MAUI CALLING
I live on Maui now. After university I was a little lost as to what I wanted to do. I still had the dream of becoming a professional windsurfer even though I had been busy with my degree and had hardly windsurfed for five years! I had just studied the whole time and was out of shape! It was just a stupid dream, stuck in my head from when I was a kid. I decided to come to Maui for one month. I had earned a little money from my internship and wanted an adventure. I knew nobody on Maui, I was on my own. I rented a van and a room for a month and did the Aloha Classic. It was an AWT event at the time and I managed a 5th place, which I was very pleased with. I was stoked because I had never windsurfed on that tack before. New Caledonia is port tack so I was super happy and there was a couple of days with pretty big waves. I went out there and Kai Katchadourian from Simmer saw me and that is how I got my Simmer Style sponsorship I guess. I proved I could handle the heavy conditions. I remember barely understanding him at that time because my English was not so great. I was not sure if it was a good deal but he seemed nice so I took it! I went home with my Simmer Style sponsorship and emailed Fabien Vollenweider because I had his contact details. Somehow he wrote back and so I had a board sponsor as well. At home I spent three months working on an engineering job and in the meantime looked for more sponsorships. I managed to raise enough money by myself to compete on a big chunk of the AWT tour in 2013. I also managed to rank third in the French nationals in stand-up paddle racing that year. In 2014 I competed again as much as possible. I had to pick up a programming job part time because financially it was tricky to survive. I was not really getting so much money from sponsors, more just equipment.