UNBOUNDED

Harking back to the simpler days of surf travel, Zane Westwood and videographer Dane Wilson headed to Chile, stripping back their normal day-to-day requirements, and just focusing on whatever was needed for the plentiful and quality waves to be found in this foiling nirvana…

Words: Zane Westwood
Screenshots: Dane Wilson

“Unbounded” has been an idea of mine for over a year now. I wanted to capture the possibilities and adventures that hydrofoiling has given us. I floated the idea to Lift Foils, and Matt Elsasser from Lift was more than keen to get the ball rolling.

About a year ago, I was watching a famous free surf-er and loved how he portrayed his view on traveling with a surfboard to off-the-beaten-track surf loca-tions. This idea of exploring the unknown sparked my interest in seeing what was possible for riding a foil. Foiling has been growing so fast, and we are only scratching the surface of what is possible. You’ll find the biggest benefit by bringing it on a surf trip. This trip, however, pushed me to trade off the surfboard for foiling many times. But that switch of boards al-lows my brain to recalibrate and reevaluate how I am approaching the wave. Sometimes, time away lets me reset, and I come back with a new, more creative approach.

I live in a rural area about a 15-minute drive from the ocean, Billinudgel, located on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, Australia. We get warm and comfortable conditions here, mostly foiling in board shorts year-round. It’s also known for one of the best waves to foil in the world, Wategos. This has been my backyard foil spot for 18 months now.

On the contrasting side of these warm and pleas-urable ocean temperatures, there is South Ameri-ca's particularly cold Chile, where the water is 8-12 degrees, and you are wearing 5/6mm wetsuits with all extremities donned in rubber. This was a totally different realm for me, foiling in such thick wetsuits and booties. It was very humbling, to say the least… It took me a few sessions to properly feel out my boards and foils again, but this was well worth the trade-off for the abundance of long sand bottom left-handers with no shortage of southwest swells getting pumped out of the South Pacific Ocean. The only limitation, aside from the cold, was my imagi-nation.

About seven years ago, my best mate and I bought a little inconspicuous van in Chile with the intention of only staying in Chile for a month and then slow-ly heading north to the warmer waters and warmer countries of South America. But I came across not only the nicest, most open, and most generous peo-ple but also some of the best surf in the world. Nat-urally we only wanted to stay and explore the place with just a surfboard, a “2-dimensional” watercraft. We spent six months in Chile surfing endless point breaks, to ourselves more often than not.

Seven years later, I've equipped myself with a quiver of foils, foil boards, surfboards, a pair of body surf-ing flippers… and a McDonald's serving tray. This trip was going to be very different from my previous one. Dane Wilson and I gave ourselves two weeks to cap-ture our trip in an obnoxious motor home with a silly big decal of an American flag plastered on the side. We definitely stuck out like sore (and rude) thumbs and, on top of that, rode a “3 dimensional” watercraft that caught a lot of the locals’ attention when in the water.

Surfing is a relatively new sport in Chile, and most surfers have only recently heard about a hydrofoil and have rarely seen one in the flesh. It was pretty special to be the first person to show what a foil is to some of these curious surfers. We all know that, as foilers, we get a lot of questions from curious on-lookers. I had to try to answer them to the best of my ability in broken Spanish, which probably made no sense at all. Still, they were stoked to share their waves.

As surfer and photographer, Dane and I created an alliance, alone in our respective crafts, committed to just a single endeavour: finding a rhythm of living simply, off the beaten path, taking what the ocean was willing to give, in whatever form it wished. We made a point of disconnecting from technology and our day-to-day routine for our immersive stint on Chile's barren coastline and ocean. The crafts of choice were the only variations. All there to help forge a bond and inspire a dance between “surfer” and the sea.

No matter the craft, the feeling of accelerating down the face, propelled by an energy buried in the water, is what every wave rider seeks. That acceleration. For me, foiling is now just a tool to harness that energy; its efficiency draws me to its craft. But the lines I am drawing are becoming closer and closer to surfing. As foils advance, they give me the ability to draw the lines I envision. Sometimes, the best feeling is envisioning those lines and then placing them onto a wave. Even bodysurfing, the feeling of the wave picking you up and pushing you forward through the barrel, is what we strive for on a surfboard. Riding a wave is riding a wave, and for me, the craft is the only thing that changes.

The stories Dane and I created from this trip together chasing waves, we have been telling since the trip finished. With just the two of us crammed in the RV, we were free to go wherever and whenever we want-ed. Trips like this make it impossible not to remain close friends after finishing up. It was an escape and a reset from the outside world. Time seemed to stop, and still, somehow, we had to force ourselves to slow down and enjoy the moment.

The film documents our travels up and down the coast of Chile, finding routine in eating, sleeping, traversing the landscape, and engaging in the surf, as the rhythm of our undistracted new lifestyle proved the perfect means to fully become absorbed in the experience, stepping wholeheartedly into the ocean. Unbounded.