Laird Hamilton: A Surfermag.com exclusive interview

SURFERMAG.COM: Dave Kalama had some interesting fins in the DVD The Ride / The Day. Can you speak a little bit about fin design…

LAIRD: Fin design has a lot to do with it. The faster we're going, we're going a lot faster, so we're more sensitive to fin design. The faster you go the less fin you need, but the better foiled it needs to be. I think sometimes outline is given a little bit too much credit versus foiled shape. Sometimes the foil is more important than the outline itself or the rake. I think that you can get away with less rake or more rake on a well foiled fin than you can with a badly foiled fin.

SURFERMAG.COM: Would you say that the fin design and the foil of the fin is probably where you're going to see more performance changes with the board? Is it kind of coming down to the fins like it has with contemporary boards?

LAIRD: Well, yeah…it is because that's what's creating the most drag. The fins are in the water and you got angles on them, which is creating drag. Ultimately it would be nice to get rid of the fins completely. That would be where we would love to be because that would be the least amount of drag. That's why boogie boards go so fast, the less fin you have the faster you go. The faster you go, the less fin you need, so… We learned a lot about our fin development through windsurfing because we were able to find out a lot about cavitation.

SURFERMAG.COM: Explain cavitation?

LAIRD: Cavitation is when you get a big air pocket on the side of your fin through a bad foil and it aerates, and once there is air there, there is no lift. And then, the board goes sideways.

SURFERMAG.COM: This is a good segue to the foilboards, which is the next thing I wanted to touch on. Describe the design elements of the basic hydrofoil.

LAIRD: The foil itself, that's underwater, it's hard for people to understand how does this even work, but really it's an airplane (spreads hands). It's a miniature airplane and the airplane is underwater. So as soon as the airplane comes out of the water it doesn't fly anymore (hand motion coming up). So the trick is to keep the plane below the surface. The way you fly this plane is by standing on top of it, so the way we connect the plane to the board is we use a strut. So there is an arm that connects the board to the airplane. And then you're standing on this board but you're really standing on a plane. You're flying the plane by leaning forward, the plane dives; lean back; lean right, the plane turns right; lean left; and then everything in between. The only difference between the foilboard and a normal surfboard is that a normal surfboard is more one-dimensional. The surface dictates the angles of what the board does, you can't really lift and fall on a board. You'll turn and go on an edge or another edge and maybe you can pop and air and get off the water, but you're not constantly riding in this kind of three-dimensional element. It'd be like if your board was able to go a foot or two below the water and then come to the surface, and that's how you surfed your board through the water, you could actually go below the water. We can't do that with our surfboards, but with the foilboard you are able to, so it adds a whole new element to your riding, to the way you look at what you're doing, the way your brain evaluates what exactly is going on.

SURFERMAG.COM: Do you foresee a time when you will be able to ride the foilboard without getting up to speed with a tow. In other words…

LAIRD: Self-propelled.

SURFERMAG.COM: Yeah, do you see that?

LAIRD: Absolutely. I mean, initially maybe it'll be like a start thing, something that just starts you. Not necessarily a boat or a kite, but maybe something like some little arm that gives you a little start, you know, you start from a little platform or something and then you start and once you've started you can fly around on it. But eventually we should be able to get it to the point where we can actually self-perpetuate ourselves from a dead stop. Yes, that is part of the future of foiling. But this is all with time and R&D and development, and right now, you know, we are in kindergarten. This is kindergarten, we are just dealing with one plus one. We are not in calculus…

SURFERMAG.COM: We are still in kindergarten?

Aichner

LAIRD: Yeah, yeah (smiles). No, I remember guys that were using wakeboard boots. There is a reason why we use snowboard boots and a quick release system, so you can get out of it because you are attached to an anchor.

SURFERMAG.COM: How heavy is it?

LAIRD: It's about forty pounds.

SURFERMAG.COM: The entire system?

LAIRD: Yeah, which feels like absolutely nothing.

SURFERMAG.COM: Does it float?

LAIRD: Yeah.

SURFERMAG.COM: Everything floats?

LAIRD: Yeah, it floats.

SURFERMAG.COM: You kind of touched on this already but in The Ride / The Day you mentioned that foil surfing was the future of surfing, can you expand on that thought?

LAIRD: A future of surfing. The thing is, there are so many disciplines of surfing and I think people have a tendency to go "ohh this is surfing and we only do this" or "this is surfing and we only do this" (makes a box with hands and shrinks it). I mean surfing is any form of riding a wave. Or, for that matter, surfing is, if you look at how its influenced skateboarding, it's really like a motion. It's a motion and a rhythm you can do on the snow, which is why they have snowboarding; which is what you can do on concrete, which is why they have skateboarding The purest form of it, the part where it evolved from, is the sea. It's like, it's like evolution: We evolved from the water but now were running around on land. Bodysurfing is the first, purest, simplest thing, just with your body, nothing else. Then you have bodysurfing with the fins next, and then you have boogieboarding and there is an evolution of each one as we go along. But you start crawling before you can stand up and then you walk and then you run and then you can sprint. But foilsurfing is one of the disciplines in the future that will allow us to have a lot more areas to surf. Which we are going to need because we have a lot more people wanting to surf. It's going to allow people that don't necessarily have the time or the experience to go out and surf 20 feet and be in that environment because they'd drown and they shouldn't be out there anyway, but they can experience riding those kind of swells in the open ocean or in the right locations in the ocean where they can ride without the consequences of falling and crashing on a giant wave. So its going to open up a lot more places to surf. And its just one of the new ways of surfing. It'd be like if you showed ancient Hawaiians shortboarding they'd be like, "that's cool but that's not the big longboard" and if you showed somebody else another discipline they'd go, "that's cool but that's not…" You know it's all relative, they're all disciplines of it, ones not greater than the other…they just are.

SURFERMAG.COM: It's like dancing. You've got ballet, you've got Ballroom dance, you've got this, you've got that...because I've always equated surfing to dancing.

LAIRD: Yeah, absolutely. Or music or whatever, it's like how many kinds of music are there? Self-expression (smiles).