Keeping track – Tracking your Wing Foiler sessions
(Updated November 2025: Hoolan’s feature to exclude pre and post session data is really useful in winter.)
Maybe my working life as a consultant has made me a data freak or perhaps I am one naturally, but I do like to keep track of my wing foiling sessions. I can use the data to look at trends, prove to myself that I am getting better and reflect on where I need to practice more. As the saying goes “what gets measured gets improved”.
In this article I will outline the benefits of tracking sessions and look at the two apps I have used, sharing my experiences with each:
- Hoolan App on an Apple Watch
- The RIP Curl Search Watch and App
In a nutshell – benefits tracking your session
Why bother tracking sessions at all, after all, you will know you are getting better regardless of whether you track or not.
Personally, I think that there are a few benefits:
- Seeing empirical evidence of improvement helps motivation. Looking back at key metrics from a few months ago can help after one of those days when “it just doesn’t click”. During my earlier foiling journey I was most interested in average distance travelled per hour for a session, as this is a good indication of time on foil. Sometimes I would come home discouraged only to realise my bad day was still better than a good day a few months previously.
- Tracking how different equipment works in different conditions, for example what specific wind ranges have been most successful with which wing and foil combination
- The fun/competition of sharing statistics like top speeds with friends.
- Having more data to think about improvement. As an example my regular stance gybe is much stronger than my goofy stance gybe. Feedback around speed and path of entry is helping me improve that.
- Provides an automated diary of your sessions on the water.
The Hoolan App
For the last few months I have been using the Hoolan App on an Apple Watch for tracking and I am extremely impressed.
The App itself is free at time of writing but you will need an Apple Watch or Garmin to run it.
Hoolan – In a nutshell
I’m using Hoolan on my Apple Watch so features may be slightly different on Garmin but in summary:
Pros
- Easy to start and stop the tracking directly on the watch. In winter with gloves this is harder, I activate tracking on shore before putting the gloves on. The app automatically excludes data before I start riding (see point 5 below).
- Activating the tracking automatically activates waterproof mode on the watch (and disables crash detection if you have that enabled).
- Integrates with Apple Watch health data so if you track exercise it automatically gets included.
- Allows you to record what Wing and Board you are using.
- Excludes pre-ride (launching) and post-ride (exiting) data from session statistics, which is useful if you forget to stop tracking. This is really useful in winter explained in point 1.
- You can further edit a session if you find it has recorded something after you had finished riding you can trim off the excess time later.
- Doesn’t excessively use battery time, I have recorded multiple sessions over several hours.
- Automatically picks up location information and wind conditions as part of the log.
- Appears to be very accurate in terms of speed and distance (unlike many other GPS devices).
- Has extremely detailed analytics (see next section for more detail), which you can walk through in multiple ways.
- It can measure jump height if you turn the feature on (it uses more battery). This doesn’t matter to me right now, but you never know!
- The support seems great, when my Lake Garda location logged as unknown they corrected this in days.
Cons
- You need a smartwatch to run it so there is some additional cost if you don’t already have one.
- There is no simple way to pause recording if you briefly want to catch your breath (maybe just a foiler over fifty thing!).
Hoolan features – Overview Screen
The analytics within the App are extremely impressive.
The Overview Screen shows:
- Date time and location data
- What wing and board you used (you tell it this when you start the session)
- Wind strength and direction and waves
- Duration and total distance covered
- Maximum speed
- % Transition success. The App counts a transition as succesful so long as you dont fall in, so if you come off the foil in the gybe or tack but stay on the board and get going again that is a success. You can dig more deeply into this though as I explain below.
- The GPS track shows your path colour coded to speed
- You can click through the session using the GPS track or dive into more detailed analysis as explained below
Hoolan- Transition Analysis
All foilers who have mastered the basics are working on their turns and this analysis is where Hoolan is truly outstanding. The summary table tells you:- How many transitions in all, how many successes (defined as not falling in) and the % of successes.
- Max average speed through the turn.
- Max speed at any point in the turn and the length of time it took to complete.
- Forward foot (L/R) assuming heel side stance.
- Maximum and average speed in this turn.
- Duration and distance covered in this turn.
Hoolan Run Analysis
The run analysis provides great data for speed freaks and those that want to understand upwind efficiency. The summary table tells you:- Max speed overall and sustained for 100 and 500 m.
- Longest run.
- Maximum upwind and downwind gains.
Rip Curl Search – In a nutshell
Prior to Hoolan, I used the Rip Curl Search watch for over two years and in summary:
Pros
- Robust lightweight watch and tracker.
- Battery life lasts for several multi-session days.
- Materially cheaper than an Apple or Garmin watch.
- Simple to start,stop and pause recording of a session.
- Records basic information about session.
Cons
- I think this is a device for surfers to record waves caught, it is not really intended for wingfoilers (or kiters or windsurfers for that matter). The default tracking option is “Go-Surf” which tracks paddling versus waves caught. This clearly doesn’t work for wing foiling so I used to use the “Go-Track” function.
- The information recorded in “Go-Track” is very basic, distance travelled, duration and top speed.
- There are some clear anomalies in the tracking results where distance travelled in an hour often exceeded maximum speed recorded by some margin.
- The application on the iphone became very buggy around a year ago and now only shows me my first two ever sessions, which I recorded with “Go-Surf”.
- Support is poor and unresponsive I have raised these issues just to be fobbed off with the app equivalent of “try turning it off and on again”.
- It doesn’t allow you to record what specific equipment you used.
- It allows you to set a home spot from a list, surprise surprise Grafham Water, which is not a top spot for big wave surfers is not included. So conditions in the session are not recorded.
- GPS track
- Top Speed, duration and distance travelled.
In Conclusion
Tracking your wing foiling sessions, is in my view fun and useful. There are a number of applications on the market for the reasons stated I highly recommend Hoolan.
After publishing this article I was contacted by Waterspeed and offered a free trial of their App. I have been using that during winter and will provide a comparison once I have a few more sessions logged.
Whether you re recording or not though, time on the water is precious. Let’s Go-Wingfoil.