The better I got at foiling, the more surfers wanted to fight me.

Watch a prone foiler fall from a hundred feet away. The board flips, the mast comes up, and for a moment there's a meter of hard carbon with a thin trailing edge rotating through the air. A surfer who's never foiled doesn't see a mast. They see a blade.

And here's the part foilers don't like to admit: they're not wrong about the hazard.

Foils cut people. The injuries are lacerations and punctures, not the bruises and fin cuts surfing has normalized over decades. So don't build your case on "foils are harmless." Anybody who's watched one cartwheel through the air knows better, and you'll lose them in the first sentence.

What they misjudge is the math. A foil that looks terrifying from forty feet away is forty feet away. The danger zone around a falling foiler is real, but it's small and it's predictable. And they're extrapolating from the one wipeout they happened to watch, not the ninety-five percent of the session that was completely uneventful.

Over those months my actual danger to anybody went down. Better board control, cleaner falls, positioning farther from everyone. Every measurable way I could hurt a person got smaller. And the hostility went up.

So it was never about safety. It was about being noticeable. Visible, plus unfamiliar, plus getting more waves than anyone else out there — that's the formula, and being completely clear of everybody doesn't protect you from it.

Some of it's just aesthetics. You're standing a couple feet above the water on a pole. There's no cool way to describe that and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What gets me is that this is entirely local. Go to Hawaii and the same act reads completely differently — foilers there are among the most respected people in the water. Not tolerated. Respected. The waterman tradition already values range, so foiling slots into a frame that was already built. Plenty of places on the mainland never built that frame.

Traditional surfing is organized around scarcity. A breaking wave gets consumed by one rider, and once somebody's on it, it's gone. Almost every rule of surf etiquette is a rationing mechanism for that single fact: priority to the guy nearest the peak, one person per wave, don't drop in, wait your turn.

Foiling doesn't sit in that economy. We ride energy a surfer can't use — unbroken swell, the back of the wave, the reform, the flat nothing between sets. Give me one crappy little reform nobody wanted and I'm set for two minutes. Sharing isn't a sacrifice we're nobly making. It costs us nothing.

Here's the part most foilers miss. In your head the story is I took a worthless piece of reform and made something out of it. True, and completely invisible to everyone else. What the surfer who's been sitting there forty minutes without a wave sees is that guy has been riding for two minutes and here he comes back through again.

You haven't taken a single thing from him. But visually you're consuming vastly more of the ocean than anybody else out there, over and over, in front of people who are rationing. In a scarcity culture, that looks exactly like cutting the line and getting away with it.

Think about traffic. Somebody cuts you off and you lay on the horn, because there's no face on a car. You're not angry at a person, you're angry at a shape. That's how road rage starts, and it's never how it goes if the two of you are standing on the sidewalk.

A foil in a lineup is a car with no face.

Paddle over calmly and introduce yourself.

Name, handshake if you can reach. A confrontation collapses shockingly fast when the other guy has to be mad at a specific human being instead of an abstraction with a carbon blade under it. Then do the thing nobody does in an argument — validate it. I get it, that thing looks scary, I'd be nervous too. Mean it, because it's true. Most people have never had somebody acknowledge their anger instead of matching it.

The words I actually use:

That last one's disproportionately effective. Four seconds of your life and it buys you the whole session. Then actually do it.

You'll also get "there are kids in here!" — the closing argument, deployed the moment the other stuff isn't working. Half the time those kids are sitting in a genuinely advanced spot that nobody had a word about, while in that same lineup surfers drop in on each other, collide, and ditch boards all session long, and somehow that's just surfing. It's a cop-out and everybody knows it's a cop-out. Don't say so. You don't win the kids argument in the water. Give them room.

Responding to somebody cussing you out with grace takes real strength. It takes enough maturity to look at a guy screaming at you and recognize that what you're watching is fear he doesn't have a better way to express. It's a little sad that this is the job — we don't just have to learn to ride, we get to be part-time de-escalation psychologists on top of it. But we're the new thing in the water, and the burden of proof is on us.

It works. I've turned people who were ready to fight me into people who wave at me in the parking lot. I've never once gotten that by arguing back.

Getting good at the foil is the part with a YouTube tutorial. This is the other half.