The WAKA Story, Told in Print: Foiling Magazine Issue #28 "Backstory" Feature

Foiling Magazine sat down with our founder for a full Backstory feature in Issue #28 — from foam dust in the living room to the world's first performance folding wing foil board.

We're stoked to share that WAKA is featured in Issue #28 of Foiling Magazine, out now. The Backstory interview with founder Nigel Thompson tells the full WAKA origin story — and if you've ever wrestled a seven-foot board bag through an airport, it will sound familiar.

The beginning — early CAD prototypes with the CNC machine running at home, 2023.

How It Started

Like a lot of good ideas, WAKA began with frustration. The best parts of foiling — the trips, the new spots, the crews you meet along the way — kept colliding with the worst part: hauling oversized boards through airports, paying baggage fees, and renting SUVs nobody wanted. After one too many check-in desk hassles, the question became: there has to be a better way.

The first folding wing foil board tested at The Hatch, Hood River, Oregon. Summer 2024.

The Folding Breakthrough

The interview digs into the six months of failed sectional prototypes — two-piece boards with carbon rods, three-piece designs, and "a few other wild ideas I'd rather forget" — before the breakthrough question: what if the hinge wasn't mechanical at all? The answer came from aerospace, where composite living hinges have been used in drone control surfaces for years. No mechanical parts, nothing to wear out — and industrial testing has since run over 1M folds without performance compromise.

The birth of the WAKA Glide — board #1 out of the precision-fit vacuum mold in Thailand, Spring 2025.

From Skeptics to Believers

There's also the story of getting early boards in front of Jeff and Tucker at MACkite for a private review. Jeff's first reaction — "another gimmicky idea, probably heavy, probably a huge compromise" — turned into "this board is lighter than most boards in the market, even carbon boards" after a few sessions. By September 2025, the WAKA Glide debuted at AWSI in Hood River as the world's first performance folding wing foil board.

Tucker putting the Glide through its paces with the Parawing.

What It Unlocks

The best part of the feature is what riders are doing with it now: boards folded into compact rental cars in La Ventana, Hydro Gav's "Uber Downwind," and gear bags that fly at 50 lbs. As Nigel puts it in the article: "the magic of the WAKA Glide is you don't even know it can fold in half — it just looks like a sweet all-carbon board, with no compromise on performance."

Field test — multiple flights, a compact rental car, straight onto the water in La Ventana, Mexico.

Hood River, September 2025 — unveiling the WAKA Glide at the AWSI show.

Read the Full Story

The full Backstory feature is in Foiling Magazine Issue #28, available now:

Read Issue #28 at Foiling Magazine →

The WAKA Glide is available in five sizes (66L–111L) at waka.surf, shipping today from warehouses in the US, New Zealand and Australia — with Canada and Europe coming this summer.