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

It started with foam dust in the living room. It ends — for now — on the printed pages of Foiling Magazine. Issue #28 sits our founder down for a full Backstory feature, and tells the whole tale: how a frustration at an airport check-in desk became the world's first performance folding wing foil board.

We're genuinely chuffed to share that WAKA is featured in Issue #28 of Foiling Magazine, out now. The interview with founder Nigel Thompson runs the full arc — and if you've ever wrestled a seven-foot board bag through a terminal, the opening will sound very familiar.

How it started

Like most good ideas, WAKA began with frustration. The best parts of foiling — the trips, the new spots, the crews you fall in with along the way — kept running headlong into the worst part: hauling oversized boards through airports, the baggage fees, the rental SUV nobody actually wanted. After one check-in hassle too many, the question sharpened into something simpler: there has to be a better way.

The folding breakthrough

The feature digs into the six months of dead ends — two-piece boards with carbon rods through the joint, three-piece designs, and, in Nigel's words, "a few other wild ideas I'd rather forget." Each one failed the same way. Then came the question that changed everything: what if the hinge wasn't mechanical at all? The answer was hiding in aerospace, where composite living hinges have flexed inside drone control surfaces for years. No moving parts, nothing to wear out — and industrial testing has since cycled it over a million folds with no loss in performance.

From skeptics to believers

There's a great chapter on getting early boards in front of Jeff and Tucker at MACkite for an honest, private read. Jeff's first reaction is every sensible person's first reaction — "another gimmicky idea, probably heavy, probably a huge compromise." A few sessions later it had flipped to "this board is lighter than most boards in the market, even carbon boards." By September 2025, the Glide debuted at AWSI in Hood River as the world's first performance folding wing foil board.

What it unlocks

The best part of the whole feature is what riders are actually doing with it now: boards folded into compact rental cars in La Ventana, Hydro Gav's giddy "Uber downwind," gear bags that fly at 50 lbs without a second look. As Nigel puts it in the article —

The magic of the 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.

Nigel Thompson · Founder

Read the full story

The complete Backstory feature is in Foiling Magazine Issue #28, out now. If you want the whole arc — the foam dust, the failures, the breakthrough — this is where to find it.

Read Issue #28 at Foiling Magazine →

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