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Lots of people have asked how to extract broken bolts on foil fuselages. Here's the bottom line--if you broke a bolt while tightening it, any advice about screw extractors and the like comes from people who have never done this shit. If you break a bolt loosening it at least the threads are not jammed tight against the thread faces. But most bolts get broken during tightening, and you can't loosen them with some device that applies less torque than the original bolt head. Period. No, not going to happen. So you need to drill out the bolt leaving a thin shell with the threads intact so you can make the threads and the remaining thin shell of the bolt collapse (generally with a chisel and hammer), and take it out. Or you can weld a nut onto the threads and turn it out. The problem with welding a nut onto stainless bolts is that you need to spill argon everywhere to get a decent weld. No way to back purge the stainless so you just gotta blow argon everywhere.

If you choose to drill out the bolt, then that takes precision drilling, and that means you need the right toys--I mean, tools.

Specifically, you either need 30 years of experience or an optical center punch. Optical center punches take less time to acquire and are fairly inexpensive. Once you have one your drilling precision increases hugely and you'll find yourself to be a drilling precision snob. 

Here's how this works:

Grind the bolt flat--I used my belt grinder.

Locate dead center of the bolt optically. If you look at the picture of the optical element you'll see where I fucked up. I didn't grind the bolt completely flat, just enough to get a good flat area for the centerpunch. But then I centered the optics on the flat area and skewed it a little towards the flat segment instead of taking the full bolt size center.

Swap the centerpunch for the optical element and whack the centerpunch with a hammer.

Presto, dead center--sort of. It's not the tools fault--it's the nut behind the wheel. I drilled this out but the threads were kind of rough and skewed a bit after I picked out the old threads. So I drilled it to 21/64ths and ran a Helicoil tap through to see how it looked. The threads were clean and full depth, so I ran in an 8mm Helicoil coated with red locktite, the remaining options would have been a 3/8ths Timesert or tig welding the hole up and re-tapping to 8mm, but the 8mm Helicoil worked fine. I fucking hate Helicoils, but they work and I have lots of them.

It helps to have a hard rock playlist running while you do this. Heavy Metal or 90's thrash goes well with metal work. I put on Skating Polly when I'm welding aluminum. Tradition.

It's great to be back in Hood River, and I love working in my shop, but I haven't been in the water for a month. A combination of bitter cold water and fucked knee has been keeping me land-bound. The knee has been so bad I can't even ride a bicycle or motorcycle--my range of motion without stabbing pain is about -10 to -90 degrees, I need about 120 to ride a conventional bike. My knee doc is a lot more open to knee replacement after seeing the latest X-rays, so he sent me for a bone scan. After reviewing it he said nope. Not there. A little closer, but no. A second opinion agreed and the two PTs I talked to in Hood River all said "Yeah, we can get you there, don't get this replaced until you really need to." So my life is going to include a lot of knee workouts, PT, and a bit of blinding pain. In other words, normal.

I'm thrilled, it means my summer is not going to be all fucked up. So I'm working hard on putting my recumbent e-Bike back in service, probably to the dismay of the Hood River police department. I built the thing in the first place ten years ago to rehab my knee after meniscus surgery. I split one of the giant batteries I had in my trike into two smaller ones (NOT a simple undertaking). The giant ones had enough capacity for a century ride over Mt. Hood, but I'm not doing that again, so I don't need 60 pounds of batteries. I also put my fat tire e-bike back in service, and I can already pedal it. Any slips or false moves are accompanied by loud profanity, so that's going to be popular at the event center. Bicycle Tourettes.

I've also re-assembled all my 3D printers and I'm getting them tuned up. Somehow my fleet of printers has expanded from two to six. Seven if I count the laser/liquid one and eight with the 2D laser cutter. I think they are reproducing. I've been given two by people who discovered I actually use them for things other than printing plastic gargoyles. I have three beavering away making parts for my projects and three that need just a bit more attention.

I put a new highly modified exhaust system and reworked the footpegs (lower, a little more forward, and not tilted) on my KTM 390 ADV. A cheap-ish adventure bike that makes a great platform for me to build the adventure bike I want. I also rewired my 1990 BMW R100GS PD and tweaked the electrical system to optimize it for a Lithium battery. Not simple, but fun. Next up is finishing the restoration work on the 1959 BSA Goldstar I promised to my youngest daughter for her birthday. Good thing it's a right leg kicker or I could never get it started. It's a crazy-ass bike, makes me nervous to give it to her. Way too fast for its brakes, and knowing her she'll have to see what it will do. A hundred miles an hour is pretty easy to reach with this primitive 500cc thumper. Fortunately, the cops will probably be watching her like a hawk. It sounds like it's going 100 when it's sitting still. It doesn't idle--the primitive GP carb has to have the throttle constantly blipped to stay running. It sounds like you're trying to get someone to race you when you just want to get going after a traffic light without stalling the bike or frying the clutch.

And of course, I'm working on my boosted foil boards. Mark Raaphorst gave me a mold for an axis wing that weighs so much I can hardly move the thing. I made a foam core to mold a wing, now I need to figure out how many layers for carbon to use and sand down the foam suitably. I think this might provide a good "standard" wing that I won't feel bad about cutting up to for the basis for various experimental wings. I'll crank out four or five and see how it goes. I'm also going to try 3D printing elements of the wing core. I can make a heavily filled core in the center and in the fuselage to wing transition that turns into a lattice to support foam. Could be cool, but could be a waste of time other than the learning opportunity, I might even try a semi-hollow wing, though it sounds like a very stupid idea.

I'm going to start paddling in the early shift with the HROC on Monday, and as soon as we have wind again in HR, I'm winging. See you out there.

I picked up a new Duotone Unit D-lab 4.5M today. At 1600 bucks a wing I won't be buying many of these, but it's a very cool wing. so of course, the first thing I did was modify it.
The handles are great, they're very well connected to the Allula strut, but there's a gap in the middle. I might be able to get used to that, but I don't see why I should have to. I have bits of carbon paddle shafts, I have velcro, and I have tools. OK, done.


This is attempt number 1. Some idiot screwed up the measurement.


Try #2, nice fit, and it's strong as hell, but I think I'll put my harness lines on the actual handles on top of the velcro straps. There's something unnerving in relying on half of a carbon tube to support a lot of weight. I want this mostly for transitions and for one-handing with a harness. That little gap in the handle strut looks ideal for a 3D printed sliding lock that will clamp the handle tightly to the strut. I'll probably do that, though it will certainly take beaucoup many tries to get it right. But I can see a sliding doohickey that pops into that slot and locks the handle down.


85 grams with straps. The wing is silly light so I don't want this handle to have any extra weight.


I was going to 3D print some end caps that would fit into the gap in the handle struts, just for a little more security. But I'm still reassembling the printers I shipped from Maui, so that can wait. I mostly posted this pic to give our OCD admin the willies. He can barely enter my shop and has to avert his eyes from the larger bits of entropy gone wild.

It's definitely time to see the knee doc. I guess that means it's a good thing we only have two weeks left on Maui.

I went to Kihei today after looking at Ka'a and the harbor. The wind was blowing straight out of the north, which I'm not a fan of at Ka'a, and I generally don't like the harbor anyway, though I seem to wind up there a lot--something like heading out on a Friday night when I was a young buck, looking for fun and perhaps some female companionship and winding up alone at Denny's at 2:00 AM eating really crappy apple pie.

So I drove across the island and found conditions looking tasty at the Canoe Hale. I rigged up and then watched the whitecaps double down while I pumped up my 4.2 wing. I thought about dropping to 3.5 but it didn't look THAT strong, so I went for it. Got blown all over the place just trying to get to my feet and finally went off backward, bending my bad knee a lot further than it really wants to go. I flopped around a bit, thinking I tore something, rode back to the beach, and managed to over-bend the knee again and stuff my stabilizer through the wing. A fuck up twofer.
Stephen Ross helped me get out of the water, taking my poor shredded wing. I thought I was done, but when I carried my board back to get ready to put stuff away and bail I realized my knee felt pretty much OK.

So I pumped up my 2.8 to give it another go, since the wind had amped up from nice to nutball. I'm a fan of nutball.

I stomped around a while to settle things that might be wiggling around under my kneecap, then went out again. It took forever to get to my feet, the tweak to my knee plus the low torque of the dinky wing giving me little help to haul myself up to a standing position--made for a grim few minutes. I finally wobbled to my feet, pumped up on foil, and off I went--feeling very much like a leaf in a hurricane. Going out at a close reach wasn't too bad, though the swells were brutal and bumpy. I went out quite a way looking for a smooth(ish) patch to jibe on. Never found one. I settled for a few bounces and a slow, wide jibe with a substantially out-of-control downwind stretch, but I was determined not to fall and need to get back up. Coming back in I was a very uncomfortable passenger. With the odd wind angle and the gusty shifts I'd get pulled off balance and into a super-fast downwind reach while I struggled to regain my balance. One of those would have been a bit much, ten or so really sucked. I decided I might cure my knee problem by ripping it to shreds if I screwed up, so I sailed straight to the beach and bailed. Stephen came in right behind me and we agreed that this wasn't exactly our idea of a relaxing fun time. So we bailed to the harbor.

Yes, once again, I wound up at Dennys.

It was nuking today in Kihei, and I was thrilled to get to use my 2.8. It's not often fat boys get to use the little stuff that the menehunes play with.

I put the 999/400-60 on my Flying Dutchman board. Pumped up my dinky little 2.8 F-one, and tied it to the mast on my board. The wind was gusting to 45, so all this took a little time. I went back to my van to put on my rash guard and impact vest, and when I was doing that I heard a weird PPffftt sound. I thought it might have been a passing car, but when I went to jump in the maelstrom I found this:

The board blew over and the wicked 999 wing skewered the leading edge on my 2.8M wing. Fuck. If it had poked a hole in the canopy I would have just taped it, but the damn thing nailed the leading edge and blew out the bladder. I usually tie onto the leash extension for my reel leash, but for some stupid reason I didn't do that.

The wind looked much too raucous for my 3.5. I should have tried it, but instead, I tucked tail and went to the harbor, which was just so-so.

Bummer.

It was nuking today on the southside of Maui. As in Gorge level nuking. I was going to do a downwinder with Steven Ross, but I misread conditions and rigged a 4.2 Strike wing and a 1150 wing. How stupid!

The wind was shit close to the beach, but as soon as I got clear of the jetty I was in trouble. Even flagged out or overhead with one hand I was overpowered, and the 1150 was reacting to the swell constantly. I was on or over the edge of control constantly. After about ten minutes of nutball thrashing, I pulled the pin and winged back upwind to the launch. fortunately, Bill Boyum, who is still on the injured reserve list was still there. He was going to shuttle my van down to the Mauni Kai--our destination. I planned to drop the wing to 3.5 and the foil wing to my 999. Steven also returned, so we decided to just mow ze lawn. Given the conditions that was fairly adventurous. there wasn't a single craft other than a guy with an OC1 hugging the shore anywhere in sight. No wingers, no windsurfers, no whale-watchers, no sailboats. Nothin, nada, as far as the eye could see.

For some stupid reason I didn't switch to the 999. Big mistake. the 999 controls swell like no other wing I've ever experienced. I had a good session, which is surprising considering my left knee has been total shit lately. the 1150 is way too reactive, the 999 would have been a lot more fun, though at the typical 999 speed my falls would have been like bouncing on concrete.

This is kind of cool: Maui No Ka Oi magazine just did an article on our house remodel. I have nothing to do with all this--it's Diane, totally. I could (and probably should, given how messy I am) live in a container if it had a good stove.  I just stay out of the way and don't offer unsolicited opinions. The article starts on page 52. Nice photos if you pop the thing up to full screen. The furniture Diane ordered finally showed up two years later. Of course, now I have to take a shower before I sit anywhere. 

https://issuu.com/mauinokaoimagazine/docs/issuu_v26n2/84

As the undisputed master of the totally stupid project, I present Ponogolf. No, I don't golf, but Diane does. so when we put in artificial turf at Ponohouse to eliminate the mud bog in the back yard, Diane had a putting green added. So of course I had to add miniature golf features. I teamed up with brother Bob to do the required windmill, with stepper motor drive programmed to be random speed and random reversing. And of course any mini golf course needs a dancing robot obstacle. Ours is named Karl, after Carl in Caddyshack, with a K because Karl is a spitting image of Karl Rohlfing after many samples of his estimable homebrew. Last but not least is the spastic programmable arm, Ty, named after Chevy Chase's character, Ty Webb. Ty is unpredictable and glitchy--perfect. Here's the windmill, an accurate representation of the Eastham mill except I guess Bob forgot a window or two. the code for the stepper motor is ridiculous since I decided the little OLED screen on the development board I chose should display system diagnostics, voltage, rotational speed and direction--even though it's buried inside the windmill. Why? because I'm fucking nuts.

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Yeah, I know. This probably isn't for everyone, but I posted this on Facebook and it started a major fazzazzah. so here you go. Warning! This will make you fat.

Ok. I need to post this because it's just so great. Sorry, this may fuck up your diet totally, but at least it's worth the calories. I'm a fairly serious cook. I occasionally have streaks where I work at it really hard, but mostly I just throw shit together, but I've been doing it so long that most times it works. This is taken from two posts on my blog. I warn you if you try this your life will change. You might be a little fatter. Of you might just have to exercise a little harder to stay where you are. You've been warned:

I never order biscuits at breakfast when I'm eating at a restaurant. That's because I don't live in the South and I don't like eating hockey pucks. I don't buy scones at coffee shops–same basic reason. Those dense wedges with no inherent flavor need a lot of other stuff in them to be even slightly edible. But I can cook a batch of staggeringly good biscuits or scones in 15 minutes and 14 minutes of that is waiting for them to be done baking. It literally takes a minute to make either, and I don't use a mix.

My recipe is White Lilly self-rising flour and heavy cream. That's it. Done. White Lilly is common in the south, every grocery store has it, and it's dirt cheap, the same price as all-purpose flour. Here's the only difference–White Lilly is made with soft wheat. Most flour in the Northern USA is made with hard wheat. Hard wheat has more protein and better gluten, so it makes better bread. If you want the yeast to do its best work, you want hard wheat flour.

Soft wheat has lower protein and less gluten. It makes lousy bread and great biscuits. All-purpose flour is a mix of soft and hard flour, which means it makes mediocre bread and horrid biscuits or scones. Bread flour or strong flour makes great bread and biscuits that will still exist when cockroaches rule the planet.
You can buy pastry flour in northern grocery stores and it almost works. Biscuits won't come out as hard, tough little clinkers, but they won't inspire poems. They won't be White Lilly biscuits. You can buy White Lilly online from Amazon or Walmart for roughly ten times the price in a neighborhood market anywhere in the south. And it's worth it. You can get non-self rising and add your own baking powder if you think you won't make biscuits often and the baking powder would lose potency, but I just get the self-rising.

So you get the right flour and then do all the standard stuff, cutting in butter to make well-greased little nodules and then adding buttermilk until you have a workable dough. They'll be great. Or you can skip all that and just make your dough with heavy cream, work it gently into a ball, pat it flat to a disk about an inch thick, and cut it into wedges or round biscuits with a sharp biscuit cutter to optimize the rise (important!!). Bake at 425 until they're golden brown and eat them while they're hot.

You can thank me later.

Oh, if you want scones, add a little sugar and an egg. Toss in whatever else you like in a scone. I have gradually switched to plain scones with some ginger/orange/lemon marmalade that I made.

Then there's cornbread. On a whim, I bought a cast iron oyster pan from Sur La Table. Well, actually from Amazon. I like barbequed oysters a LOT.

The heavy buggah arrived the day after I made a too-large pot of salmon and clam whatcha got chowder, effectively cleaning out all the slowly composting leftovers in the refrigerator (too late for a lot of stuff, but just in time otherwise). The unlikely combination of the carcass of a hefty whole Alaskan sockeye salmon for the stock and meat (I cooked the filets for a dinner with Gregg Leion and his much more charming wife a few nights before), a container of frozen chopped clams, pureed parsnips, pan-roasted corn off the cob, some yellowed broccoli, some wrinkly russet potatoes, and heavy cream that was turning to creme-not-so-Fraiche turned out to be amazing but needed a hearty companion. The biscuits I made the first night weren't quite up to the match. So I made cornbread in my new Oyster pan. Awesome. So awesome that it's been my lunch and sometimes dinner for the four days Diane has been gone on a ladies' golf trip. Yes, I revert to a grubby bachelor as soon as her car leaves the garage.

The cornbread I made was just a basic guess that White Lilly flour might make great cornbread for the same reason it makes great baking powder biscuits–it's the right kind of flour for this application. Since I've never seen a recipe for cornbread with White Lilly self-rising flour I just made it up on the fly. Absolutely amazing, on the first try.

1 cup White Lilly self-rising four
a little extra baking powder–probably 1/2 tsp.
1 cup Polenta, aka grits. I like the Red Mill stuff but any coarse cornmeal will work
1 Tbs sugar
2 Tbs oil (I used EVOO)
hefty pinch of salt
1 egg
heavy cream to make a pourable batter

Stupidly simple–mix everything together, add enough heavy cream to make a batter you can pour into whatever pan you choose to use. I lubed the oyster pan lightly with olive oil and poured in the batter to within 1/2″ of the top. Put it in an unheated oven set to 400 and fired it up. I think the slower heat cycle of an unheated oven lets the baking powder do its thing a bit longer. I have no idea how long it took, I just checked every few minutes until I saw the golden brown color I wanted. It's easier to extract the sticks from the pan if you let it cool a bit after pulling the pan from the oven. The pan will be hot as blazes and will stay that way for a long time, so a trivet or just set it on the stove is necessary. No, I didn't wait for it to cool to eat the first six–I don't have that kind of discipline. I rarely let steak rest as long as I know I should either.

The cornbread is light, with a great texture. Rises to fill the pan with a nice smooth dome. Crisp on the edges, delicious with a dab of butter. I ate half the sticks with a bowl of chowder, and half of them later for dessert with some local honey drizzled on them. Yes, I ate 12 huge cornbread sticks.

By myself.

Like an animal.

This is, by a long, long margin, the best cornbread I've ever had.

Fumbalaya. Fake Jumbalaya. I made shrimp and sausage Jambalaya tonight with almost none of the required ingredients: Some kind of sissy keto chicken sausage from Costco, no peppers, no Okra, none of the required spices. Diane and I have become intolerant to garlic and onion (FUCK, really??? What's next? Air??). So within those narrow parameters, I managed to make kick-ass Jambalaya. How? Simple. it's all about the roux. Cook the roux until it's dark brown, like coffee, and everything else works. I did the shrimp separately, in a carbon steel pan so hot that the avocado oil was smoking hard. Blasted one side while I dumped hot paprika and red pepper flakes on the other side then flipped the shrimp, salt, pepper, and deglaze the pan with some decent chardonnay with the shrimp in place and dumped the whole mess into the Jambalaya. A mound of rice, a few scoops of Jambalaya, a splash of Tabasco, and a bit of flake salt (Josephson, of course, what, did you think I'm some kind of hick??). A nice glass of Chateau Magdalena and who the fuck cares about the missing Okra?
I'm going to get another glass and watch Bottle Shock. Diane and Twila are chipping by the pool at the target (it's a golf thing) and they're going to go do some putting. I'm envious. this will actually be better reheated. Jambalaya always is.

I generally tell anyone with a medical problem on Maui that they need a plane ticket. My knee has been really shit lately, when I try to stand up on my SUP foilboard it collapses. It works a little better with a wing, but it's still a bit of a trick to get up. I don't want to get on a plane anytime soon, so I was open to considering local care.

Tomoko Okazaki told me about a PT clinic in Haiku that I'm going to give a try to, and today I went to a new walk-in orthopedic clinic in Pukalani called All Access Ortho Maui, which I assumed was going to be kind of weird. Who ever heard of a walk-in orthopedic doc? Usually, you have to get a referral to even see an Ortho.

My expectations were low.

Wrong. Remarkably good.

The young lady I assumed was the receptionist turned out to be an extremely competent X-ray tech. They do on-site X-ray with what looks to be state-of-the-art equipment. I didn't meet the doctor, but the PA was excellent. He confirmed what my knee doctor in Portland has been telling me--that I'm probably not a great candidate for a knee replacement at this time but he gave me a thorough exam, confirmed that the Haiku clinic would be a good idea, and recommended stretching and specific exercises. I've been dealing with this for ten years, and he told me quite a lot I didn't know about strengthening my knee.

He gave me a deep steroid shot with a lot less agony than most of the shots I've had over the years. My knee has felt good all day and I should be in a good place to work on strengthening it.

I had low expectations, and they were blown away. They took my insurance with no copay or other charge. Competent, very little waiting, excellent care, and fine results. If you need ortho care on Maui I'd certainly give them a try. Here's a link to the article that directed me there:
https://mauinow.com/2022/01/03/orthopedic-urgent-care-clinic-opens-in-upcountry-maui/

A little video of my cheapskate foil booster (and a basic ADHD demo). If anyone is interested I'll look up the company I bought the powered fin from, but they are fairly common.

My board leash came disconnected yesterday when I was at Kanaha outside the reef. My board got away in a hurry. Swimming in an impact vest is painfully slow, so I couldn't catch it and soon it was out of sight in the swell. Of course, I still had the wing, so I got to practice self-rescue for quite a while, which is certainly a worthwhile skill to work on.

I simply got the wing flying, moved my grip further back--which would get a little more challenging with a wing that doesn't have a boom or a fake boom in my case--and used the pull to drag myself through the water. That worked really well until I ran over the reef and got rumbled by a few waist-high waves. In the excitement, the wing flipped and I struggled a bit to flip it back while swimming. I could have stood on the reef, but long experience told me I didn't need to add coral cuts and vana spines to my troubles. I gave up and just kicked along for a while, but the current and wind was carrying me towards Ka'a.

I finally tried a few different approaches to flipping the wing and managed to do it by holding a wingtip down and pulling on the leash. I was prepared to hang on to the wing tightly if the leash parted. I also thought this would be a shitty time to pop the bladder and came up with a few strategies if that happened. Mostly arrayed around keeping as much air in the wing as I could. Fortunately, the wing finally flipped nicely and I continued my cruise in.

With the aid of the wing, I was able to not only make good speed towards the beach, but I was also able to hold my own against wind and current, aiming towards the lifeguard tower at the edge of kite beach. Several windsurfers checked on me to see if I was okay, I assured them I was and didn't need the lifeguards. One of them told me a winger had retrieved my board and put it on the beach. Whoever that was, thanks, and thanks to the windsurfers who checked on me.

This looks like a better way to self-rescue in many cases. I've done the spinnaker riding the leading edge thing before, but there are some refinements here that I haven't tried. I'm going to practice this next time I go out--which given the current rain in Maui, might be a while.

When I was about 100 yards offshore I saw a lifeguard on a rescue board paddling out towards me. I thought about waving him off, but he said I should get on the nose of the rescue board and fly the wing to bring us both back to the beach. He apparently didn't realize he was dealing with a clumsy geezer with bad knees, and after flopping around a while I gave him the wing leash, handed him the wing, and crawled onto the back of the board. We made good time to the beach and Chris--the lifeguard--aimed for my board so I only had to walk a few yards to retrieve it.

I took a long walk of shame back to my truck, carrying my gear all the way. I could have stashed it and gone for the van, but it wasn't that far (probably less than half a mile) and everything was pretty sandy. I wanted to use the hose and shower at the entrance to kooks to wash everything off, including me. I stowed my gear and headed to Costco for a restocking expedition, probably the most dangerous thing I did all day. 

Thanks to everyone that helped me out. I'm confident I didn't NEED help, but it's certainly nice to have people care. It's always worthwhile to have something like this happen so you can test your reactions and ability to respond. If I couldn't manage this and/or worse situations I'd have no business wingfoiling anywhere but a kiddie pool.

But I can.

In the windsurf world people had a lot of ideas about how big the steps should be in a quiver. For the basic kind of windsurfing I used to do--mow the lawn at the Hatchery, Dougs, Rowena, etc. in the Gorge, and add in a little surf at Kanaha, Euro, or break all my stuff at Ho'okipa--most people used some kind of percentage jumps. That had the benefit of being a bit bigger jumps at large sizes where a rough cut is suitable for light wind and then smaller increments at the nuclear wind end where size got very important.

It seems like wing manufacturers just do some random increments, like half meters. I find myself not able to make a reasoned choice of wing sizes. Going from 6 to five doesn't seem to accomplish much, and dropping to 4.2 often seems too far. In fact, I rarely use the 4.2. It's either 5.0 or 3.5 of if the wind is light it's 6.0

I'm thinking perhaps I can look at wing sizes the way I used to look at sail sizes.  I always wanted sails in my quiver to overlap a little at the top and bottom of their range. After a lot of fiddling and testing I settled on 20 percent as a reasonable number (each sail is 80 percent of the preceding sail). I haven't done any of that kind of testing for wings, but I suspect if I do it will be something similar. Twenty percent starting at 6Meters is  6, 4.8, 3.8, 3.1. 2.4.  I like the looks of that progression. A heavy guy like me could skip the 2.4 and have a well-spaced 4 wing quiver.

This might be easier than I thought. I had a few phone calls with Dave Kalama to talk about a more stable foil surfboard, a sort of Mr. Fugly 2. Mr. Fugly was a foil board Dave built for me that was a stable as a dock--and almost as big. I gave it to a friend after I progressed enough to use a smaller board. Mr. Fugly wasn't really fucking ugly, but it sure stood out. People who didn't know me would yell: "Hey! that's Mr. Fugly, you must be Bill."


The infamous Mr. Fugly

Anyway, I've been struggling to get my foil surfing mojo back, and a bigger board seems like the answer--something bigger than my 5'10" X 31" wing/surf board or the 6'10"X31" many times repaired, heavy as concrete foil surf board I've been using. I planned to get Dave to build me a custom board to deal with my balance and knee issues, but it turns out Dave had a production 7'2" X 32" board that I've tried a couple of times and I really like it. It paddles well and fast, has lots of stability, I can move around on it and lurch to my feet without too many faceplants. I even like the footstraps and ventral fins that came with it. It's carbon, fairly light, built in the Kinetic factory in Vietnam. Has very slick fin boxes, and both tracks and a tuttle mount. It pivot turns nicely, which is surprising with the big fin ahead of my front foot. Of course, as soon as I picked it up from Dave the surf went away and the wind started picking up. But I expect there will be plenty of time to play with Mr. Handsome this winter.

So we put the custom board on hold, and this might be my permanent foil SUP board.





That's a lot o' liters, but I think I'm done with chasing smaller.


I added a simplified version of the geezer crutch--if I start flailing around as my knee gets tired I can grab this handle to help haul myself into a standing position. It works OK. Not great, but it will get better with some tuning.

At first, I thought I was struggling to SUP foil because I've been wingfoiling so much that I've lost my surf mojo (what little I had). But over the past few days, it's become increasingly clear that my weak left knee and my declining balance are the real culprits. This morning in relatively glassy conditions it was taking me four of five tries to get to my feet. Most of the failed attempts ended in an ignominious faceplant. I got in touch with Dave Kalama this afternoon to talk about commissioning a REALLY stable SUP custom foil board, something along the lines of the famous "Mr. Fugly". My wife says a new version has to be named Mr. Handsome. We'll see. But I've been joking about needing a SUP foil board with a walker frame. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but in the meantime, I did this:

Holy fukowitz, the pace of this development is completely astonishing. Beyond unreal, it seems completely impossible. At the same time the value of Spacex, and its Starlink system, is growing exponentially, fundamentally independent of the Starship effort, which must be more or less a massive drain on revenue and resources with payoff far in the future, though at this pace the future might not be that far off.

https://newatlas.com/space/raptor-vacuum-engine-starship-test-spacex/

I've been missing SUP paddling, or more specifically, my body has been missing the workout. My triceps are deflating, my chest and abs are softening, Wing Foiling just isn't the same level of exercise. I plan to paddle a lot more in Maui this year, but I said that to myself about halfway through the summer, and still never got my board wet. I carried it around on the truck for a month or so, but I actually need to take it off the truck and stick it in the water.

Then I saw this thing. Most of the gimmick paddle systems I've seen are pretty silly. I try to be open-minded about them, I even briefly owned a Hobie with a mirage drive, but I haven't seen many useful approaches. But this thing actually looks pretty good. https://newatlas.com/outdoors/supski-stand-up-paddleboard/ I'd be a little more convinced of the usability if the guy in the video demonstrated even a basic idea of how to use a SUP with a regular paddle. He paddles like it's his first time on a board. And with 2 backers, only one of which shows up in the products claimed section, I'd have my doubts this thing will get funded. Which might be too bad, it's not a terrible idea and the execution looks OK.

In the classic SciFi book, "A Mote In God's Eye" Jerry Pournelle writes about a character trait called (as I recall) the Crazy Eddie. He's the kind of person that in the middle of a trash removal problem where garbage is choking a city and causing health problems calls for a trash hauler's strike. No, I'm not writing about the governor of Texas, this is about a wingfoiler in Maui.

There's been a growing problem with wingfoilers in the harbor and increasing pressure from the Canoe Clubs, fishermen, and commercial users of the harbor to ban wingfoilers using the harbor. The number of wingfoilers in the harbor has grown shockingly, especially given that it's really a lousy place to wingfoil once you get past doing the walk of shame every time you hit the water.

In the middle of this brewing storm, a tourist wingfoiler did this (from a Facebook post):

There was an incident at Kahului Harbor, Maui today with a wing foiler who said he was from Hood River.  The wing foiler disobeyed the orders from a tugboat in the shipping channel and foiled around barges and between two tugs.  He refused to give way.  We spoke with this person and he was not apologetic or had ownership of doing anything wrong.   This was a total lack of respect and knowledge of the local environment and issues.  Some of you may be aware that the Maui Wing Foiling community is on VERY shaky ground with the canoe clubs and the Kahului Harbormaster at the moment.   
Please pass this information along to anyone thinking of coming to Maui.   We want you to enjoy world-class wind and waves but we also want you to obey the rules of the road so that we can keep enjoying wing foiling here.   And if anyone knows of a person who happens to currently be in Maui riding about a 5'0 Starboard with a blue F-One Strike wing - we would be grateful if you would let him know that he messed up.   Any help in identifying this person is appreciated too.

I could care less who this clown is, and I certainly hope he's not really from Hood River. I'm reposting this here to say--don't be a Crazy Eddie. I occasionally see some remarkably stupid close passes to the barges in the Columbia, which I mentally dismiss as a stupid tourist move but that's probably not true. I've never understood why anyone would do such a thing. A tugboat captain maneuvering a massive barge certainly shouldn't have to pay attention to someone on a water sports craft of any flavor. And no matter what idiotic sea lawyer nonsense someone might claim, they absolutely have the right of way, both in maritime law and by the laws of physics. If you wind up in their path they cannot and will not maneuver to avoid you. Far more important, it's a completely irresponsible thing to do and it can result in regulation or outright banning of this sport, as it almost did with windsurfing back when hordes of beginners choked Hood River. Don't do it here, and for damn sure, don't do it on Maui, though I certainly expect that won't be an issue for long. This Crazy Eddie has almost certainly nailed shut the harbor for anyone with a wing.

edit--I thought I was wrong about the name and changed it to Crazy Charlie. But I looked it up and found I was right in the first place--unusual. Maybe I'm not completely senile.