“The future of action sports” is how Giri Watts of Kitty Hawk Kites refers to wing foiling. For participants and viewers alike, the experience of wing foiling remains a ‘see it to believe it’ activity as riders glide atop the waves and take to the sky for one thrilling ride after another.

By Steve Hanf / Photo Above: by Peter Watts

When Giri Watts headed to the shore with his wing foiling gear just a few short years ago, he remembers being bombarded with endless questions:
What IS that? Where’s the motor?

“There is no motor,” he says with a laugh.

Lucas Meyjes, taking a break from wing foiling instruction, shown boosting roughly 20 feet in the air oceanside in Rodanthe. Photo provided by Lucas Meyjests

Now, when Watts pulls his board with the mast and wing onto the beach, he still gets questions – they just tend to be a bit more on the knowledgeable side.
“They’ll be like, ‘Is that one of those hydrofoil things? I’ve seen those!’ ” says Watts, who leads the teaching effort for Kitty Hawk Kites out of its Waves Village Watersports Resort in Rodanthe. “Foiling is going more and more to the forefront, and it’s fascinating to see a sport being born in the time of social media, because it’s absolutely exploding.”

It’s easy to understand both the questions and the appeal of foiling in general and wing foiling in particular. A quick glance at the gear alone causes a double take for the casual water sports enthusiast. Ken Ahrendt from Wind-NC in Nags Head describes it like a plane, with the mast, front wing, fuselage and rear stabilizer. And all those parts certainly help the rider take flight.

“It really does live in between windsurfing and kiting – it’s like they had a baby,” Ken offers, eliciting a laugh from his wife, Sara, whose opportunity to offer lessons alongside him in their business this past summer was limited due to having an actual baby.

Wing foiling is no easy feat to pull off, yet improved equipment, more general knowledge and a host of enthusiastic teachers are helping the sport soar into “next big thing” status thanks to the payoff of skimming not through the waves, but over them.

Lucas Meyjes, a Michigan native who’s taught watersports at a local surf shop on Hatteras Island the past several summers, was wing foiling for a personal session recently between Salvo and Avon and couldn’t help but marvel as he flew across the water.

“To my right is just the endless beaches of Cape Hatteras – gorgeous. And to my left is the deep ocean blue. And in between there is just silent cruising around,” he says. “The waves were relatively calm; dolphins were jumping just over my left shoulder. It’s just … really magical.”

WHAT IS IT?
Wing foiling is part of a relatively recent subset of watersports involving the hydrofoil, with its attachment on the bottom side of where the surfer stands featuring a large mast and wing. The design creates lift, making it easier for riders to get on top of waves, even if those waves wouldn’t be considered ideal for “regular” surfing.

Foiling comes in a variety of disciplines, from surf foiling to SUP surf foiling to kite foiling – there’s even E-foiling now which, yes, does in fact include a small electric motor to help with propulsion. The internet is full of videos on the topic, featuring epic tales of people in Hawaii actually foiling from one island chain to another, and the sport got a recent boost this summer when kite foiling was part of the Paris Olympics.

Wing foiling, though, is having its moment in the sun right now. Similar to kite foiling, the big difference comes in the equipment: Riders aren’t harnessed on their boards and tied to lines in the sky as the kite dances in the wind high above them. Instead, a hand-held, light-weight inflatable wing lets the rider catch the wind and steer a course for thrills or simple cruising.

“When the wing first came out, a lot of people had been watching foiling for a while, kind of sitting back,” Ken explains. “We had a lot of clients say they just connected with the wing: ‘Oh, that’s it.’ The kite was maybe too scary. The windsurfing sail seemed like a lot of stuff. The wing, people have gotten into it.”

Giri Watts of Kitty Hawk Kites emerges from the surf with some of the watersports industry’s hottest new gear: the foiling board with its attachments and inflatable, hand-held wing. Putting together the skills learned on a board, atop a foil and with a wing make for exciting times on – and above – the water. Photos by Peter Watts

HOW DOES IT WORK?
Learning how to wing foil is fun. Really. Promise!

“Less than elegant,” Meyjes describes with a laugh when asked about his first attempts.

“Humbling, rewarding, fun,” Watts offers of his first forays with the wing. “There’s a real satisfaction in the learning process. It takes some work, and it’s a mental thing, but it’s also a very physical sport. I mean, it’s a full-body workout, head to toe.”

Or, as Ken puts it with a laugh: “Learning it is very physical, which is a euphemism for ‘it’s gonna kick your a**!’ You’re going to be exhausted.”

Still, all three instructors stress that their average clients can successfully wing foil in a relatively short period of time.

Meyjes says there’s really no prerequisite for someone to jump into wing foiling, and in fact, having NO experience on a surfboard can actually be helpful in some ways.

“The normal kiteboard or surfboard, you find yourself leaning back to keep the nose out of the water, and that’s how you ride, very weight-back,” Meyjes says. “On the hydrofoil, the wing generates lift, and it’s your job to stand on the board and keep it down. So, as you accelerate, the wing wants to take more lift, and you shift your weight forward and keep the nose down. Oftentimes, many people with a background in any watersports, they get on a hydrofoil, they lean back, the foil shoots out of the water, and it’s like slipping on a banana peel. So those first few times, it’s awkward, it’s like a bucking bronco that wants to kick you off.”

After 45 or so minutes, though, Meyjes says riders adjust to keeping the nose down and enjoy their first flights. And there are tricks to helping people enjoy a faster path to success. Sara mentions that “everybody wants to foil right away – but you’ve got to learn the wing first.” So, to figure out how to harness the wind power at your fingertips, starter lessons with wings on big boards are often the way to go.

“It really does start with wing control,” Ken says. “That’s your power source. It’s either helping you or hurting you. It’s either your buddy and you’re going together or it’s your enemy and you’re fighting it.”

For his part, Watts remembers taking his new wing outside to an open parking lot with his skateboard to get a feel for working with it.

“With the wing foiling scenario, we break it down into a trifecta of skills: There’s the wing skill, there’s the board skill, and then there’s the foil skill, and you can put those pieces together in a lot of fun, exciting ways,” he says. “For me, I had a lot of board sports. The wing was the foreign element. It’s interesting because a process that took me months to learn myself, I’ve been able to condense into hours for people in a lesson setting.”

Giri Watts of Kitty Hawk Kites. Photo by Peter Watts

WHY WING FOILING?
There are plenty of reasons people are flocking to this newest of watersports. For starters, gliding above the water on a foil is easier on the body than getting beat up in the chop. Instructors are seeing people who loved windsurfing in their 50s and 60s transitioning into wing foiling into their 70s and 80s.

The gear isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly can be less intimidating and not quite as expensive and bulky as kiteboarding and windsurfing equipment: “The wing deflates,” Watts says. “I mean, you can pack all your gear in the back of a Prius pretty easily. It all breaks apart.”

Perhaps best of all, though, is the fact that less wind is necessary for wing foiling. People travel from all over the world to enjoy various watersports on the Outer Banks – Meyjes had clients from Dubai and Luxembourg earlier this summer – but if you’re unlucky enough to catch a week of light wind, things like kiteboarding are out.

“Wing foiling fits into people’s lives better than a lot of other wind sports because the minimum wind for fun has been dropped,” Ken explains.

Instead of 16 to 20 mph winds, the target number is more like 10 for wing foiling. Plus… “More important than the numbers is the quality of the wind,” Ken adds. “For kiteboarding and windsurfing, you need steady wind. Wing foiling, because of the foil and the way the wing works, you can do what I call connect the dots: You have a little gust of wind, get up on foil, the wind goes away, you maintain your steady progress, then another gust comes, and you connect with that and take that energy and use it for a while. That is what allows people to have big fun on small bodies of water back home.”

More and more visitors are flocking to the OBX from places like Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, taking lessons on wing foiling in the sound, getting comfortable with the sport on a couple of weekend trips, and then buying gear and enjoying it on local lakes. Many of them are academic types – one of Ken’s top clients is a professor at Duke – who enjoy figuring out the technical aspects of lift and drag.

And many of those visitors love the fact that Wind-NC, for instance, lets them do it in Nags Head now after decades of trips further south.

“To me, part of the story of wing foiling is kind of the full-circle nature of wind sports in Nags Head,” Ken offers. “Nags Head, specifically Windmill Point, was kind of the birthplace of wind sports in the whole Outer Banks, like that’s where windsurfing started. We have much bigger areas that are foil-friendly and people are finding out about that, and so that’s something we’re excited about.”

It’s an exciting time for everyone involved in the industry. Watts loves watching elite-level athletes race at breakneck speed, complete double backflips and soar 20 to 30 feet into the air – he calls wing foiling “the future of action sports.”

Meyjes, meanwhile, loves watching one new rider after another figure it all out and glide quietly over the waves.

“It never loses its draw, the way you get up on a foil and watching others cruise around. It’s always magic to some degree, even when you understand it,” Meyjes says. “It’s just really cool, kind of understanding what the magic is behind this magic carpet ride.”

Steve Hanf worked as a sportswriter for 13 years before jumping into the world of education. He has worked at First Flight High School leading the journalism program there since 2015.

Author: Steve Hanf

Steve Hanf is a former professional sportswriter who teaches the journalism classes at First Flight High School. The dormant Nike Running Club app on his phone offers a reminder of the seven half-marathons and one full marathon he completed … several years ago. 

Steve Hanf

Steve Hanf is a former professional sportswriter who teaches the journalism classes at First Flight High School. The dormant Nike Running Club app on his phone offers a reminder of the seven half-marathons and one full marathon he completed … several years ago.