August 15, 2023
2 minutes reading time
Teenaged pioneer of the foiling tack
Today Harry Joyner celebrates his 17th birthday at the Allianz Sailing World Championship. Despite his young years, the teenager from Western Australia has already earned himself a piece of fame in the short history of the iQFOiL windsurfing class.
He’s the first rider to be credited with completing a foiling tack. This manoeuvre is the Holy Grail of foiling windsurfing.
Everyone in the Olympic fleet can pull off a foiling gybe. That’s standard stuff, the easy manoeuvre, if anything is easy when you’re standing on a short plank hovering at up to 30 knots of speed above the ever-shifting surface of the North Sea. With the wind at your back, maintaining momentum through a gybe is more straightforward. Completing a tack is much harder because you’ve got to overcome the drag of the rig as you carve through the eye of the wind. Plus maintaining balance and changing foot position at high speed requires pinpoint accuracy.
Joyner can remember the exact day he pulled off his first foiling tack. “It was on 17th March 2022. I thought it was going to be impossible but one day it just happened. I managed to do it and it felt bloody awesome! But it took me about two months before I managed to do the next one. Then as soon as I did the second one, they started to roll in a little bit easier and quicker.”
Joyner didn’t reveal his big breakthrough straightaway. “We revealed it just before the Europeans in Lake Garda, probably about two months after the first foiling tack,” he says. “It’s a competitive advantage and you always want to try and find an edge over your competitors. We don’t really want to tell the world how we’re going to beat them.”
If you get it right, Joyner estimates a well-executed foiling tack will gain you about 20 metres advantage over your rivals touching the water through the middle of a more typical tacking manoeuvre. “It’s still difficult to be consistent, particularly for the heavier guys. You see more foiling tacks in the youth fleet because they’re a bit lighter. There’s probably only about 10 to 20 per cent of the [senior] fleet doing the foiling tack, but that’s going to go up over the next year.”
By Andy Rice, World Sailing Event Correspondent