact
vest to protect your ribs and then of course also a helmet just for safety the
foil or the board can hit you so we do carry those that boots on it good idea
to have that. For whoever's driving the boat make sure you're really safe with
the propeller using a jet ski safer because you got a jet drive but make
sure you put that propeller neutral with anytime someone gets close to it and you
know start real slow it's good to start with a stand up paddleboard on the knees
just moving real slowly till they get up on their feet and put the feet in the
right position then you can speed up a little bit until they get out of the
wake and then slowly accelerate till they're able to lift and you should
never really go more than about 15 miles an hour, that's about the max. starting on
the stand-up board, we're gonna start on our knees, holding the rope and then
the signal is ready to go all right give the boat a thumbs up, we're gonna slowly start
at a low speed and while while you're just moving slowly you are you know you
place your feet in the right spots and you can you know before you lift up and
make sure your feet are exactly on the center line and exactly on top of the
foil and holding the tow line, you want to kind of have a relaxed you don't want
to have arms straight up in front of you you want to kind of keep it a little bit
lower, keep your elbows bent, that way you can kind of adjust the amount of tension
from the rope and once once you up on the foil, I kind of like to just
hold it with one hand but the idea is you guys are both regular foot
right? yeah okay so when you're regular foot you basically once you get up and
you start moving you want to kind of go to the left so you're kind of getting
out of the boat wake and to the left side of the boat so starting under stand
up paddle foil board is easier but once they got the basics figured out I put
them on a pro board which is trickier to start but then easier to control once
you're up on the foil, but I find on this really small board like this the easier
ways to come get up is just laying in the water
and then putting your you're in the right spot and you're just gonna
kind of hold to the rail with one hand and then you got the tow line in the
other hand and then you can kind of give it a thumbs up when you're
ready to the boat with this hand and then same thing, you
need a little bit of a pull. On the boat I'm gonna
start a little bit quickly to help you, and you want
to keep your knees bent and and just let the the pull of the boat pull you
up and then as you as you're getting pulled up then you turn your nose
towards the boat, so you're kind of starting sideways to the boat and then
as you're coming up you turn the board towards the boat; and then same thing, you
kind of want to get out of the wake of the boat and have that tension to
the side and having a smaller board makes it easier to control the foil once
you're up; but it's a little bit harder to get it started. So any
questions? We're gonna try to keep this the speed to a minimum basically we
don't want to have too much speed, sometimes you think the faster you go
the easier it is to lift but it's also you know the foil can lift too fast and
it can be hard to control and so on, so what we're gonna try to do is just ride,
keep the board on the water and then slowly slowly slowly come out come out
and lean a little bit back and then as soon as you start feeling the lift, you
kind of want to push it back down to the surface so try that a few times just
lifting up and pushing it back down lifting up putting it back down. so the
idea is to slowly, slowly come up. I'm keeping the boat speed pretty low on
purpose so that Tyler actually has to lean a little bit against the rope to
make it lift up and and then as soon as he comes up he's trying to keep it back
down what you want to avoid is coming up too high because as soon as a little bit
of air gets over the foil it'll lose all lift it'll breach and you'll crash so to
keep the foil under water at all times don't bring it up too high like that.
If you need more lift like I said turn your board away from the
boat. If you need less pull, turn it towards the boat, so what you can do is
if you if you feel like you're not going quite fast enough to lift just kind of lean
against the boat a little bit, increase the pull on the line by just
leaning away from it and then slowly coax it up out of the water and you know
keep your knees bent and also but keep your body upright and and it helps to
kind of have your stance a little bit squared off so that you got your shoulders
kind of Square to the board, it makes it easier to balance and keep your weight
front to back foot you know and the keep leaning on the front foot to
keep the foil low and lean on the back foot if you want more lift and
towing behind the boat you end up leaning a little bit more on your back foot
and angling the foil up because we're trying to do it at a low speed so you
have a little bit higher angle of attack to make the foil lift at lower speed but
it's easier to control than if you go really fast and you're just kind of
fighting to just keep the foil on the water. What did you learn from this, what are your
takeaways? Luca: one thing that I found that really helped me especially once I was
up on the foil and flying was when I make corrections you know if I find
myself going up too fast or kind of going down too fast is that I want to
make the smallest Corrections possible otherwise it's really easy to just sort
of overpower yourself and throwing yourself right off the board; another
thing that I found was you know as opposed to a normal surfboard where you
just have the back and forth the foyer has more axis of movement so you kind of
need to be a little bit more balanced with your weight you know you get more
weight on the front foot and then you're also a little bit more upright and
squared off than you would be with a normal surfboard which is kind of a
unique feeling but once you get that then it gets a lot easier to kind of
finesse the board and keep yourself you know low and in control.
All right, good, what about you Tyler?
Yeah, for me steering was really an issue, I had to figure out to turn my foot off to the
left on the axis of the mast to help the mast with an angle so that I could get
outside of the wake; that was really where the smoothest water was and where
I was able to find the most control and if your goofy foot that would just be
the opposite way turning to the right so really turning on the axis of the mast
outside of the wake, staying low and in control
keeping my knees bent that's where I was really able to control the altitude of
the of the foil that's where I also struggled too, was you know the foil would
come up too fast and I would fall off if the foil would catch too much
altitude yeah. So it's really important to keep pressure on the front foot and and not come up too quickly,
that's one of the main things. all right, thanks for watching everyone, give
us a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video we'll talk to you next time, Aloha!