This looks fun. Very fun. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Adam Bennetts rides a foilboard very, very well. When you see someone like Bennetts doing what he does, it can be easy to think that it’s… well, easy. Foiling is not easy. Twiggy said foiling makes him feel like a kook. Hell, even Gabriel Medina, who’s been at it for a while now, looks strangely unsure of himself on one.
Bennetts, as you’d imagine, grew up surfing. For a while, he could call himself a professional in surfing’s vague sense of the word. When he saw foiling for the first time, he thought it looked a little bland. “I was living in Bali,” he told Foiling magazine. “Getting barreled, surfing pumping waves most days.”
Then, on a trip back home to his native Australia, he decided he’d give it a go, just for fun. That changed the trajectory of his wave riding career. Now, he’s all about foiling.
“I foil exclusively these days,” Bennetts told me in April. “In fact, I haven’t ridden a surfboard in nearly six years since I started foiling (except for two waves at Uluwatu last month). I am at the point now that I can pretty much surf a foil like a surfboard and so to me, it feels like surfing and it just feels so much better in every element. It’s like surfing on steroids.”
A refrain commonly heard around foiling is that foils are dangerous and shouldn’t be around other surfers on regular surfboards. Bennetts is aware of that — and in the case of the video you see here, other surfers weren’t an issue — and he adjusted accordingly.
“I generally try and find waves where there is no one out because it just gives you so much room to move and properly have a crack at surfing the waves like you would on a surfboard,” Bennetts said. “One day, I would love to have access to some iconic waves with no one out to try and see what’s possible on the foil — waves like Bells, J-Bay, and even Snapper.”
This single wave at Uluwatu, however, ridden from basically Outside Corner, likely quenched his thirst for more waves… at least for a few seconds. You can see more from him on his YouTube channel, Mister Bennetts.
