Another year and another whirlwind race season (or 9 days in my case) in Hawaii. A wonderful convergence of amazing people in some of the best downwind conditions in the world. Being in Hawaii during the race period is one of my favourite times of the year as I get to catch up with friends and make new ones thanks to this amazing sport. This blog took a while to write as I couldn’t really find the time to sit down and put my thoughts down for a while and really just wanted to enjoy some cruisey foiling for a couple of weeks. 

Ok, I never wrote a 3 foil quiver blog for March because March wasn’t great for wind so I didn’t have much to write about and ended up a bit busy in April and May. However in April I received not one, but 2 parawings to see what all the hype was and to finally follow up on my last parawing blog post. Both of these parawings work great, so I’m not really going to go into the differences between them (I’ll leave that for the parawing connoisseurs). Now that I’ve had a good amount of time on them, I plan to talk more about the usage of parawings from a downwinding and learning to downwind lens rather than ‘which is best’. The parawings I have are the Flow D-wing 4.2m and the Ozone pocket rocket 3m.

So you may have seen me posting on instagram about a leaderboard site (https://race.downwind.app/) that my buddy Sibren built. Originally it started as a leaderboard for a part of a local run for a bit of fun, but Sibren quickly realised that this leaderboard was scaleable and we started adding more runs globally (first through our network, and now by promoting it more on social media). This blog post aims to go through some of the ‘basics’ about the leaderboard – but in general we hope that it drives community engagement in all the various DW locations, a bit of friendly rivalry and can possibly even end up as a tool for local events or challenges.