Hi everyone. I reakon a lot of wingers on Seabreeze are old windsurfers like me. I'm trying to use as much of my old wind foil gear as possible and had one good session.
Starboard foil board I have is 125L and 75cm wide. With the WindWing fuselage I can actually ride it in the straps but they are a bit too far back. It works though. I'm using the F4 foils I already have with a 76cm fuselage that brings the foil back near the Tuttle box.
I have a 6m Patrik wing.
My F4 1000 wide foil is capable of flying with 10m in 7-8 knots minimum as a windfoil board. But yesterday in 8-12kts on and 6m wing I couldn't get up. I struggled to get the board above 4kts so didn't even feel it trying to lift. Do I need an 8m for light days? Or a bigger front foil?
Good luck with your equipment is my point of view from your photos. Your board is made for windfoiling and not wingfoiling. The board is big, the foil is too far back and you don't have a mast. The balance points and overall mass are just not optimal. Having the right equipment will help you. I have come from windsurfing/supping/kiting and always when I have tried crossover products they work, in my experience, poorly in all conditions.
A bigger foil would be better around 1500cm at a guess and medium aspect.
The 6m is good for light winds but you will soon need something smaller. A big wing gives you power but is cumbersome, so it makes transitions harder.
Maybe there is someone out there who has succeeded with your setup who can give you different advice.
Myself I would bite the bullet and get better equipment.
Good luck with the journey and all the best with getting on the wing. I am sure with your foiling experience that it will not take long.
You could have an additional tuttle box put in your current board about 40cm further forward. That would likely be the cheapest and best solution if you're intent on using your current setup. With your experience in foiling and windsurfing though, you will outgrow a board that large after one hour. Better to rent or borrow a 100L+ board for a day, then buy something appropriate for an intermediate that could get you through a couple of seasons. The foil looks fine.
Mast placement looks like biggest obstacle to me. Read up on balancing centre of lift of foil with centre of mass of board plus foil. (Board should balance level when supported upside down from centre of lift of front foil). High aspect foil harder to learn but doable. Wing fine.
You've got a couple of problems. One is that the take-off speed on the foil is relatively high. With expert pumping skills, you'd still be able to get going in similar wind as when windfoiling with a similar sail. But pumping with a wing is quite different from pumping with a sail, and it will take you a while to get to that level. With a sail, you can pump the board up to (semi-)planing speeds, and then have enough speed for the foil to lift you. With a wing, you'd need to pop the board out at low speed, and then accelerate to 8+ knots without having the board go back into the water. Fast learners can probably figure out how to do this in a few dozen sessions, and then reach the point where the low end is similar for sail and wing foiling. Slower learners (like me) may need 100+ sessions.
Even with very good pumping skills, though, I can't see how you could possibly reach the same wind minimum when using a 6 m wing that you get with a 10 m sail. The best wingers on the best dedicated wing gear (read: downwind boards) may be able to get the same wind minimum as very good windfoilers with a slightly smaller wing - but that's a "may be".
You comment about the foot straps indicates that you want to wing in the same position that you use for windfoiling. That makes some sense with respect to the volume distribution and rocker line of your windfoil board. But in all other respects, it's a bad idea for winging. You don't have a mast base to push and pull the nose around, so all the extra board hanging out front is just dead weight. Even if you get the gear to fly, you'd be missing out on some of the things that make winging so much fun.
I have been able to try my AFS Windfoils 1080 and F700 using a W95 mast/fuslage set up on my Patrik AIO board because it has a tuttle box in addition to the US boxes. The Tuttle box is positioned further back. Despite looking like it should work the AFS windfoils are horrible to wing with (excellent windfoils BTW) Very hard to get them flying as you need a lot of board speed and when I do get them going they are not really any faster than my larger sized Armstrong HS series foil wings.
I think this is partly due to the mast rake of the set up as well as the fuselage length.
For what its worth I tried this when I could already wing foil and it was hard to do even on the Patrik wing board. If this is much the same or even worse for your kit then I would say getting dedicated wing kit is going to make progress much easier.
I have also tried a Fanatic Stingray (windfoil version) with Slingshot foil and while this set up worked with a wing it was very hard to get going. This was because of the width of the board making it very slow to get going and needing a lot of power.
Select to expand quoteberowne said..
Hi everyone. I reakon a lot of wingers on Seabreeze are old windsurfers like me. I'm trying to use as much of my old wind foil gear as possible and had one good session.
Starboard foil board I have is 125L and 75cm wide. With the WindWing fuselage I can actually ride it in the straps but they are a bit too far back. It works though. I'm using the F4 foils I already have with a 76cm fuselage that brings the foil back near the Tuttle box.
I have a 6m Patrik wing.
My F4 1000 wide foil is capable of flying with 10m in 7-8 knots minimum as a windfoil board. But yesterday in 8-12kts on and 6m wing I couldn't get up. I struggled to get the board above 4kts so didn't even feel it trying to lift. Do I need an 8m for light days? Or a bigger front foil?
I started with slalom board and wind foil. It's very much doable. But my I used 1500cm2 front wing with wind foil fuselage just like you. With that combo I needed to keep front foot little forward from front straps, because lack of mastfoot pressure. Obviously just couple of week later when I was sure that winging is fun, I bought wingydingy board which had tuttle and double tracks.
Beginner needs quite a bit of wind to get going. Even I mostly do winging and foil slalom nowadays, I still prefer wind foil racing gear with 9.0 sail in sub 12 knots condition.
Enjoy
