A few weeks ago, we met up with Kai Lenny at Sunset Beach. He parked, smiled that gigantic Kai smile of his, then told us he’d been surfing for six hours already that day. As he told us that, he was pulling the strangest board out of the back of his truck. You’ve seen them, of course: called a hydrofoil, it’s a surfboard with a giant wing hanging off the bottom. The wing uses the wave’s energy to propel the surfer forward and up, getting rid of most of that pesky thing called friction and effectively letting a surfer ride rolling, unbreaking waves for unbelievably long distances. As we sat in the sand watching Kai bounce his way into waves, two things were very apparent. One, hydrofoiling is really hard. Two, Kai looks at surfing (and the ocean in general) through a different lens than anyone else.
“It looks so fun!” Kai exclaimed while looking out at very-not-fun-looking Sunset Beach. Windy and choppy, there wasn’t one other person out there. A spattering of surfers sat out near Backyards, where things were a little more lined up, but Sunset was pretty much an un-surfable mess. Kai didn’t care in the slightest. “You look at things a little differently when you’re riding a foil. See that?” he continued, pointing at what looked like a rolling mess of whitewater. “That’s perfect!”
MySurf.tv put this little edit together, and not only does it have Kai on a hydrofoil, pumping his way between waves, it’s got a little bit of supsquatching thrown in for good measure.
