PWA at Sylt has been doing foiling races in winds too light to race slalom. Looks great. Noticed that they often flew quite low, touching down occaisionally. Would they be using special racing foils? Seemed to use big boards & sails, much like slalom. Very few planing gybes. Albo & ARG3 were dominating till they had an upwind section where big tactical factors came into play. A few nice crashes.

The course they have been using :

Saw that last night, noticed that a couple of the shafts seem to be angled forward from the vertical.
Is this a new thing Sean??

Clever choice of course reusing buoy slalom setup!
IMO, without an upwind leg things wouldn’t be interesting. Foil upwind/downwind abilities have to be used to make it more tactical.
An upwind/downwind course would be best, but this course can share the same buoys than nonfoiling DW slalom, so best option if switching from both modes.
I hope RSX convertible proposal learns from that, an only downwind slalom course won't appeal much to the olympics sailing comitee.

Cheers!

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ka43 said..
Saw that last night, noticed that a couple of the shafts seem to be angled forward from the vertical.
Is this a new thing Sean??

Yes that's the only way to have the front wing under your back foot (approx) without modifying the board (you'll have noticed most of the pwa sailors are on their light wind board)

Thanks. Looking forward to getting a foil and trying it on my new Falcon TE 129 with a 16 year old 6.2 wave sail

Foiling exhibition race commentary starts at 5:01 with very spectacular racing starting from around 5:05, plus interesting interview with A2 just after 6:50:
livestream.com/accounts/9351246/events/6423750/videos/137826595

Seems a bit dangerous to me, close quarters and all that, a collision could be lethal.
In car racing they call it "trading paint", can't imagine what they'd call a collision in that kind of racing.

Good move Larko. Buy a foil and bring it up to Budgie. A delta foil?