Foil Around Britain
Mainland Britain has almost 18,000km of coastline according to the Ordnance Survey – 17,819km or 11,072 miles to be precise. How you come to that figure isn’t easy though, because of tides, how accurately you measure it, and what you class as the mainland. What’s even harder than getting an accurate distance of the coastline of our island nation though, is circumnavigating it.
This autumn two water athletes, Stephen Bowens and Simon Osborne, are attempting to wing foil their way around Britain, using the power of the wind, their stamina, and a bit of help from the tides, to do a full lap over the course of six weeks to raise money for Cancer Research UK. If they average travelling 1km offshore and cutting from headland to headland rather than going in and out of every bay then it’s probably a little over 3000km or 2000 miles. It’s a massive undertaking, and one that we here at C-Skins are proud to be supporting.
Steve and Simon both live and work in Cornwall, and are both intimately connected to the sea through their work and pastimes. Steve lives in Portreath on the north coast and works part time for the HSE for Adventure Activity Licensing (AALA, the body that assesses and certifies outdoor activity centers) alongside his own business running lifeguard training, water safety and first aid courses, whilst Simon is based in Falmouth and one half of Online Sea Kayaking (an online coaching platform) and a sea kayak coach and guide. Simon’s no stranger to circumnavigations and ocean-based challenges, having become the youngest person to sea kayaking around Britain in 2002, kayaking solo around Ireland in six weeks in 2004, and then joining a four man crew to row across the Atlantic. That first circumnavigation of Britain by sea kayak, and this attempt by wing foil, have both been in memory of Simon’s brother Mark who died of leukemia when Simon was just nine years old.
As this article lands online, the pair are on the East Coast of the UK, near Whitby in Yorkshire. Whilst they were waiting out a couple of days of unfavourable conditions to cross The Wash, we caught up with them to find out more about what led them to this point and the challenge so far.
The Physics and Physicality of Wing Foiling
Many surfers and water users will have seen foiling and wing foiling by now, either in person or online. Surfers on short, thick surfboards levitate and fly along at high speeds a few feet above the water, supported on a blade that cuts the water and connects them to an underwater wing that once it gets up to speed lifts the board and the rider up off the surface of the water. Surfers can pick up swells from a long way out, or that are too fat or slack for regular surfers to ride, and can flow through numerous figure of eight turns even in choppy conditions as they’re riding the wave’s energy beneath the surface with minimal drag and aren’t affected by surface chop. They can then pump the board to maintain momentum and lift, and keep going without the need for the wave’s energy. Wing foiling adds wind power in to the mix as the rider holds a delta shaped wing, like a kite without the string, to pull them along and give them the speed to get up on the hydrofoil or to power them back out top the line-up after a ride – or alternatively, just to foil along in flat water along the coast or downwind.
Steve told us that in his opinion, whilst it’s a full body activity, he doesn’t think wing foiling is as physically demanding as surfing or windsurfing. But then, just like surfing, most wing foil sessions are a few hours long. To get around Britain Steve and Simon will be putting n sessions that could be up to nine hours long, controlling and pumping their boards and holding their wings in a feat of serious physical endurance. “Some of these days have been exhausting.” Steve admits. “Simon and I have different physical backgrounds, so I have found that it is my legs on the downwinders that have been fatigued the most. My upper body I haven’t really noticed it too much, not because I’m particularly strong in that way, but that’s just been my experience. Simon has been good on his legs but has found his shoulders, forearms and hands to be more fatigued.”
Open Water: Wing Foiling From The Isles of Scilly to Sennen
Last winter, Steve and Simon successfully wing foiled from the Isles of Scilly to the Cornish mainland. They both kayaked there and back several times, and when Steve took up wing foiling he decided it would be a good challenge. “Because of the direction of the prevailing south westerlies, it was always going to be more likely that we’d go from the Isles of Scilly back to the mainland, but it took quite a lot of planning and organisation.” Steve recalls. “The day that we planned to go, we went to Sennen to launch our support RIB and go across to the islands but the conditions were hideous so we made the decision not to go. We tried again the next day and launched from Penzance at about 4am in the pitch black, motored out to the Scillies, and sat on the beach in no wind whatsoever. Once the wind picked up we managed to get going, and by the time we arrived at Sennen the forecast was exactly accurate - it was about force 6, there was a huge swell coming in, and the whole bay was closing out so we had to very carefully come on the inside of the reef to get some shelter then come right up towards Sennen to land. Gwynver was absolutely off its nuts! So that was really challenging physically, and we couldn’t see each other most of the way across because we couldn’t see over the tops of the swells. That sowed the seed though in terms of what might be possible in terms of wing foiling and taking on greater challenges.”
After that crossing, Steve hatched a plan to wing foil around the coast of Cornwall, but Simon with his prior circumnavigation experience asked “Why bother just doing Cornwall? Why not keep going and do the whole of Britain?”
Prior Preparation
A challenge of this magnitude requires a lot of planning, and a lot of physical training. Both Simon and Steve have the logistical and expedition planning experience to pull this project together. Steve is also a qualified physical trainer who ran an applied sports science degree programme for a decade, so a year ago he wrote a strength and conditioning programme for Simon which he followed for the twelve months building up to this. Steve does a lot of CrossFit anyway, and then in the last four months he increased his additional training specific to the demands of this trip. “The things that have been most useful have been things like weighted walking lunges, pull ups, lots of front squats, back squats, hack squats, all that sort of stuff. Although I do a lot of weights normally, the stuff that’s been helping is not doing a lot of heavy weights stuff, but just doing lots of reps and time under tension.”
Nonetheless, this far into the challenge they are both feeling it. “The thing that’s made us most fatigued is not the physical challenge, but the stress.” Steve says. “On some of the sections we’ve been four miles off shore at a number of times, going into wind against the tide, and the anticipation of those days is very tiring as well as the concentration required to use a foil in those conditions. The foil works by creating lift from the speed at which it goes through the water, so the faster you go the greater the lift it creates,” he explains. “In choppy water or in waves the speed of the foil is changing all the time, so as it accelerates you have to press down on the front of the board and that changes that uplift into forward motion so you accelerate. You’re constantly changing the angle of the board to maintain control. And then of course you fall off and have to get back on again.”
It sounds exhausting, and as well as the training that they’ve done, they also need to fuel their efforts hour-by-hour, and day-by-day. When out on the water, Simon and Steve are carrying backpacks with protein bars and energy snacks donated to them by Decathlon to help keep them going, as well as various items of safety equipment. Steve ran us through that kit: “Some of the equipment we’ve been carrying with us on the water are PLBs which are satellite emergency distress beacons; we’ve got handheld VHS so we can communicate with the coastguard most of the way round; we carry our phones, and use Safe Tracks which the coastguard want us to do so that they can see us on the water and can call us if they get contacted by somebody from shore saying they think we’re in distress. We’ve got day/night flares too, so we’re pretty well equipped in terms of dealing with an emergency and getting help.”
This challenge to foil around Britain is not completely unsupported as Simon and Steve are being shadowed by a support van, however it is unsupported at sea.
“We’ve come to realise it would be a hell of a lot easier if we had a boat.” Steve admits to us. “We’d be really confident – we could just leave and if the wind dies we can climb on the boat. But we don’t have that. Instead of a support boat we’ve been very fortunate to have been supported by Foil Drive who are a company who have designed a little battery powered motor that sits on the bottom of the board and we can use that as an emergency get-out instead of a boat. It has a little propeller and so it’ll give us a little burst of power to push us up onto the foil. We can also ride with the board going through the water [rather than above it] and use the Foil Drive to get back to shore,” he explains. The Foil Drive has a range of about six or seven kilometers, so on days with strong offshore winds where they might not ordinarily venture a long way out for fear of not being able to beat back to the beach against the wind, it gives them confidence to do so.
And just in case that technology fails, they’re both also carrying a set of split paddles each, which are kayak paddles that break down into four sections so that they can fit into a bag. They’ve practiced paddling 5km with those, which isn’t very easy due to how short their boards are and the drag of the foil at low speeds, but they know that they can do it if all else fails.
“The Foil Drive was really handy one day early in the trip along the coast of Dorset,” say Steve. “We launched from Lyme Regis and were heading for Lulworth Cove, around Portland Bill. We hadn’t really appreciated it but there is a big long shingle beach running for over 30km up to Portland Bill that when we left had large dumping surf on it. That meant that when we left we had 50kms with no way off the water. We had a two-hour window when the tide was slower to get around Portland Bill and thankfully a friend of mine who runs The Official Test Centre in the Olympic Village in Weymouth very kindly sent a couple of his lads round in their RIB to keep an eye on us as we went round which was very reassuring. After stopping in at Weymouth to load up on food we got going again but were delayed by live ammunition shooting on the MOD range near Lulworth Cove so we missed the tide and the next headland. It was getting dark by then so we used the Foil Drive to get us into a little gap in the cliffs and we were able to scramble up a little fisherman’s path, dismantle all our gear, then we walked a couple of miles through some farm tracks to the nearest road. Simon’s dad met us there so we could find somewhere to sleep for the night.”
Simon’s dad drove their support van for the first week, and they’ve got friends and family lined up to do stints all the way around. Steve’s brother took over from Simon’s dad for the next week to get them past Southampton and The Solent, then one of Simon’s friends and right now Steve’s wife is driving the support vehicle. The van meets them around lunchtime so that they can grab a quick sandwich, and then they rendezvous again at the end of the day. It’s easier said than done considering they are at the mercy of the winds and tides. Some days they can cover over 100km, and other days they have to return to near where they set out from if the wind fades on them. It’s not easy to plan or anticipate, and that’s most strongly illustrated by their last-minute change of plan to travel anticlockwise around Britain rather than clockwise.
A Last Minute Direction Change
Simon and Steve’s plan had always been circumnavigate mainland Britain in a clockwise direction, using the prevailing southwesterly winds and getting the rougher west coast done and dusted earlier in the trip before the risk of rougher Atlantic weather increased. However there is a famous line from a poem about “best laid plans” and this was a textbook example. “We spent three days going in a clockwise direction but the wind kept failing and for two we just couldn’t get around Land’s End” Steve told us. Then on day three they set out from St Ives headed for Perranporth, but the wind faded again and they ended up floating around in the water just off St Agnes head, warranting a visit from the St Agnes lifeboat to check on them. They made it to Perranporth but the following day the wind switched to gale force north easterlies, and was forecast to remain the same for the next ten days – a pattern that’s almost unheard of at this time of year. “We made the difficult decision that in that wind direction we could actually get along the south coast, because we wouldn’t get very far if we carried on up the north coast. So at lunchtime on that day we drove from Perranporth to Falmouth, got on the water and did 130km into Devon, past Plymouth, and landed for the first night.”
Shipping Lanes and Wild Coasts
The coastline of Britain is nothing if not varied. From the busy shipping lanes of the English Channel and ports like Dover, Southampton, Hull and Liverpool, to remote, wild and strongly tidal sections such as Cape Wrath and The Minch on Scotland’s north west, or The Wash between Norfolk and Lincolnshire, there are many and varied challenges.
“We went across the Thames a few days ago, which is obviously a big consideration in terms of crossings, and we’ve done several crossings before. If we have wind it’s fine. We are travelling at 20kph, and the shipping lanes, whilst they are very busy, aren’t particularly wide. Every morning we always contact the coastguard to tell them what our plan is, and in the busy shipping areas I also phone the Harbour Master to inform them what we’re doing and to check on any shipping movements for that day. We can also look on AIS which is an online location system that is used for all commercial shipping, so you can see all ships, what their destination is, the speed they are travelling at, things like that, so we can take that into account. But in reality we get to the shipping lane, we look to make sure it’s clear, then we get across that shipping lane as quickly as possible.”
The Thames Estuary crossing is 8km, from the north coast of Kent to the south coast of Essex. On the day when they crossed the wind died, and so Simon and Steve “pump foiled” their way across, pumping their boards to maintain speed, lift and momentum, in the absence of wind. They reckon they’d each lost about 2kg of weight as sweat when they arrived in Essex.
Cape Wrath is the far northwest tip of Scotland and it is the most remote stretch of coast on the mainland, being four miles from the nearest road. As well as being so remote, it is a wild headland sticking out into the North Atlantic, with strong currents and winds. Steve worked in Scotland for a number of years and still goes up to the Outer Hebrides to run lifeguard courses on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, so has a couple of friends who run commercial boats up around there and they’re hoping that when they get up there they’ll be chaperoned around that corner of the coast.
When Dreams Meet Reality
To take on a challenge like this requires an acceptance but “putting to one side” of the harder realities that are likely to be faced. No doubt when Simon and Steve were planning and training for their project they were dreaming of and motivated by the prospect of speeding along downwind on a sunny September day, feeling as though they’re flying. The reality is that they’ve battled adverse weather condition on many days, slogged against tide and wind, and sometimes had to return to shore and sit out a few days whilst they’ve waited for conditions to improve. They’re carrying a lot more weight than if they were just out for a couple of hours session, and they’re foiling conservatively as a result. As a result and having faced a few hurdles, they’re not making as much progress as they’d like. But both men are accepting of the reality of attempting a challenge like this at this time of year. And perhaps crossing the finish line is only one of the rewards on offer. Connecting with a community is an upshot that’s they weren’t expecting.
“What’s really transpired is that all the way round so far, the water sports community - whether they are kitesurfers, windsurfers, wing foilers, surfers or sailors, have all been incredibly supportive and all seem to have a bit of a kindred spirit. We’ve stayed in a sailing club that had a regatta on, and they fed us and gave us a bed for the night. We’ve had wing foilers come out to meet us in the water and say hello and take videos and have a chat. We’ve had kiters who when we’ve had a problem like damaged equipment have got on WhatsApp and got in touch with other people who they know within the water sports community further along the coast to let them know we’re coming and to look out for us. It’s been absolutely incredible and it’s given us a lot of faith in the people who live along the coast of Great Britain. There are some really great people and we all share this amazing playground together. That probably sounds a bit corny but I have to be honest, and that’s my experience so far. Whatever happens over the next three weeks I know that’s going to be the main thing that I take away from it.”
You can follow Simon and Steve’s progress foiling around Britain using the live tracker above, and you can support their challenge with a donation to Cancer Research here.
