bigtone667 said..
But really crap when you drift down the line on a wave or drop them in the surf. And pretty crap in wind that varies a lot between 5 and 10 knots and you keep losing line tension.
You are displaying your ignorance and prejudice. The whole of a foil kite is full of air. When the white water hits it the kite rides up and over the wave. It would take a direct hit of a pitching wave to flatten a foil.
The canopy of an inflatable kite can be either flattened by a wave, or catch the white water, and amplify the force.
In gusty conditions the float of a foil makes it more likely to recover from a hindenberg situation.
What is crap about foils is that you have to grovel around in the sand to set them up and pack them up. Nothing is worse than packing a wet sandy foil. It's much easier to carry an inflatable kite to the grass to pack up. I used to ground handle my foils by the bridles to the grass. It was doable but it's more of a trick than a sensible way of managing a kite. You can carry a semi-deflated kite in a bunch but then you have to deal with bridles hanging loose and getting the kite wet from contact with your wettie.
Foil kites tend to go porous after about 150-180 hours of use. They look like they fly fine, but they tend to stall and do unpleasant stuff at inconvenient times.
Any canopy tear on any kind of kite is easy to repair. It can be very difficult to sew around the leading edge of a foil (it can be impossible to repair a damaged leading edge on an inflatable). It might be easier with the new foils with the whipper snipper wire in the leading edge.
I have never had a puncture on my inflatable kites and I am only now doing my first repairs after over 200 hours on each kite. I used to repair my foils all the time.
they do ok with a surfboard in some conditions but not others.
