Robby Swift
“Windsurfing has been one of the main focuses, motivations, passions and thankfully providers of income in my life. It was a passion that began before I can really remember. I do remember annoying my parents with incessant demands to take me to the beach from the age of about 5 till I was 17 and old enough to drive. It didn’t matter whether there was wind or not, I needed them to take me there to check to be sure there wasn’t enough for me to get planing before I would shut up. Now, since I left school and made a career out of windsurfing, the passion hasn’t died down at all, I would say it has almost increased. I love competing and have always wanted to win a world title, something that has eluded me so far but that just means that I still go to bed at night dreaming of how I can improve my sailing and wake up first thing in the morning determined to fit as much useful training into the day as possible, be it surfing, biking, running, gym or, best of all, windsurfing!
Since the arrival of social media and instant disbursal of videos onto the Internet, it has become possible to offer a lot more to our sponsors than just purely contest results and magazine exposure. This is also something that you can personally take control of, so my windsurfing obsession has extended into pre-session organizing of videographers and photographers and post-session collecting, sorting through and editing of footage and the subsequent distribution of it through various channels. There is nothing better than having a great day on the water and then picking up the footage from the amazing videographers that we are lucky to have here on Maui and making it into a video that thousands of people appreciate and then receiving messages from the people who enjoyed it. It’s a very satisfying feeling to be able to share my passion with so many other passionate people around the world and it’s kind of addictive! Of course getting paid to do all of this is just the icing on the cake. I’m very lucky to be able to do one of the most fun and challenging sports in the world as a job and that my passion just seems to get stronger and stronger as time goes on, in the same way as equipment improves every year and the tools that we have to capture the imagery get so much better!”