So on Sunday 15th I ticked a downwinder run that a mate of mine who is a Lord SUP foiler has been hassling me to join him on for some time.
Hands down the most hectic, gnarly experience I've EVER had on the water!
We coined it the 'Cannonball Run' from Injinup to Sugarloaf Rock in the South West of Western Australia
A 21km trip (at least for me) and I was legitimately terrified for all of it!
The pre-session anxiety levels were at all time high!
Conditions were 25kn average winds - gusting 30kn combined with a 1.8m swell - it was heavy!
For scale the first tack on the GPS track was 2km and at the furthest section we would have been ~5km offshore
You can see on Navionics it is deep and it was cold!
Confirmed by the local knowledge - it is also very sharky!
This was big boy conditions with 3 of us on the foiling spectrum
Nathan 'Susan Foil! @foil_perth on his Sunova SUP w/ Axis ART999 foil
Brett 'The Mad Canadian' @brettkotelko on a 2.8m Cloud Kite / Armstrong HS foil
Plus me 'Inspector Gadget' @paularity_ on the Flite Ultra / Flow 900
Quite the odd assortment of blokes if I'm honest!
Safety gear we took out were PLBs + Hi-Vis PFD's + iPhones / Apple Watches for location tracking and Brett had a radio
Realistically it would have been a Westpac chopper rescue and none of us particularly wanted to make the National news anyways!
We had a caddy on standby - Bill who is a 75yo fellow foil frother who also rides an Ultra
The most memorable moment was me glancing behind and seeing a literal mountain rise up, with Nathan on the crest
It jacked up so steep that he accelerated way too fast and he couldn't hold his wing down even dragging his paddle as a brake!
I vividly remember seeing his entire foil lift out of the water like he was flying in the air at an impossible angle until he ended up swan diving down the face of the multi-storey bomb!
I didn't do any true gliding - not that I couldn't - I would have easily had my longest unpowered glides to date, but because I've worn out the needle bearing cage in a few propellors recently and unfortunately have actually lost confidence in it's reliability - this was no place for a gear failure!
Powered by electrons, range anxiety was always at the back of my mind - even though I have done nearly double the distance on a Sport FliteCell previously
There's also no riding footage from me - I decided not to take my new Insta360 X3 out - I haven't got the balance dialled enough with the swing weight of holding out the selfie stick to risk it in those conditions!
Except for one shot from Nathan's GoPro catching the most intense threading the needle exit that was what I was most concerned about and staring down for the entire run.
The finish is at a place called Sugar Loaf Rock and between the island and the rocky outcrop in this wind/swell direction forms a semi 'lagoon' with a relatively calm place to come in
But it is a tight gap and the sheer force of the wave energy smashing into the rocks creates an insane amount of refraction and confusion so even straight lining it to the lagoon was no easy feat!
At one critical 'Do NOT Fall' point my wing punched through the crest of a backwash wave and I was so determined to not get annihilated against the rocks that I somehow managed to keep level in the air (foot straps FTW!) and land back in the water
The wide angle lens in his Reel does it no justice
It took just on an hour to complete, I came off 3 times because the angle of the swell tripped the accelerometer in the mast and the tilt detection disarmed my Controller
After a while of reading the play, you could traverse the sections and if a trough looked too steep, kind of peel off the back and catch the next one
Sometimes you accelerated so fast that even on an angle following along the crest there'd be no choice but to straight line into the ditch and all of a sudden you're riding up the back of the bump in front of you and it actually felt like going uphill, so much so that you'd almost stall out the wing!
Focusing on controlling my breathing and remaining calm was critical and my heart rate averaged like 145bpm for the entire hour! Burnt around 700 calories
At the finish I could barely lift the 25kg board out of the water and I had to hike up jagged limestone in bare feet twice because carting the eFoil plus battery ~500m up a rugged hill in one trip with jelly legs was just not feasible!
We pretty much couldn't sleep that night - the endorphins were next level and reviewing Nathan's GoPro footage was like reliving the run again haha!
And what's even more insane is that the next day in windier and bigger conditions, Nathan - who was recovering from COVID and not at all peak board fit - did a solo send and had to exit further up the coast at a sketchy break called Windmills!
I declined to go again - after riding every single day for 4 weeks straight my legs were cooked (my excuse anyways haha!) - so I was impatiently waiting for him at the end, peaking out that I was going to have to call in a search!
Luckily a little dot appeared in view and he somehow timed the close out sets to not get smoked onto some rocks
What a strike mission! 2 days of full blown survival sessions - we were ecstatic, but the 3 hour drive back to Perth was in utter exhaustion!
He reckons that was the most f@$"ed up thing he's seen anyone do on an eFoil - let alone on a pocket rocket Ultra!
And there might be some mad Hawaiians who've done comparable runs in Maui, but I reckon a high percentage of watermen would not have been out there that weekend
When I get back from work next month, now that I have the confidence that it's survivable - we'll return down South, maybe with a few extra stray lunatic downwind foilers and catch it on camera!
Cannon Ball Run
www.instagram.com/reel/CngkySmjpCF/
Susan's Solo Send
www.instagram.com/reel/CnlNPZ-juhr/
Maddog stuff Paularity! Brett is a good friend of mine and we did a kite downwinder, lancelin to wedge, on Monday so I guess he's getting in some good downwinders lately!
Wish I could have been down south with you all. I could have thrown a wingding in to your mixed downwinder bunch 
Select to expand quoteYoungbreezy said..
Maddog stuff Paularity! Brett is a good friend of mine and we did a kite downwinder, lancelin to wedge, on Monday so I guess he's getting in some good downwinders lately!
Wish I could have been down south with you all. I could have thrown a wingding in to your mixed downwinder bunch
Yeah rad! He must have done a fair bit of driving!
We could have been like The Avengers of foiling haha!
www.instagram.com/reel/Cnst5OLjHiV/
the exit from the day I didn't go out!
Can't understate how hectic it was
