There's a feeling every snowboarder knows. You've hiked twenty minutes from the lift, dropped into a run nobody else has touched, and for about eight seconds you're completely weightless. The mountain disappears. It's just you and the hill and something that feels embarrassingly close to flying.
Then it's over. You're at the bottom. You ride the lift back up and do it again.
What if you didn't have to stop?
The Florence Brothers Figured It Out First
John John and Nathan Florence are two of the most talented surfers on the planet, but they're also just two brothers from the North Shore who love going fast and finding flow. And somewhere along the way, they quietly stopped prioritising snowboard trips.
Not because they fell out of love with snow. But because they found something closer to home that scratches exactly the same itch, and then some. Downwinding. Running with the ocean's energy, pumping a foil through linked swells, covering miles of open water at speed with nothing but wind, water, and whatever you've got in the tank.
The Sickos crew have been all over it too. Their latest video from Hood River is basically a love letter to the downwind: frothing, grinning, "endless waves" energy all the way through. If you haven't watched it, go and do that now. Then come back here.
So What Actually Is a Downwind Run?
A downwind run is exactly what it sounds like. You start upwind, pick a line, and ride the energy of the ocean: small bumps, chop, and swell, all the way to your finish point. On a foil, you're using the lift of the foil wing to link those bumps together, pumping between them to keep flying. When it clicks, you stop touching the water entirely and just go.
It's addictive in the same way a powder run is addictive. That same sense of momentum, that same edge-to-edge rhythm, that same feeling of reading the terrain ahead and committing to a line.
Except the terrain is alive. It's moving with you. And it doesn't end at the bottom of a piste.
The Overlap Is Real
If you've spent any time on a snowboard, especially in the trees or in proper off-piste terrain, you already have the movement pattern wired into your body. The way you weight and unweight. The way you read what's coming and adjust before you're on top of it. The way flow state feels when everything lines up.
Downwinding taps directly into that. The timing is different. The medium is different. But the feeling? Uncomfortably familiar.
A lot of people who've made the crossover describe it the same way: it's what I was actually looking for all along.
No Queues. No Lift Pass. No Ice.
And here's the thing snowboarding can never quite shake. It comes with baggage. Airport queues. Piste bashers. The Sunday afternoon M4 back from Bristol after a day at the dry slope. Lift passes that cost more than a small car. The ice patch that sent you sideways at speed in 2018 that you still think about.
Downwinding has none of that. You park up. You launch. You go.
North Devon is one of the best setups in the UK for it. Consistent Atlantic wind, proper ocean swell energy, open water runs that would genuinely make your snowboarding mates' jaws drop if you showed them the track on a map. There's nobody out there. Just you, the bump, and the next one after it.
Getting Into It
The entry point for downwinding is getting comfortable on a foil first, and that's where we come in.
Our five-lesson progression programme at Slack Tide takes you from first flight to genuine ocean confidence. By the time you're through it, the downwind runs that the Florence brothers and the Sickos crew are posting aren't some mythical elite-level thing. They're the next step.
The mountain isn't going anywhere. But the swell forecast's looking good this week, and the wind's in the right direction.
Book your first lesson at slacktidefoilclub.com or drop us a line at crew@slacktidefoilclub.com. We're based at Crow Point, Woolacombe, North Devon.