Toeside and Tacks on a Parawing: Which Wings Turn Through the Wind

Tacks are the most contested maneuver in parawinging right now. They work, but which wings they work on is a design question before it is a technique question, so ask “can my wing do this at all” before you ask how. This article covers the toeside foundation, the tack itself, and the call I make most sessions: when to skip the tack and jibe instead.

Prerequisites

Before working on tacks you should have:

• Jibes at roughly 80% completion. That is the community’s working threshold before attempting tacks, and I agree with it. A tack has a dead spot head-to-wind that a jibe doesn’t, and the jibe is your bail-out on both entry and exit. Finn Spencer’s jibe tutorial is the sequence I’d start from.
• Solid upwind riding. If you can’t hold a consistent angle in both directions, fix that first (see riding upwind). A tack is an upwind leg with a direction change in the middle, nothing more. Gwen Le Tutour’s “give and take” upwind video covers the steering-and-edging rhythm the entry is built on.
• Switch or toeside riding under way. This is the actual bottleneck, not the wing work. More below.
• Steady wind with some margin. Slightly overpowered is easier: you carry more speed through the dead spot and can afford to exit a few degrees low. The widely cited 17–23 kt sweet spot for parawing skill work applies here too, and steadiness matters more than the number.

Why toeside is the real skill

A parawing pulls horizontally through lines. No rigid frame to brace against, no boom to hang off. Heelside that’s fine: you edge against the harness and the geometry works like a kite. Toeside, you lose most of what your body is used to leaning on, and the line pull tries to rotate you open at the exact moment you’re trying to stay closed and driving upwind.

The consequence shows up in every tack discussion. Riders get around the turn but can’t ride away from it, because their toeside won’t hold an angle. Forum consensus on the Progression Project is blunt: learn to ride switch (feet swapped, heelside on the “wrong” tack) rather than depend on toeside or chicken-jibe your way around. Switch restores the heelside edge-versus-harness geometry on both tacks, and it’s what unlocks real upwind angles.

The practical order: heelside both directions via switch first, toeside second, toeside upwind third. Toeside across the wind comes together in a session or two. Toeside pointing high, with line tension trying to unwind your shoulders, takes deliberate work. Keep the bar hand quiet, hips rotated toward the nose, back knee driven in over the board’s centerline, and let the harness take the load instead of your arm. An outstretched arm fighting the pull is the same mistake that ruins upwind riding generally, and toeside it costs more.

Grip note: most riders steer one-handed once flying. Toeside that matters more, since the free hand is your balance and swapping hands mid-carve makes the turn noticeably less stable. Decide your hand plan before the maneuver, not during it.

Which wings actually tack

The design axis that decides everything is what the canopy does when fully depowered on the front lines, because that is the state you need through head-to-wind.

• Double-skin / ram-air (Triple Seven P.T., BRM Paia, Gong Lowkite Droid): per BRM’s own description, double skins “continue to drive upwind even when completely sheeted out to the lowest possible angle of attack.” That residual drive at zero power is exactly the tack-enabling property. The Inertia’s test team called the Paia’s upwind angles the best they’d seen from a parawing. Trade-off: worse packability and less low-end grunt at takeoff.
• Reflex single-skin (Flow D-Wing V2): the reflex profile holds shape fully depowered, so it survives the head-to-wind moment far better than a plain single-skin.
• Plain single-skins (BRM Maliko/Kanaha, Flysurfer POW, Ensis Roger): sit deeper in the window, pull downwind when depowered, and generally fold when you sheet out through the eye of the wind. The Ozone Pocket Rocket is the repeatedly cited best-in-class single-skin for upwind work and the exception that tacks acceptably. On most of the rest, the realistic answer is that this wing jibes.

If your wing is in the last group, that’s not a skill problem. Spend the energy on fast jibes and switch riding instead. You’ll lose less ground in a jibe-plus-switch than in a blown tack. BRM hosts a dedicated “How to Tack with the D-Grip Handle” clip on their video page if you want the brand-specific handle work.

The tack in detail

The step cards above give the skeleton. This is what actually happens in the middle three seconds.

Speed is the only currency you have through the turn. From a broad reach, carve up smoothly rather than snapping the board; a sharp carve scrubs the speed you’re about to spend. As you climb past close-hauled, begin sheeting out onto the front/A-lines. Timing matters here. Depower too early and you lose drive while still needing to climb. Too late and the canopy backwinds: wind hits its face and it collapses backward over you.

Head-to-wind is the dead spot. On a good double-skin you still feel a faint forward tick from the canopy; on anything else you feel nothing, and the foil is coasting on stored speed alone. That is why the number-one mistake, entering slow or leaning back, is fatal here: a stalled foil head-to-wind with a depowered parawing gives you no power source to recover with. Foil flat, weight centered, ride the coast.

As the nose crosses the wind, steer the handle across to the new side. The parawing follows bar input directly. There is no wing flip like in winging, which makes the hand work simpler than the wing-foil tack tutorials people extrapolate from. Re-power progressively as the board falls onto the new tack; the canopy needs airflow to reload, and snatching it to full power while nearly stationary just backwinds it.

Exit either by switching feet in one shuffle (you land in your normal stance and toeside becomes irrelevant) or by riding away toeside. A related input from Triple Seven’s P.T. handling material: pushing the bar down and away while turning the wrist into the turn keeps the canopy banked with a clean airfoil and reduces tip collapse. Forum riders point to roughly the 4:07 mark of Triple Seven’s video for it (rider-cited timestamp, not from the official description). It’s described for powered banking turns, but the same wrist input keeps the canopy composed on the tack exit.

When to jibe instead

A tack is worth it when you’re grinding upwind in solid breeze on a wing that holds shape depowered. Jibe instead when:

• Your wing is a plain single-skin. That’s most of the current market (our specs database lists 40 models from 18 brands), of which only a handful are genuinely tack-capable.
• The wind is dying or gusty. The dead spot punishes marginal power; a blown tack in dying wind leaves you off foil, downwind, sorting a collapsed canopy.
• There’s traffic or heavy chop upwind. You need clean water through the eye of the wind.
• You’re tired. Late-session tacks fail on the foot switch, and every failure costs more ground than a conservative jibe.

A fast jibe plus confident switch riding loses surprisingly little upwind ground versus tacking. Racers push tacks because seconds matter; for a downwind-oriented freerider, the jibe is the default and the tack is a tool.

Drills

1. Toeside holds. Ride toeside across the wind and progressively pinch higher, counting the seconds you hold your highest angle. When you can hold it comfortably for a long stretch in both directions, the tack exit stops being the hard part.
2. Switch commitment runs. Do full upwind legs entirely in switch stance, jibing into switch on purpose. This is the Progression Project’s prescribed path to real upwind angles and doubles as your tack-exit insurance.
3. Land the foot shuffle. Rehearse the two-feet-in-one-motion switch on the beach, then on the water while unweighted over a bit of chop, the same drill as for jibes.
4. Heelside tacks before toeside tacks. Carve up from your strong side; exit switch. Only once those are consistent, reverse it.
5. Overpowered reps. Drill tacks slightly overpowered so you can afford to exit a few degrees low while learning the timing. Depower control is easier to learn with margin than at the edge of planing.
6. Depower rehearsal on land. While ground handling, sheet fully onto the front lines and watch what your specific canopy does. If it folds on the beach in steady wind, it will fold head-to-wind on the water. Better to find out on land.

Hazards

• Stall head-to-wind. You come off foil with the canopy depowered, pointing upwind, with zero drive. In cold water or offshore wind that is where a drift problem starts. Know your self-rescue and drift plan before drilling tacks away from shore.
• Backwinded collapse over the board. A canopy collapsing backward can drop lines across you and the foil. Come off foil, keep tension off the lines, and sort while floating, never mid-ride.
• Weak toeside in dying wind. If you can only hold angle heelside and the wind drops, half your course home is gone. Don’t take a toeside-dependent route upwind of your launch until toeside upwind is proven.
• Gusts mid-maneuver. A gust hitting during the re-power phase spikes board speed exactly while your feet are moving. Read the water upwind before committing; see gust management.

One caveat before you go drill this: as of mid-2026 no high-quality dedicated parawing-tack tutorial with timestamps exists, so riders extrapolate from wing-foil tack content and forum threads. Treat every sequence here as 2026-current in a sport that started with the Maliko V1 in August 2024 and is still moving fast. More technique articles live in the learn hub.