My experience in foils doesn’t extend much further than using a fair amount of the tin variety when cooking over a campfire. But there is a growing number of highly dedicated individuals in our area who have dove headlong into hydrofoiling, or just “foiling” — applying aeronautics to traditional watersports in order to “fly.”
“It’s a whole new spectrum of watersport,” said Steven Siig, longtime North Lake Tahoe local who has become a multi-day-a-week foiler.
There are various means of foiling — kite, wing, prone, downwind, efoil, and wake being the most prominent. While foilers find their rides thrilling and even spiritual, the learning curve can be steep, long, and painful.
“A lot of things are easy,” said adventure sports icon and foiling guru Craig Beck. “But it’s like, how much fun is that? Well, foiling ain’t easy.”
Beck has experimented with a number of the foil disciplines as a rider and a designer, and just recently tested his first skate foil to rave reviews.
Siig’s crew are wake foilers. Sitting in the water with their foil-and-board setup, they’re pulled up via a rope attached to a boat like a wakeboarder. Yet once enough speed is gained, the underwater foil’s wings-and-fuselage attain lift, the board rises above the water, and the foiler begins to soar. Letting go of the rope, the foil continues to do its thing — the rider hovering around from wake to wake, a turn here, a glide there as they find their water-flight Zen.
Siig and most of his foil-mates — including Tom Burt, Russ Klein, Mark Hendricks, and Dan Fraiman — were Tahoe water skiers in the ’90s who moved on to wakeboarding in the 2000s and wake surfing in the 2010s. Foiling was next in line in the progression of riding on water. “We all started seeing foiling on the lake,” Siig said. “There weren’t too many people doing it in [wake] surfing, but we noticed it was starting to become a new tool in terms of water sports. Once it kind of caught on, we realized we could adapt it into the wake scene. We were on the first wave of people doing it [locally], and it started happening all over the world.”
Through engine placement, ballast additions, and trim tabs (fins/rudders), new wake surf boats are creating bigger wakes, more technically shaped wakes, and more numerous wakes, essentially augmenting available terrain. The foil allows that terrain to be seized in a way that traditional wake surfing does not.
“Guys that are really good can go across the boat, to the third, fourth, fifth, six wave,” Siig described. “When Hendie’s like on the sixth wave, he’s way back there. Like a quarter mile away, then he pumps back up [closer to the boat].”
Foiling can produce a near-perpetual ride, the limitations not imposed by the lift/speed of the foil/board but by the human body’s need to take a break. Elite foilers can fly around for so long unattached to a boat that they sometimes seem less like athletes and more like wizards.
Daily improvement — but difficult, dangerous
Like snowboarding in the 1980s and early ’90s, wake foilers are frontiersmen, learning on the fly and creating as they go. “My favorite thing about the sport,” Fraiman said, “is I feel like I get better and learn something new every time I go … The progression is cool.”
When Siig started foiling three years ago, he relied heavily on the coaching of his crew, even though they had at most a year or two of experience on him.
The need for instruction in the sport is a recurring theme when speaking to foilers. There is an obvious reason why.
“It’s freaking hard,” said Beck, the longtime adventure-man and perhaps Tahoe’s godfather of the foil scene. “It’s typically a minimum of 10 times before you basically get up. And once you get up, you’ve still got a lot to learn. There’s a lot to it.”
But in a world where groceries are delivered at the push of a button and machines write people’s emails and do their thinking for them, there’s perhaps benefit to the sport’s inherent difficulty — a crucible that must be passed, the fun on the other side of the learning curve unable to be found through a prompt, the feeling of flight a thing to be earned by one’s own human acumen and determination.
Part of the sport’s difficulty is its inherent danger. The two sharp wings and fuselage connected to the mast-and-board are not entirely unlike a giant version of something you might find in a chef’s arsenal for slicing specialty meats.
“Seeing these hovering surfboards riding three wakes back with no rope defied logic and therefore captured my interest.”
~ Keith O’Meara
He now wears a helmet (the only rider I saw when watching numerous local and international foiling videos), and when he falls, he wraps his entire face within crossed arms, aiming to make himself “into a ball” as he pushes the foil behind him and leaps forward. “I probably look kind of funny,” he said, “but you gotta protect yourself at all times.”
Even the boats themselves can be dangerous, especially when other boats are in proximity.
Once a level of trust is established between wake foil crews, different groups can choose to come together to essentially create more terrain. Boats meet up in the lake and riders share the waves, moving seamlessly between their varied wakes as if a snow skier was somehow able to mingle back and forth between fresh pow and spring corn on the same run.
But, as in snow sports, upping the terrain game can up the consequences.
In early August, multiple crews were out doing their thing, and the interplay of numerous wakes was creating exhilarating conditions when calamity struck. “We had a big accident,” Siig said. “By circumstance you can get into the wrong place at the wrong time, and it happened. Someone got launched into the boat and broke six ribs, had a collapsed lung.”
In Tahoe/Truckee, hear-tell of injury in adventure sports can feel like commonplace news, perhaps too much so. But we go on. We put the ski boots back on. We put the bike helmet back on. We get back on the foil.
You could call it competitiveness or sticktoitiveness. You could also call it obsession, or you could use another word, which came up with great frequency when speaking with foilers.
“It’s an addiction,” Siig said. “I’m freaking addicted.”
But it is this need to get back on the foil that keeps the sport progressing and keeps the good times rolling. Tom Brady was addicted to winning football games, and Georgia O’Keeffe was probably addicted to painting close-ups of flowers. Such need can also be called passion.
And when it comes to foiling, there might not be anyone more passionate about it than Craig Beck.
Action sports all-timer
Beck grew up on the water in Southern California, surfing the breaking ocean waves of Dana Point by the time he was 8 years old.
Flight was in his DNA. His father was an Air Force pilot who flew experimental aircraft. The family moved around internationally for a few years before Beck landed in Truckee just in time for the 1960 Winter Olympics. Though he did not know how to ski, the 14-year-old procured an on-mountain, on-ski messenger job for the Games. His first ever run was from the very top of what is now Palisades Tahoe all the way to the bottom — his assignment to bring film from the start of the men’s downhill (ostensibly the only copy) down the black-diamond run to folks at the base who’d disseminate the photos worldwide.
Undaunted, the young Beck simply watched how the Olympians were making turns and made a plan to mimic what they were doing. He managed to make it down the mountain, the film somehow survived in one piece, and a lifelong love of carving was born.
Fifteen years later, Beck would produce one of the most pioneering and innovative ski films ever made, Daydreams, an ethereal showcase of Tahoe’s early extreme skiing movement and a foil of sorts to the more one-size-fits-all Warren Miller films of the time.
Beck got his first taste of hydrofoiling “35 or 40 years ago” on The Air Chair, the first commercial foil, marketed toward water skiers in the 1980s. “It was a giant turd,” Beck said.
So, he started innovating. Beck now works with sport-leading Lift Foils, and also designs his own custom boards (complete with his own custom artwork) sold on a more bespoke level.
To move from his disappointment in the air chair to designing top-level foil equipment, Beck turned to the sky for inspiration. After Daydreams, he launched heavily into aviation and aeronautics. He designed his own hang glider in his living room, and learned from its successes and failures in his pursuit of better designs and more efficient flight. He became a test driver for hang glide companies and gained an expert’s knowledge of aeronautics. Eventually he took his knowledge of wing forms and shapes to the wings of the water, some of his early hydrofoils even made from hang glider parts.
“Hang gliding was basic,” Beck said. “Then wings got wider and narrower [for better performance]. That’s aspect ratio. And that’s the big deal now in foils.”
Aspect ratio is, in simple terms, wing span divided by wing area. In nature, birds that fly long distances and/or that tend to soar (think albatross or eagle) have long and narrow, high aspect-ratio wings. For maneuverability, as found in the shorter, broader wings of bats, for example, low aspect ratio is the name of the game.
When converted to foiling, low aspect ratios offer heightened ease and stability while higher aspect ratios allow for increased speeds and optimized top-end performance.
Into the Future
Foiling as a concept in water sports received a big boost in the 2000s when surfing great Laird Hamilton began using foil boards for tow-in big-wave surfing. In time, the various niches of foiling became more defined as mainstream sports with bright futures.
“It was around 2016 that wake foiling caught my eye on Lake Tahoe,” said Praxis Skis founder Keith O’Meara, his heralded “handcrafted” ski company based in Incline Village. “Seeing these hovering surfboards riding three wakes back with no rope defied logic and therefore captured my interest.”
O’Meara met Beck at a Made in Tahoe festival, the former showing his snow skis and the latter showing a bevy of his custom-made surf, wake, and foil boards. “I was able to swindle a trade,” O’Meara said, “a pair of my skis for one of the Beck Boards, and in doing so Craig said he would teach me to wake foil.”
His friendship with Beck and intrigue with foiling grew from there, and Praxis has become a significant player in the Tahoe foil sphere. It is a dealer for Lift Foils as well as Slingshot Sports, and also showcases Beck’s designs.
“When you get a board from Craig Beck you get a one-of-a-kind board with one-of-a-kind artwork,” O’Meara said. “You get a board with a soul.”
O’Meara stated that the most popular foil setups this summer have been for the wake and wing variety, with an increased interest in efoils. “The efoil is the easiest way to learn how to foil,” he said. “You will be up flying around on foil in a matter of hours.”
“Efoiling is solitary,” observed Siig of the discipline in which a rider gains speed and lift from an electric propeller attached to the mast. “It’s go out and Zen out.”
Siig also finds spirituality in his crew’s morning wake foil sessions. “We call it church,” he said. “We call it praying, being one in the world.”
Yet with efoils costing up to $15,000, and top of the line wake boats well exceeding $100,000, the nirvana ain’t free. On your local barista or teacher salary (not to mention journalist wage), in fact, it’s prohibitive. And a primary tenet of spirituality is that it should be open to all who seek it.
So, with all the progression that’s occurred since the Air Chair, all the distance that foiling has covered in the past 40 years, perhaps the final frontier is for foil flight to become accessible to all — all, that is, who dare brave its crucible of difficulty and danger in order to discover its realm of magic and beauty.
Equipment, types, technique
The foil-setup looks a lot like a miniature airplane. Composed of a front wing and a tail wing connected by a fuselage, when enough speed is reached lift is attained — and the above-water board and its rider take off in flight.
While wake foiling uses a boat for propulsion and lift, kite and wing foilers harness the wind for theirs. Efoilers use a battery-powered propeller, and downwinders (downwind SUP foil) use an oar, wind, and the energy of small bump-waves.
Prone foilers, found on ocean waves, start out on their bellies and paddle like surfers to catch a breaking wave for their initial speed and lift, catching multiple waves before ever needing to paddle again.
All foil disciplines employ “pumping” — riders pushing into the water with their legs to create energy in similar fashion to a child using its body to do so on a swing.
Donner Lake’s low-to-the-water winds are often ideal for wing foiling. In Lake Tahoe, the higher, gusty winds (especially of approaching storms) in Incline Village and Kings Beach offer a goldilocks zone for kite foiling.
And any morning where Lake Tahoe is calm and flat is prime for wake foilers to create their own waves to go out and fly around.
Various Tahoe/Truckee sport shops are now stocking foil boards and setups, and many offer rental/demo packages as well. If you’re interested in trying out foiling, visit your local shop and talk with the pros.
