They choose to fly. While the rest of us mere mortals plod along at four knots, glued to the water, slogging into chunky chop, slapped by rude powerboat wakes, taking spray full in the face, the foilers are soaring. Like sailing superheroes: Zip! Zoom! Zowee! Foilers live the dream of us waterslugs: admit it, wouldn’t you like to go flying at 10, 15, 20, even 30 knots, the foils singing, an insane velocity of apparent wind whistling through your helmet? Are you ready to step up, to live on the cutting edge instead of the (sigh, yawn) ordinary sailing experience? It can happen to you.
Over the past year I have seen my circle of seemingly normal sailing friends become consumed by wing-foiling. If they go without winging for more than 12 hours they slip into withdrawal – they get fidgety, they check the forecast on their phone, they look for clouds with solid breeze. When the wind is right, they jump on their boards and they’re gone, agrab people in the visceral way of surfing and snowboarding. I went to the Foil Bay of Islands 2024 event, the largest gathering of foil flyers in the Southern Hemisphere, to try to find out what it is all about
