" The idea came about when planning my return home to the Bay Area from training in Europe. I had seen so many kids across Europe windsurfing and windsurf foiling, but back in the US it’s a struggle to find kids out on the water doing the same. While I know we can’t change the lack of popularity of windsurf foiling among kids in the US overnight, I thought why couldn’t we start small and what better place to do that than in San Francisco Bay?

So, with F4 and efforts from the Cal Sailing Club and the San Francisco Boardsailing Association, we put together a Youth Foiling Demo Weekend with F4. Here kids of all ages from around the Bay Area could come to Berkeley and get a chance to try windsurfing with some F4 foils. While we were excited to try and get kids stoked on foiling, we thought we’d be lucky if 10 showed up. I’m happy to say we were very wrong.

Over the entire weekend we not only did not have enough foils for kids to use, I couldn’t get them to leave at the end of the day. Kids showed up both days at 11am on-the-dot and there was a steady flow of them until I had to clean everything up at 5. Kids who showed up for only an hour or two on Saturday came back and stayed the entire six hours on Sunday.

Most of the kids that came had windsurfed before, but never foiled. After giving a few pointers on land I would send the kids out on the water with the goal to see if they could get flying. The results were amazing! Most kids got the initial pop-up and a few were able to get up and maintain flight. Although it only lasted a few seconds and was immediately followed by a big crash, the kids came back to the dock with the biggest smiles on their faces screaming “did you see, did you see?!” and insisted on going back out until they got foiling again.