Surfing has evolved many times over the course of Laird Hamilton’s career, often by his hand. With that in mind, when I was recently invited to his place to participate in a press junket, of sorts, I took a moment to ask him what he’s been riding lately, with the winter season on the horizon. “Foiling is in the forefront. Everything I’m doing has a foil,” he tells me. “I’m just not riding too many boards. I mean, I’ve been paddling the last few days: prone, standup, knee paddle, just that kind of stuff for training. But everything’s based on foiling.”
When I ask him what it is about foiling, rather than surfing, that has captured his interest so completely, he bristles a little bit. “Well, I am surfing. I’m just riding a foil,” he replies. It may seem like a subtle semantic distinction, but Laird doesn’t see “surfing” as a separate sport from foiling. To him, surfing is riding a wave, no matter what craft it happens to be on. “But why is the (ideal) tool for surfing, foils?” he asks. “Well, first of all, the sensation of the way a foil feels is so magical. Like, it’s so free. It’s the most freedom that I’ve ever felt in the water. It’s like leaving the ground and going into flight.”
As much as the sheer speed of a foil is a draw in and of itself, it also serves a pragmatic purpose for Laird. “I believe that the way to ride the biggest waves is on foils,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind.” He goes on to explain that, to him, the pursuit of foiling has always been intrinsically linked to big wave surfing. “The real crux of the thing that got me originally interested in foiling was that I experienced a limitation in planing hulls in boards that ride on the surface,” he says, referring to one day in particular where he was faced with an inability to maintain enough speed while descending the face of a monstrous wave. “After that, I realized that there was a limitation, that planing hulls had too much drag and that you wouldn’t be able to technically deal with a real 100-foot wave. Once I experienced not being able to descend, that just totally made me like, ‘Okay, time to look for another way.’”
Much like how he doesn’t see a distinction between the words “surfing” and “foiling,” he sees foiling as just another point in the continuum of surfing’s progress. “The biggest breakthrough in surfing after boards is fins. Now we’re riding our fins,” he says. “I mean, that’s just part of the evolution of surfing. That’s where we’ve evolved to. This is where we’re going. You can tap into the energy of a wave in a way you didn’t even know existed. It’s the most efficient wave riding instrument that I’ve ever ridden, and I’ve ridden a lot of different things for wave riding.”
However, as much as he loves the sense of speed and technical advancement of foils, Laird is just as enticed by the sense of discovery they provide. “You can ride waves bigger, further, faster. It just takes the world and all of a sudden creates a new frontier. It’s like the discovery of a new continent,” he says. “Now we’re looking at places that potentially could be good for doing things that we could only imagine. In a crowded surfing world where maybe you find days and hours at a spot. Now we can just go to a place where no one is and do stuff that no one’s done. Like, I’m in.” He laughs gleefully at the thought. “It has everything to do with what tow in did in the beginning. You know, like why we started. I mean, I seem like I’m always led in the direction of what’s bringing us kind of into the wilderness, taking us into the wilderness and being more like frontiersmen instead of settlers.”
The biggest irony is that, at the same time as foils have opened up that frontier to riding giant waves, they’ve also allowed surfers to tackle the tiniest breaks. “We’ve actually worked our way backwards,” says Laird. “Instantly, when we first started, we were using them in giant surf, and then we went back the other way. But everybody else is coming in from the little waves up. It’s just kind of ironic that the thing that is the one for use for big happens to be the one for small.”
However, despite the immense possibilities created by foil boards, many core surfers still turn up their noses at them. Even outside of horror stories of foil riders weaving through crowded lineups riding essentially a giant hatchet, there’s just this visceral negative response traditionalists have to foils. For many, it just doesn’t look like surfing. Of course, Laird is no stranger to the surfing world’s resistance to change, as he’s been at the forefront of some of the biggest quantum leaps in the sport. In the case of the foil haters, he shrugs it off. “I always say ‘Give it a true chance.’ Really put the time in on them,” he says. “Anybody who’s talented, that’s a good surfer. I mean once you feel it… I don’t know. I don’t see any of those guys saying anything.”
He ascribes resistance to foils to the discomfort of being forced to go back to the drawing board. It makes sense, if you’ve dedicated a good chunk of your life to becoming even just competent at surfing, going to a foil and feeling like a beginner again can be off putting. “They don’t want to be a kook. If you’re good at surfing, last thing you want to do is try to ride something you can’t ride,” says Laird.
To him, though, that is part of the appeal. “Half the fun is when you’re not good at it,” he says. “Because then you’re laughing at each other and falling down and, you know, having fun. Let’s not forget, ultimately we’re here to have fun. I mean, some of us need a little more extreme things than others, but this is supposed to be fun. If you can’t do that, if you’re taking yourself that serious, then you’re doing a bad job of living.” He briefly turns philosophical. “We’re on earth here to enjoy ourselves. That’s one of our obligations, I believe, and surfing happens to be one of the greatest things you can do to have fun while you’re here.”
In the end, it comes back to that sense of discovery, the desire to be an explorer. Laird says that a large part of what makes surfing worthy of our of our time is that it gives us the opportunity to be a student. To him, winding back the clock and becoming a beginner again is just another way to find himself at a new frontier. “The foundation of discovery is being a beginner,” he explains. “Also having curiosity. You’re like, what can we do? What can we ride? I mean, foiling has me so curious that it’s got me looking all over the world for all kinds of crazy stuff because of the potential of what’s rideable. ‘Can we ride this? What is it going to take to ride that? How are we going to be able to ride that?’ Those are some beautiful questions. Those are questions to keep you up at night and wake you up early and just keep you connected.”
