The Interview - Oskar Johansson
Issue 11 / Fri 18th Feb, 2022
Jack Galloway gets in touch with Oskar Johansson to find out all about his epic YouTube vids, unreal flight time & downwind SUP foiling.
Hi Oskar, great to have you join us here at Tonic Mag. After doing a bit of Instagram stalking it looks like you first went surf foiling in 2018? What inspired you to give it a go?
Hey guys! Oh you must have dug deep through the gram to find that one. Yeah it was a while back now, but a good friend Jase Finlay got a GoFoil setup well before I even knew what foiling was. After watching how much fun he was having I gave it a crack. I don’t think I got to my feet the whole first session, but second session I got a 15-metre glide and ordered my first setup that week.
Since then the equipment has improved dramatically, tell our readers about your progression. How long until you were linking waves & what led to you to complete the ridiculously impressive 30-minute run?
After getting my first setup, which was regrettably a Chinese replica of the Naish Thrust, I was solely motivated to link waves. I started with the 2 for 1 and kept trying to add one more. I could get to a 3 for 1 consistently but to be honest it just wasn’t doing much for me and I pretty much stopped foiling for over a year and a half. It wasn’t until May-June 2020 when I got to witness Jeremy Wilmotte foiling and he completely changed my perspective. He was riding it like a shortboard, ripping turns and pumping way out for multiple waves. That was when I got foil-brained! I started shaping my own foils that were based off the GoFoil GL series but thinner and higher aspect. I learnt to relax on the pump, stay up high, and move my feet around on the board to work different leg muscles and conserve energy. I could get 10-12 mins on foil but I was totally gassed. Then the Armstrong HA1125 came out and in just 2 sessions I could go for over 30 mins. Those high aspects changed everything for me.
Incredible stuff. I’ve recently seen that Perth Standlick (@Perth67) went past the hour mark, will you be heading out to beat his record soon?
Perth Standlick is a crazy good ex-pro surfer that is just as talented on a foil! I chatted to him after that 1 hr run and he was still doing turns for the first 40 mins and not until the end started focusing on conserving energy… Although I may have already beaten him haha. The second prone session I had on the HA1325 I went for 1hr 8 mins. I was genuinely running late for work so had to call it quits. I haven’t had a crack at it since, but I really don’t even know what the limit could be…
I feel like you need to go in the record books for that. Can you give our readers 3 points to improve their pumping? What’s the best wing you’ve used in terms of glide and efficiency?
The first thing that helped me was to try keep the foil as high as possible, the water density is less and the foil is so much more efficient up high. Try to stay up in the top third of the mast height. Second is to keep the board as flat as possible on the down pump, you want the nose to barely drop down. This ensures your energy pushing down is translating into projecting forward, and not wasted driving the foil down into the water. And third, make sure you are not just working one leg. I struggled with my back leg burning out, so I slide my front foot back when I am pumping to take more of the load, as well as sliding my back foot forward, basically narrowing my stance.
Oh the best wings I have ridden for glide and efficiency would be between the Armstrong HA1325 and the AXIS ART1099. Both were the first wings that I could kick off the back of a wave and glide without pumping to the wave behind. It still blows my mind!
We love your unique YouTube edits, techniques, or reviews whilst on foil surfing and pumping. It’s impressive to see and really engaging for the viewers, what gave you the idea?
I got the idea a little before the Armstrong HA1125 came out. One of my best mates was going through chemo while stuck in the US in the middle of COVID. He is a good surfer but never foiled so I wanted to show him what he was missing out on and give him something to look forward to. I took my GoPro out, caught a wave and naturally just started talking about everything I was feeling. He loved it and it got me thinking about doing a review in the same style. A months later the HA1125 came out and I had a crack at the review. Honestly the hardest part was uploading it to YouTube, I was so nervous!
I presume your go-to foil spots are along the East Coast of Australia. As long as they’re not secret… what are your favourite spots & what conditions are you looking for?
I split my time between Sydney and the south coast near Batemans Bay. Sydney has some awesome foil waves around Long Reef headland on the northern beaches. Any wind or wave direction and one side of the headland will be working. The south coast however is pretty challenging for foiling. I actually still surf more than I foil as we have a lot of really good waves to get barrelled. Once it gets below 2 ft then I start foiling. Tomakin river mouth, or Shark Alley about 5 mins further south are really good foil waves. Honestly, I spend most of my time foiling standard beach breaks, nothing special. Once I dialled in my pump all I needed was a chip shot and then I could pump out and ride the unbroken lumps further out. I just look for slow weak rolling waves for an easy entry.
I’ve recently seen a rather depressing article from Sydney suggesting that foiling might be banned at certain beaches. What do you think we can do, as foilers, to protect our sport & the fun that we’re all having at the beach?
It’s a tough one, there are people on both sides of the fence doing the wrong thing where the argument seems to be focusing on. Whenever I paddle out, or if surfers come out, I just talk to them and see how they feel about it. 99.9% of people watch you glide around and catch 20 waves and just want to know “how much?” and “where can I buy one?”. But there are people that are genuinely nervous about them and they can be hard to navigate. In general the rules I follow are don’t weave through multiple surfers. Paddle/pump down to a vacant bank if it’s possible. And never pump out and snake a set! I have always had the mindset that surfers can only ride in the pocket of a breaking wave, while we try and avoid that area so we naturally stay away from each other and look for different waves. It obviously gets complicated when you throw beginners in the mix in heavily populated beaches. If you ever see a beginner foiler in a situation that might be dangerous, just have a chat with them and try to help them understand. And give them some tips to help them out as well! Hopefully if we can keep having constructive conversations to understand the different concerns and then share that around we can avoid any mandated bans.
What are you working on at the moment in your surf foiling? Straps, turns, style, airs?
At the moment I am really focusing on taking more of a top to bottom surf approach. That was always my approach with low aspect wings, but now that wings have become higher aspect and much faster it is way more critical to approach a section straight on. I think the high aspect wings love to be powered up through wide turns on unbroken sections but taking them into the pocket is scary! Your timing has to be perfect and the load on your legs is intense, you really need to be strong enough to stop your legs collapsing. The other one is straps, I want to play more with doing tweaked straight airs. I have landed a few flips, but the tweaked grabs that Austin Tovey does look insane! The landings look so sketchy though.
I’ve seen you’ve been riding the HA725, we’re excited to get our hands on one.. What’s it like?
OH MAN that thing is my all-time favourite prone foil. It has an almost twitchy feel, it always wants to be on rail. It can take a bit of getting used to, but once you start feeling comfortable you can lean it over so hard, and then roll over to the next rail with no lag. The pump on it is surprisingly good, but you have to keep it at speed and any mistakes are pretty hard to recover from. Speed wise it can handle anything. I can tow it at 10ft, and then prone it at half a foot. It does have a high stall speed, but you get used to that and it teaches you to make less mistakes.
Tell our readers about your self-built SUPfoil downwind board. What dimensions did you go for and, crucially, does it work? Have you built surfboards in the past?
Yeah, since I was 16 I have always shaped my own surfboards so getting into foiling I naturally wanted to build my own boards. The trends in SUP downwind boards are moving to longer and narrower boards so I decided to push it and go 5’10 ½” x 22 ½“ x 5” at maybe 80 litres (I can’t measure volume hand shaping). The goal was to have something that is fast through the water to catch the tiny bumps out at sea (think like an ocean canoe), but not be too narrow that you can’t balance. It is certainly more advanced than I am, but it’s good to have something that you can grow into rather than hold you back. So far it has been the easiest board I have paddled up. There is also something so rewarding about riding something you made yourself.
Is downwind foiling something that is fairly new to you? How’s it going? Done any big downwind runs?
Downwinding is my absolute obsession at the moment! I have always dabbled with prone runs, but the risk was just too high doing anything longer than a few kilometres. Learning to SUP downwind has changed everything though, now I can go as far as I want. I actually just sent my dream run over the weekend that I have been eyeing off for over a year. It is a 30km run that finishes back at our house. I’m already planning some way longer runs but just trying to convince people to come with. Slide into my DM’s if you’re interested. Haha!
As a Brit, I just have to ask this question… Ever had any shark scares while you’re surfing?
You guys always have to ask! Well, that 30km downwind run I came across 8 sharks, but all mostly juvenile and half were hammer heads. I have had a few encounters with them surfing though, but mostly they are hunting fish and we happen to be in the middle of it. A few years back we had a great white darting at the mouth of a rip looking for fish in the turbulent water. I saw him surface on the next wave out and it came straight at me. Once it got close enough to see that I was far bigger than what it was hunting, it made a very aggressive U-turn underneath me. I had to lift my feet up so I didn’t hit him. He wasn’t at all interested in me, but I still needed to wash that wetsuit out afterwards! Took me a few weeks to get back in the water after that one.
Crazy stuff, thanks for taking the time Oskar!
Videos
By Jack Galloway
