Last year, after attending a few events in France and Spain between us, Sibren and I thought it would be a good idea to run an event at home. Since downwinding in the Netherlands was / still is in its infancy with a small dedicated group of foilers learning and progressing across the country, our primary goal was to put together an event that brought the community together and catered for as big of a range of levels as possible. The idea was originally to do a two part event (see the “original plan”), with half the run (8km) being a race and half the run being a fun run (7km). This would give people a chance to have a taste of racing, whilst also being able to enjoy the bumps together, leaving the option to only opt in for the fun run. We chose a run the event on the Markermeer on a stretch between Almere and Lelystad, which when the wind is decent (18+ knots south west) provides super beginner friendly bumps and hoped that the weekends we picked for the event window in October (being statistically quite a windy month) would give us the conditions we were hoping for. However, it seems that the best way to kill the wind is to organize an event…with the weekends we wanted to run on having pretty much no wind...
Fast forward to 2025, and almost the same thing happened. The first weekend of the window was windless, and on the second weekend we didn't get the desired South West winds to run the event in Almere along the dijk. But a good Easterly showed up on the forecast and we pivoted and decided to run a more fun format of "free for all laps" focusing on the "Stage 2" of the original format and making it more community focused on the other side of the Markermeer by Wijdenes. Despite the cold, it was awesome to see how many foilers turned up, with almost 20 foilers turn up from all over The Netherlands as well as Belgium! Some of the riders have posted their own event summaries, such as Ortwin who captured his perspective of the event in this YouTube video.
On this side of the Markermeer the start of the run is slightly onshore with how the coast sticks out at Oosterleek, but with the way the lands curves away, the second half of the run opened up. With decent wind, we had really good bumps, and the slightly longer than average (800m or so) paddle out, was made good by the fact you were surrounded by so many buddies!
This format turned out to be much more inclusive than the original plan since the short 4-5km run meant the spread between the fastest and the slowest wasn't too big, making it easy to shuttle with shorter waiting times keeping everyone warm (as far as possible). Additionally there was the option for foilers to stop at 2km meaning that even the less experienced downwind foilers could take part meaning everyone also got 2-3 runs in! It was great to have participants enjoying downwind foiling with the paddle, parawing, Foildrive and even a couple of wingers. This format went down really well and everyone was buzzing as they reconvened, shuttled back to the top and went again.
The focus of the event was community and sharing bumps. I even emphasised at the start that “it is not a race”. Racing these slow surfy bumps is pointless, and its best to enjoy them for what they are best - cruising together and surfing. For “prizes” - we used the leaderboard to track stats with prizes being given out for: Most extra distance, fastest km, fastest lap (yes yes, not a race), most progression, youngest hip, flow, most set ups used over the day (two fully different boards / set ups and parawing + wing), FoilDrive division prizes, furthest travelled, smallest foil, most camera time on the drone (awarded retrospectively)
Thanks and appreciation must go out to Basir who was filming on the drone and helping with shuttles all day along with all the awesome brands that got behind the event:
Appletree Surfboards - https://appletreesurfboards.com/
Code Foils - https://codefoils.com/
Vaikobi - https://www.vaikobi.com/
Kaohi leash - https://boardmeetingusa.com/
SurfEars - https://surfears.com/
FoilDrive - https://foildrive.com/
Storm Co (F-one, Manera Ozone Benelux) - https://www.f-one.world https://www.manera.com https://ozonekites.com/
Wingsurfer & Axis Foils https://wingsurfer.nl/ https://axisfoils.com/
North & Mystic - https://northactionsports.com/ https://www.mysticboarding.com/
Lift Foils NL - https://www.liftfoils.nl/
Wakestyle - https://www.wake-style.com/
Voyager foiler - https://www.voyagerfoiler.com/
