West Coast Hustle

Having garnered a modest reputation in the foil world by way of their honest and occasionally sweary Generic Foiling Podcast, hosts Freddie Oldfield and Liam Proctor felt it was about time they took the show on the road to the USA, bagging themselves a pass to the AWSI industry event in Hood River, hiring slightly unconventional digs for the stay, and convincing plenty of industry figures to get in front of the microphone. It also gave them both a chance to hone their downwinder skills too… some taking to it more successfully than others.

Words: Freddie Oldfield
Photos: Freddie & Liam (unless stated)
Photo here: Shannon Stent

It’s currently 9pm west coast US time and we are flying home to the UK from possibly the best trip of our lives. Inspiration has struck and my brain just wants to get everything down on paper while it’s fresh in my mind. The cabin crew have completely dimmed the lights, I’ve made extreme use of British Airway’s complimentary wine service, and it seems like everyone around me is asleep. Liam keeps trying to get some shut eye, has failed, and resorted to hitting the attendant button so he can return to his Scorsese film with a fresh G&T. Jetlag is going to be a real issue and we’re both straight back to our nine-to-fives within 18 hours of getting home.

First things first, Liam and I host our very own foiling podcast. It ain’t big budget, and it definitely is not ‘professional’ in the traditional sense of the word, but we bloody love it and a surprising amount of you lot seem to, too! In just two years we’ve amassed a whole community of foil frothing listeners that we value greatly. They rely on us for weekly(ish) episodes, and we rely on them to join in with our gentle industry pokery and piss-taking. At the end of last summer, we’d been interviewing industry insiders and big wigs for a little over 12 months and we were gaining traction. Our egos and ambitions were starting to swell, and as the 2023 American Wind Sports Industry event came to a close, I said to Liam: “We have to get there next year.”

There seemed to be a lack of media coming from the event that we actually wanted to absorb. Great for product info, but it was all so bloody serious and impersonal: “Tell us about your new foils”, “What else is new for this year?”, “Wow, is that carbon?”. Frankly, who gives a shit… that will all be on the brand website in a month or two anyway! As far as I was concerned, we’d established ourselves sufficiently to suggest that we should be there putting out our own special kind of media ‘content’.

I wanted to hear the stories behind the product development, the key decisions along the way and the brands themselves, i.e. hear from the people behind the scenes, and not from the marketing department. Marketing has its place, and done well, is an artform, but from the stories we’d heard, the AWSI was about so much more! These companies we all follow that develop the tools that fuel our addictions are run by extremely cool folk and this event puts almost all of them in one spot with world class conditions for all foiling disciplines. I thought to myself, perhaps if we could get ourselves there, with a bit of luck, we could sit these people down and create a sufficient rapport to get them saying things they probably shouldn’t say, rip into them about the things we didn’t quite see eye to eye with, and entertain ourselves, and our listeners at the same time. To be clear, by luck, I mean a large cooler stocked with ice cold beer.

Now, having no sponsors or financial backing is great for allowing piss taking and retaining impartiality, which I deem to be a big reason for our positive reception from the audience, but it isn’t good for funding a trip across the pond. It isn’t like discussions about and offers of sponsorship hadn’t come our way in response to our quick growth, but some of them happened to be more serious around the same time I decided I wanted to go to America…

To cut a longer and more complicated story short, thankfully neither of us had to start an OnlyFans page to make it to the US, and, joking aside, and if you’ll indulge my opportunity to record it in print, we actually have our listeners to thank for joining our membership or sending donations to our ‘Buy Me a Coffee’ account which funded this trip. A genuine heartfelt thank you from us. Hopefully we did a good enough job that you’ll consider doing it all again next year!

So, the number one goal of this trip was to come away with some banging interviews to drip feed on the podcast platforms during and after the event and we were fairly confident we could get this sorted. We owed it to the supporters of the podcast. After all, they were the reason we were able to make it there. However, it seemed silly and wasteful to fly 10 hours for a three-day event, and then fly 10 hours back. So the plan evolved considerably. We ended up spending 10 days in Hood River to make the most of the conditions, the event and the fact most brands and their riders may linger around a day or two before and after the event (when they’d be less suspecting of us pouncing in front of them with a mic). So far from home, and with the very real possibility that we might cock it all up and the podcast might sink, we decided to make the most of the opportunity and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway 101, as far as San Diego.

Liam saved up his yearly holiday allowance at his engineering job and I worked every demo event I could through the spring and summer to allow me to take days in lieu of leave. 3.5 weeks in total, a considerable amount of time and, typically, a considerable amount of money which we didn’t have. How would we get around and where would we stay? Enter the U-Haul. America is an expensive place so $20 a day for a U-Haul seemed like a great idea and one we knew people would find comical. The amount of times we’d hear “what, you’re spending three weeks sleeping in that thing!?”. Granted, there was a general stank to the truck by the time we dropped it back off in LA, but an unforgettable love/hate relationship was made with the thing.

After landing in Portland and spending an horrendous evening experiencing the delights of a Motel 6, we collected our accommodation-on-wheels and headed straight to Walmart to kit it out with our camping wares. At $20 a day we’d hired the smallest box truck U-Haul offer, so space was always going to be precious – so we had to get creative. A rope mezzanine was constructed to house the wing and kite gear we’d brought with us and two double bed airbeds would squeeze in perfectly on the floor space to make for a very comfortable experience given the circumstances. A double camping stove, plenty of gas, cutlery, plates and bowls, cast iron skillet, cooler box and multiple camping chairs meant we could cater for up to eight people, if needed. Our dream was to be sat at the famous Hatchery on the Washington side of the Gorge, post session and offer all the big names in the industry a beer and a chitchat should they be passing by and had some time. Well guess what, it bloody well worked, and it didn’t even take that long. We’d barely been at the hatchery 20 minutes before Appletree’s founder Wieger plonked himself down with a microphone in one hand and a beer in the other in the sunshine – the big fella had his priorities straight.

A secondary main aim of our trip was to get this bloody downwind SUP foil discipline cracked. We’d been flirting around the outskirts of it at home and hadn’t gone fully “balls deep” yet. Now was the time we could hopefully get into some solid conditions with the right kit.

The first pre-event days were spent in the Hatchery car park in 35+ knots with a tonne of swell. Maybe not the easiest conditions to have your first few runs on downwind kit, but we persisted. A few more flat-water sessions at home prior to flying over and a slightly more “elevated” skillset shall we say shone through for Liam, and by the second day he was performing runs from ‘Tunnel 4’, three miles upriver from the Hatchery, without touching down. I used my honed commentary skills to video some of his first runs for our Instagram account – you can check it out at @genericfoilpod.

Let’s just say my first few runs weren’t quite so successful. No bother, my personality meant that everyone in the local vicinity and anyone watching any footage online would find it all highly amusing to watch an impatient English bloke lose his shit very loudly at himself. We’ve lent into these characters over the last few months and massively while we’ve been in the states. Liam’s the techy one with an engineer’s mind who can go down the most boring rabbit holes (in my opinion). Some listeners love that (and that’s awesome!) but I can only handle so much tech before I have to bring it back to the real world. Some people like that, some people don’t. It keeps things interesting and hopefully means we can have some incredibly diverse conversations. Either way, Liam is rational in his learning process and doesn’t get too emotional. I am the opposite, and the internal pressure I put on myself to be good at something usually comes out very vocally when I’m frustrated.

Anyway, back to the trip. Where was I?

The AWSI industry event itself brought three days of no wind at the Hood River event site. The incredible local weather systems meant 10/20 miles down the road there was wind to be found for the eager beaver shop-owners who were there to test kit for their next season’s sales, but that wasn’t why we were there. We were there to knuckle down and record some chats and give the brands a respite from having to talk about the same shit over and over again. Armed with an updated recording system and some handheld mic holders Liam had 3D printed the day before we flew out, we went off in search of some interesting folk from a list we’d hastily written up. Well, we succeeded and ended up having three massively busy days. We were blown away by the responses and far more than we had expected had heard of our little media outlet – and the ego started to grow. Thankfully we were brought crashing back to earth very quickly by the friends we made along the way – I’m talking about you, Dylan @kitepuertorico.

We did ourselves proud and have come home with an army of recordings ready to drip feed over the coming weeks and months: Wieger and Jorrit from Appletree, Richard and Benoit from AFS, Roy and Karen of Kaohi leash fame – these are just some of the names we have in our audio bank – the list goes on and on.

It felt like multiple trips in one – AWSI hustling, post-event Hood River mooching, Adgate hospitality and Californian surf foil shenanigans. It’s been an amazing experience and Liam and I couldn’t be more grateful. We also really think there’s a niche to be exploited here in this industry we all love – we want to shove ourselves as far up into that niche as we can and bring you all the pivotal info you’re all craving! We may well be heading back to the UK just in time for winter, but we ready our 6mm hooded wetsuits with a renewed and refreshed vigour for our industry and these sports. Bring on the next stage of the SUP foil downwind journey!