S - Ep 060 Ken Adgate King of the Tacks

Ken Adgate joins Liam and Freddie from Rio Vista, Northern California (the Sacramento Delta, “the Delta”) for his solo debut — a listener and supporter of the show before he came on, and the guest they say has been most anticipated by industry insiders. Two hours covering his path into the sport, his tacking technique, his roles with Ozone and Mikes Lab, his own board-building craft, and a closing “Room 101”/gear-preference segment.

In brief

Ken’s day job is running family car dealerships; foiling is his hobby, ridden most evenings at Sherman Island near home. He got into kiteboarding once his kids stopped wanting the family boat, was hooked instantly after watching Johnny Heineken and “Ruben” videos, and became Mikes Lab founder Mike (Zajcik)‘s regular on-water test partner — “Robin and Johnny’s Batman,” his term for being Johnny’s sidekick tester. He is an un/official test rider for Ozone too, feeding back on prototypes. Separately he’s a self-taught, hobbyist board builder (~120 boards built for friends), and the episode’s back half is a detailed, technical board-building conversation with Liam, who was mid-build on his own boards at the time.

Key topics & claims

• The tack (title topic, Ken): his signature move — thrown before committing to the tack, using shoulder rotation “like the snowboarding effect” so the lower body follows, with the wing thrown hard across the shoulder/over the head and used as a pivot point on the water; the cue to recover is when the wing touches the water. He traces the style to strapless pocket-board kite freeriding. Liam and Freddie say they’ve tried to replicate it on flat water without success.
• Background (Ken): family runs car dealerships, a coffee shop and a body shop; he was competitively into golf before this. Moved to Rio Vista by a river, always boated with family, got into kiteboarding only after his kids aged out of the family boat. Was never drawn to racing until Mike encouraged him to enter, which is how he met Johnny Heineken and “Chip” and the rest of that crowd.
• Mikes Lab relationship (Ken): he and Mike became test partners and best friends — Mike would bring prototype foils out to Sherman and they’d swap and test pitches, front wings, back wings and fuselages on the water. Ken and Liam/Freddie run a recurring “drug dealer” bit about Mikes Lab’s addictive quality and long waiting list (Ken says he’s “lucky enough to be in the inner circle now”).
• Ozone relationship (Ken): describes himself as one of Johnny’s testing sidekicks; Ozone sends prototypes for feedback as “part of the program.” He talks up incoming designer Simon (Ozone; no wiki page yet — see report), 21 years old at the time, credited with the double-skin/twin-skin concept and already Ken’s houseguest building a race board together; Rob and Dom preceded him. Ken calls Ozone “a big family” and praises the culture.
• Twin-skin verdict (Ken, answering a listener question): needs 5–10 sessions to click, but once understood it backwinds upwind faster than most riders can sail forward — a “clean profile” with no handles/inlets in the way delivers power so well that, past a threshold, backwinding “turns into a sail.” He and Johnny plan to ride an entire downwind race leg backwinded to avoid switching feet.
• Board-design philosophy (Ken): designs the board to the foil, not the other way round — each Mikes Lab foil has a known angle of attack, so the board’s stance/box position can be fixed with confidence, “plug and play.” He favours narrow boards (down to ~18.75–19in) to cut rail interference, rocker over the old flat/prone-derived tail (flat tails cause nose-down pitch instability and resist pumping), a half-inch concave deck for foot feedback, chines for rail deflection on turns, and — a recent experiment — a V-tail/V-nose combo that Mike and Johnny were initially skeptical of but now rate highly for touchdown deflection without straightening the rider out. He argues aggressive downwind-board chines “straighten you out” on touchdown, which is why he won’t ride a downwind board that’s too light/aggressive in swell.
• Tuttle/“total” box vs tracks (Ken): a total (Tuttle-style) connection removes the flat rear section tracks require, giving more shaping freedom (double concave, chines) and, he believes, more strength via an I-beam effect — but it sacrifices adjustability, so it demands committing to a fixed mast/foot position up front.
• Construction detail (Ken): builds his own PVC track boxes (80kg-density PVC, glued/epoxied, tied into the top sheet), runs Divinicell H80/H100 foam forward of the tracks (11–12 inches towards the nose) to spread foil load rather than relying on extra carbon layers, keeps the nose light (single carbon layer) to save weight, uses S-glass reinforcement sleeves on hard edges (nose/tail/chines), fairs pinholes with West System 410 filler rather than adding epoxy weight, and finishes boards to a ~7–8lb target for a 60L board. He’s also been ceramic-coating board bottoms to help high-speed touchdown recovery.
• Where boards are heading (Ken): predicts narrower, longer, lighter, more-rockered production boards with skinnier downwind-style tails for water release; sees foils as closer to a design plateau and expects the next material gains to matter most for intermediate-to-advanced riders; is skeptical mass-production lamination (Bondo, primer, extra paint to hide flaws) can chase the same weight savings amateur builders get.
• Sherman Island (Ken): describes it as an unforgiving spot — great white sharks near the river mouth, thick summer fog that can erase the wind on the ocean side of the Golden Gate, and real risk of getting swept out past the wind line, hence a strict buddy-system / parking-lot check culture.
• Gear takes (Ken, Room 101/preferences segment): dislikes the Nash Hover Glide’s square flat tail (acknowledges Rich Boughton likes it for subfoiling); if barred from Mikes Lab, Ozone and his own boards, he’d pick Levitas, F-One and Armstrong for foils (rating current foil mast stiffness/quality below Mikes Lab across the board) and would go custom or F-One for a production board, largely because friend Billy is an F-One distributor. Unconfirmed grapevine from the hosts (not Ken) suggests Kai Lenny (“Kiahi”/Kahi) is having input on F-One’s winging boards.
• New Ozone gear (Ken): the incoming Ozone “Flow” wing (Ozone’s fourth wing, teased at the time); praises the Ozone Fusion as “in a complete realm of its own”; likens Ozone’s Chrono kite story (an experimental release that became one of their best-sellers) as the model for how Ozone lets designers experiment.
• Rival wing (Ken): an unnamed new-brand “Aqueous”-style transparent wing (a “Frank”/“Stefano” prototype, described as similarly weighted to Ozone’s wings) rated as strong “above average” across the board — good low end, tacking, backwinding — though the bag is awkward (rolled, windsurf-sail style) and he hasn’t yet tested its upwind backwinding.

Gear / brands mentioned

Mikes Lab (foils, angle-of-attack philosophy, 700/800/825 wings for prone, 340/540 for towing), Ozone (Flow, Fusion, Chrono, double-skin/twin-skin wing, Rob, Simon, Dom), F-One (production boards, Charles Bertrand referenced earlier by the hosts, unconfirmed Kai Lenny/Kahi board input), Armstrong (masts, board bags), Levitas, NAISH (Hover Glide), West System 410 filler, Divinicell (H80/H100), S-glass, Boards general design (Tuttle/“total” vs tracks).

Notable quotes or takes

• Ken on Mikes Lab’s cult status: after riding one, “it’s so hard to ride anything else — it just ruins you for life,” with a ~160-person waiting list and roughly 18 months’ wait.
• On amateur vs production lamination: Ken argues production boards gain weight from filler/paint used to hide lamination flaws that a careful hobbyist wouldn’t need — Liam’s own “heavily textured” recent build prompts Ken’s tip to check surfaces by feel, eyes closed, not by sight.
• Ken’s line on treating light, expensive gear with care: “you just have to treat it like… you can’t get another one” — comparing a Mikes Lab foil to a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
• Hosts’ running bit: Mikes Lab as the “hard drugs” of the foiling-brand hierarchy, Ken cast (jokingly, by the hosts) as merely “the weed dealer” by comparison.

Mentioned

Ken Adgate · Ozone · Mikes Lab · Johnny Heineken · Liam · Freddie · F-One · Armstrong · NAISH · Kahi · Rob Whittall · Charles Bertrand · Hood River · Boards · Wing Foiling · Kite Foiling · Downwind

Auto-transcribed (faster-whisper small, unreviewed), no speaker labels — attribution above is inferred from context and may be imperfect in places, especially in fast three-way exchanges. Several names are uncertain and have been flagged inline or omitted from wikilinks: the Ozone designer transcribed only as “Simon” has no existing entity page; “Kiahi” (almost certainly Kai Lenny, tentatively linked to the existing Kahi page) is spelled inconsistently; “Stefano”/“Frank” behind the unnamed transparent “Aqueous” wing brand could not be confirmed; a kite-race rider heard as “Olly Bridge” (distinct from the Guy/Eric/Steph Bridge family already in the wiki) is unconfirmed; the repair-tool name “Terade” (possibly “Tear-Aid”) is uncertain; “AWSI” is used throughout as the industry’s Hood River trade show/event without full expansion in this transcript.