The Generic Foiling Podcast — a second brain

S - Ep 084 Fred Hope and Slingshot

9 min read

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S - Ep 084 Fred Hope and Slingshot

Recorded live at the AWSI event site in Hood River, on a shaded balcony at Slingshot’s offices overlooking the site. The first sit-down with Fred Hope — credited on the show with “changing the game” in kitefoil riding — and, chronologically, the earlier of his two appearances (a follow-up, deeper Project Drag conversation happens later at Ep 144). Long stretches of the raw transcript are unusable (see note at the end), but the recovered English portions cover Fred’s route into Slingshot, the origin of the OneLock screwless connection system, his relationship with Ken Adgate, and a wide-ranging chat about kite foiling, coaching and gear.

In brief

Fred nearly walked away from professional foiling to become a marine biologist right before this era, but instead ended up running product at Slingshot — writing briefs, working with R&D and designers, then marketing and sales. Most of the episode traces the multi-year, expensive slog behind Slingshot’s screwless OneLock foil connection (born out of solving corrosion and fiddly setup, which turned into a drag-reduction project that cost Fred “probably 50” broken masts), plus his views on where board/foil connection standards are headed, his close friendship with board shaper Ken Adgate, and a personal tour through kite foiling, coaching, and his own gear preferences.

Key topics & claims

  • How Fred ended up at Slingshot (Fred): he called Slingshot a few months before graduating to say he was quitting to become a marine biologist — this was around his career peak, December 2021 — but stayed on. His actual role is closer to product owner: he writes product briefs, takes them into R&D with the designers, then writes marketing copy/story, then works with sales — “cool to be with the product throughout the whole trajectory.”
  • Origin of OneLock (Fred): the screwless connection idea started roughly three years earlier, at one of Fred’s first in-person Slingshot meetings, aimed at solving two problems — corrosion (their old Phantasm aluminium fuselage corroded depending on the factory’s aluminium QC) and convenience (older, less dexterous customers struggling to align screws and T-nuts on a mast plate at the beach). Only once they were building it did the team realise how much drag the screws themselves were adding, which pushed the geometry work toward a fully streamlined, non-bulbous foil shape.
  • The cost of getting there (Fred): shrinking the carbon collar around the mast to cut drag meant “breaking a mast every 10 minutes” during development — he estimates roughly 50 masts broken — forcing multiple expensive mold retools to get more carbon into the collar. Their first physical sample came about 1.5–2 years before this recording, after CAD/3D printing work. Testing the latest layup recently, he broke his own rail on his elbow and hip in a strapless-air crash rather than breaking the foil — offered as evidence of the layup’s strength.
  • Tracks and the case for a shared standard (Fred): Slingshot’s current RTS (Rapid Track System) — two front teeth plus rear flags — still adds drag. Fred expects track systems to start disappearing within about three years, but says no single brand can pull it off alone without limiting its foils to one brand of board; he name-checks Armstrong and F-One as making boards he rates highly. He points to UK riders Connor Bainbridge, “Ray Sir” and Isaac building an adapter plate that lets a board take either a Chewbacca- or Levitas-style foil as evidence of real demand for a shared/universal connection — something like a Tuttle-style slide with pucks and a lever. He frames the foil industry as small and close-knit (citing Sam Light and “Elliot” from Slingshot chatting with Armstrong’s “Nathan Chuck” at the same event stand) as a reason cross-brand cooperation should be more achievable than in a bigger industry.
  • Ken Adgate, the friendship (Fred): Ken Adgate “hates plates” and makes a new board almost every week, partly (Fred jokes) because his wife does the paint finish and he wants a new colour to show off. Ken is unusually open about sharing his shaping learnings with Slingshot’s designers, but gets genuinely upset when other brands copy his shapes outright rather than engaging with him. Ken’s boards have a lot of rocker, touch down well, but run narrower — Fred rates them as suited to a more advanced rider than Slingshot’s general customer.
  • Pumping and tail design (Fred): Ken’s recurring message is that boards need enough tail flex/movement to let a rider engage a pumping motion (most visible on flat-water take-offs combined with a paddle stroke), not just glide efficiently. Fred backs this with his own back-to-back test of two downwind boards in the same conditions: one let the tail move and allowed pumping at low speed; the other’s tail “would just stick,” meaning he needed a knot or two more speed to get going. Slingshot’s light-wind wingboard/downwind crossover, the Laser, deliberately keeps tail volume clear of the mast for this reason.
  • What Fred is proudest of: the new OneLock foil (the biggest headache of his career so far), and — as a category — the minimalist Hobie/“Hopecraft” Joystick and UFO kite-foiling gear, which he calls close to his personal ideal of kite foiling: simple, minimal, light.
  • Kite foiling as a discipline (Fred, prompted by Liam): Fred thinks kite foiling participation is shrinking as wing foiling has taken over, but argues kite foiling was the catalyst that let foiling expand into wing, downwind and SUP in the first place. His theory: flat-water, light-wind winging has a ceiling of fun once a rider has learned to tack and gybe, and Slingshot’s average winging customer (60s–70s) has no interest in tricks — so some wingers may drift toward kite foiling for its extra power and up/downwind range. He still kite foils every summer at home.
  • Coaching: Fred runs kite-foiling clinics, including one in Cabarete with a guide named Andreas (“Uncharted Kite Sessions,” roughly a week with video review), plus private coaching for around five clients worldwide (one exclusively on twin-tip). He caps it at about six weeks a year and uses the trips to scout new markets — an upcoming trip to Morocco is one example.
  • Strapless landing technique (Fred, explaining to the hosts): land with the mast/fuselage at a steep angle to the water (Fred personally lands closer to ~40°, steeper if landing faster), bending the knees on the way up and straightening again near the apex, weighting the front foot on touchdown then the back foot to pop back onto foil. Landing slower and steeper is easier than landing flat and fast, which he says is a common beginner mistake — landing flat lets the front wing catch air and pulls the rider down.
  • Losing and recovering a board while winging leashless: Fred wing-foils without a board leash in wind and chop, and recovers a lost board by angling the wing’s leading edge roughly 45° to the wind and using it like a sail to reach the board. He notes their OneLock foil can occasionally catch the wind side-on and “sail away” briefly before rolling over so it can be retrieved.
  • 2024 AWSI gear trends (Fred): wing materials had converged on similar shapes, mostly built from what he calls “Lula” or Dyneema-type fabrics (spelling uncertain), with the emerging theme being a single central bar/handle on wings (Slingshot’s “uni handle,” others’ “boom,” FlySurfer/Core’s handles). He felt kites/bars/wings overall were less advanced than the prior year, with more real movement happening in foils — new connection systems, more trailing-edge camber on KT and Armstrong foils, and Axis’s super-high-aspect wings. Slingshot’s own 2024 releases: Slingwing V5 (building on the NXT), and Cod V2/NXT in the Big Air new-school series. A rider he names as “Jeremy Berlander” (spelling uncertain) is credited with a kiteboarding world title on a “Lula” kite (brand unclear).
  • Mid-length wingboards: retailers told Fred mid-lengths were harder to sell in 2024 than expected — too narrow/unstable for the average customer, who (per Fred) varies hugely by location: Hood River’s “hatchery” riders are far more advanced than those at the main event/waterfront sites. He mentions Adrian at Axis regularly pitching him newfangled super-high-aspect wings that Fred doesn’t think Slingshot’s general customer is ready for yet.
  • Naming OneLock: the name was a genuinely debated internal decision — the team worked from two conceptual columns, “security” and “speed” (rejected options included Slipstream, Impossible, Fast Latch, Quick Lock) before landing on OneLock.

Gear / brands mentioned

Slingshot (OneLock/screwless foil connection, RTS track system, Phantasm aluminium fuselage, Slingwing V5/NXT, Cod V2/NXT, Laser downwind/wingboard, Joystick and UFO kite-foiling gear, “Dart”), Ken Adgate (hand-shaped boards), F-One (Skate, Eagle, Swing wing), Armstrong, Axis (super-high-aspect wings), Connor Bainbridge and “Ray Sir”/Isaac (UK adapter board for Chewbacca/Levitas), the old “caraphoil” (a discontinued, ~9–10mm unprofiled C-shaped mast known for an audible vibration).

Notable quotes or takes

  • Fred, on why the OneLock project started: “it was about convenience and it was about corrosion” — only later did the team realise how much drag the screws themselves were creating (paraphrased from several exchanges).
  • Fred on Ken Adgate’s boards: generally too narrow/advanced for Slingshot’s typical customer, but he still rides them “just because it’s fun to try new shapes.”
  • On the “Room 101” segment (a UK format explained to Fred for the studio audience): the Slingshot Dart — an early freestyle-oriented kite/wing ridden by “the Spencer Brothers” when they were on Slingshot — was already nominated into the vault on a previous episode by someone the hosts call “Army” (name/spelling uncertain). Fred’s own pick was the “caraphoil”: a thin, unprofiled C-shaped mast that vibrated audibly like a “whale call” on the water — he owned one and still misses it despite selling it.

Mentioned

Fred Hope · Slingshot · Ken Adgate · Sam Light · Connor Bainbridge · F-One · Armstrong · Axis · Adrian Roper · Liam · Freddie · Hood River · Kite Foiling · Downwind · Pumping · Masts · Boards

Auto-transcribed (faster-whisper, unreviewed). A large fraction of this transcript — most of the intro banter and several long stretches through the middle and end of the interview — rendered as Welsh-language text that does not correspond to anything the hosts would plausibly have been saying (almost certainly a transcription/language-detection failure on crosstalk, music or accented speech, not real Welsh content); those passages have been treated as unusable and excluded rather than guessed at. No speaker labels exist in the source, so attribution between the two hosts (Liam/Freddie) is inferred from context and is not always certain; Fred’s own lines are generally clear. Several proper nouns are uncertain and flagged inline above: “Jeremy Berlander,” “Lula” (kite/fabric brand), “Army” and “Ken Pogg Darts” (podcast/person reference), and “caraphoil” (mast brand/nickname).