most recently, it has been masts… thinner and narrower with good stiffness, for improved glide & yaw turning. I think the gains here aren’t finished yet. We have barely started exploring different materials.
And brands are re-looking the drag and poor stiffness (and weight/cost) of plate attachment system (welcome back tuttle!)
before that, it was an improvement in low-end and pump via extreme rear loaded camber sections (think KT foils, and before that the gofoil p1125. among others).
Now it’s applying the same camber learnings to reduced drag sections, and increased span. = faster, glidier foils. A few small brands (mikeslab) have already been ahead here for a while, but not as easily available.
And now we’re starting to see those now start to be able to crank turns well too, while being slippery and glidey. think F4 orca, which has a wide span, but very narrow chord at tips and wider at the root.
With parawinging comes new demands and a new thing to optimize for… ie. a combo of low-end/glide/turning. ie. focus on ripping turns on downwinding-type swells & bumps, as well as low-end get-up and pump to get more range out of parawings.
I think everyone will next be taking a step more in that direction and improving both the turning and glide, and will hopefully leapfrog. The current thing that also needs improvement is tip breaching performance again, since cranking turns on wide span gliders with mid-short masts means those tips see a lot of air!
And materials evolutions will matter here again too, with the stiffness requirements for wider spans vs challenge of thinner foil sections.
a few brands have janky connections that limit them on reducing drag, so expect new standards there too.
then who knows after that. It’s more about optimizing for where the sport goes.
But there’s definitely tons more headroom for cool shit.
for just prone foiling… yeah… maybe we’re in a refinement phase.
Its been 8 years and we have never stopped making leaps. Ever innovation, I’ve jumped on it about 6 months after the early adopters started filing internet reports of how awesome it is.
Here’s my list of versions, each one significantly and noticeably better than the prior! I’m not including the foils I tried that didn’t shine as obvious improvements. Interesting as I list this out the progression has been alternating front foil, then rear tails as breakthrough improvements. This is TEN versions of front foils over 8 years. And FIVE versions of tails over 8 years.
To be honest with y’all - improvement hasn’t really slowed down.
GoFoil Maliko Blue
GoFoil IWA Red
GoFoil high aspect and thin tail that could be shimmed
GoFoil GL
GoFoil NL
Takuma 980/1280
Takuma 1095
Takuma with KD Maui surf tail
Axis 999/1099
Axis 1051/1151
Axis with KD Maui Race tail
Code 860R/980S
AFS Enduro 900/1100 Silk 850/1050
AFS with Axis Skinny tail
I’m about to make the leap from Takuma (full quiver) to Code 980s / small fuse / 150 tail (to start) using my Cedrus Evo Surf mast. I tried the Code and loved it, so decided to level up to a more modern foil platform. Just waiting on my Cedrus adapter and some waves! Did you ever try the KD Maui tails with Code or are they not compatible and or necessary (still a newb to Code)?
I’m so impatient, the wait for the latest mikeslab is too much to swallow, but yeah you’re right
Oh yeah for sure. I never bought a code tail at all, just ran KD tails. Tails are so personal so everyone had different opinions, but for me the 13” race tail on medium fuse was my favorite. The only issue is you have to work out a shimming setup to get the angle just right.
Years ago I posted about “tails count twice” meaning that they all impose downforce. That downforce has to be countered by the lift on the front foil. The drag from say 25 lbs of downforce is equaled by the drag of 25 lbs of upforce . . . . long story short - Tails should go away!
As you work your way towards smaller and smaller tails you just get used to the reduce drag and necessity of a rear “Stabilizer”. Example: I was running the Axis Skinny 30 tail and loving it. Just 86 cm. Never thought that would be enough for any reasonable situation but it was fast and pumped, granted I was on bigger faster open ocean Pacific swells.
I don’t think we will get to ZERO but will keep working our way in that direction. Meanwhile the front wings (foils) will likely have to accommodate smaller and smaller stabilizers and the world could get better still.
Beasho, tails provide pitching moment, which creates stability in the system. Humans can control unstable systems, but it can be very difficult. We’ve all seen videos of people riding tail-less setups.
It is possible to design front wing foil sections that provide both lift and pitching moment. The easiest way is with swept profiles. I’m not convinced there is a net win to doing this - meaning while it could potentially mean no tail, I think it won’t win on drag all things equal (its a less efficient way to create pitching moment - stability).
The best example I’ve seen of this is both the Triton monofoil and the Sabfoil Sea-devil. Both look super draggy just on surface area drag.
Perfect reason not to ditch a tail - longer fuze means less force needed to generate the same moment. Less force = less drag and less negative lift. Making the front wing do all the work (monofoil) would likely cause more drag
This thread has me thinking about the potential of a surf canard setup. I borrowed a Zeeko canard foil back in like 2018 during a kite session and that foil was super nimble. Had a very skate like feel to it, kind of like you could both yaw and roll into a turn.
Main wing and stab contribute to lift, and when designed correctly is supposed to achieve higher speeds and more maneuverability. Every design has drawbacks, but there are some bright minds designing the expensive water toys we obsess over. I think one of em could get a surf canard dialed in, and when they do I’ll be busting out the wallet…. again
I’ve been imagining a canard setup for years. I’ve also talked to a number of aerodynamics folks about it. Generally the consensus is that canard can in theory achieve better lift/drag ratios because the stabilizer is providing additive lift instead of subtractive down-force. But that balances against the main wing getting disturbed flow, which in many cases erases the win.
I imagined a canard that is mounted somewhat higher than the main foil. Two things - we keep clean flow over the main wing, but we also get a indicator that (maybe) allows for clean breach recover.
I haven’t modelled it, but I don’t think a canard will work due to the high moments on our foils. On an aircraft, the thrust and drag vectors are close to one another but on a foil the drag vector is near the foil wing/fuse and the thrust vector is at your feet on top of the board. This sets up a large negative pitching moment that’s balanced by the positive moment generated by the stabilizer. fortunately, as you go faster, you reduce main wing aoa, thus increasing stab negative aoa and increasing the positive moment. On a canard, the canard reduces it’s positive aoa along with the main wing, so the positive moment from the canard would be pretty much the same across a range of velocities and the the negative moment from drag/thrust would not be balanced. Clearly you can make one work, but I would bet that it’s very limited in it’s speed range before becoming unstable
I remember Nicolas saying it was much more complex to tune, the front small wing having a slightly different pitch than the main one, and operating in a different plane. I spent a fair bit of time on the Spitfire XLW for kitefoiling, and it felt great. Not very tolerant to having your feet outside of the perfect balance point, but once dialed, it was fantastic and a very dependable foil, that felt quite safe to use and jump with, with more of a backfooted feel in the turns. Main drawback was that it was heavy, with those solid G10 wings and chunky alu fuse. A couple of walks of shame had been brutal! Once I had a taste of the carbon foils in the GoFoil Kai/GL140 era, I must admit it was hard going back to it. But there was potential, and it would be great to see some more development going down that path.
That Spitfire has some different duties now in retirement…
I have modeled it, but I was not able to design a canard hydrofoil with better efficiency at equivalent pitch stability compared to a conventional setup.
The thing is, to get static pitch stability with a canard, you need specific behavior from canard and main wing: the lift curve (CL-Alfa) of the main wing needs to be steeper than that curve from the canard wing. You can’t use any foil section, they need to work together in a specific way. The compromise of being limited to sections that work for this was worse than the benefit of having both wings lifting.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but I really spent time trying and could not come up with a design that would provide an improvement.
I had the Zeeko Spitfire as my second kite foil after the Zeeko Black and White. I’m a life long surfer so I loved the caving surf turn feel of it but I didn’t think it was very user friendly. It tended to drop out on me a lot and switching feet was often hit and miss for me.
I switched to the original Cloud 9 surf foil after the Zeeko Spitfire for kiting and it was a major improvement but I still miss the carving turn of the Zeeko Spitfire.
Yep lots of room left for improvement in foil systems as a whole as well as specific foil shapes.
This also is an interesting follow up pic to the discussion about smaller and smaller stabilizers… If you look at kite and wing race setups you see quite large stabs paired with quite small front foils. It’s a very different concept than what we use for “recreational” winging, prone foil, etc… I’m just always surprised by how big the stab is on race setups. Different end results (straight line speed vs surfing waves) require pretty significantly different approaches.
Thought a bit of rogue market research might be interesting… The results were revealing with around 90% in favour — even if it’s a fairly self-selecting crowd.
There’s definitely some straight-line potential, but the usual trade-offs apply: weight, cost, and a maybe some open questions around dynamics.
The bigger factor might end up being rules and classes — if certain approaches get banned, that naturally limits how far anyone pushes things.
Downwind seems like the area most open to experimentation for now…
