What are Your Favorite North Sonar Foils for Kite and Wing Foiling?

What are Your Favorite North Sonar Foils for Kite and Wing Foiling?

with Matt Aiken from North Kiteboarding

Jake: What is your favorite front wing for winging and kiting?

Matt: For kiting I ride this big 1500. It's cool; it goes plenty quick, but it's also got a really low stall speed. For fooling around riding waves and stuff, it can be really fun, so I like it a lot for kiting.

For winging, with this being my first season, I started on our giant 2200, and that was really great for learning. Now, as I'm progressing, my front wing needs are changing really quickly. Compared to kiting, winging is a bit more size-specific; you can definitely be on the wrong size wing. Right now I'm using our medium aspect ratio front wings. I started on the 1350 and I was really liking that, and the 1050 can be good when it's really windy, but the 1200 seems to be doing everything really nicely for me, so our mid-size medium aspect seems to be pretty much the only wing I'm using now.

Jake: So from the 2200 to the 1200 medium aspect. How long did it take you to make the change from that big, stable, lifty wing to the medium aspect?

Matt: That's a good question, and I think I may have seen this tip on one of your vlogs. I stayed on it until I felt really confident in all my transitions and jibing, so I stayed on it longer than some of my friends suggested I should. From there, I found there's so much efficiency going with a smaller, higher aspect wing. It's funny; when you're just standing there in starfish stance not knowing what to do, the big front wings definitely get you up and going in less wind, but now, as I'm getting a sense of the technique and my pumping efficiency's getting better, I can go through lulls so well and I've got so much more board speed with these smaller high aspect wings that I think I end up with a lot more wind range.

Every winging session's an adventure and something new happens every time. It's been fun to learn a new sport, and if you have a really strong foiling background, you learn winging and progress really quickly, but the actual foiling parts are a big part of learning to wing. All boards inherently want to stick to the water a little bit, and having the experience to pop the board up onto foil is a really big part of learning it. I like handling the wing and figuring out how to pump, but to me, the key to learning to wing is the foiling background.

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