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HOOKED // CHEERS TO THE DIE-HARDS

New Zealand reader Phil Penney recounts his own windsurfing journey and celebrates the die-hards of windsurfing!  

PHOTOS – John Carter, Ken Box // WORDS -Phil Penney

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I first saw a picture of a windsurfer in a boating publication called ‘Seaspray’, long out of press now. It was the mid 70s and the magazine ran a novelty article about this strange sailing surfboard without a rudder. Ridiculous. But somehow the idea took hold and even more surprising, a production windsurfer called the ‘Comet’ came out a few years later.

New Zealand in the 70s was still quite isolated from the world. Short of a crisis, such as the collapsing export markets or the oil supply shocks that were going on at the time, anything that happened in the world took its own sweet time to trickle down to the antipodes. This little group of islands at the bottom end of the earth, surround by oceans, saw world developments months, even years after their inception. Isolated was the word.

Austerity

The 70s were a pretty austere time down under as well. Money wasn’t being thrown around. Even if you had the cash, often the supplies and materials were limited, or hard to get. There was a definite attitude of making do, and from that hard ground, the New Zealand ethic of ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ flourished. ‘Home made’ was very much a way of life, or at the very least, ‘home mended’.

So within this backdrop, it was somewhat surprising that a production windsurfer would be developed and marketed within New Zealand. Fun for the whole family, they said, car top it, they said, easy to rig and use, they said. And it was. The Comet must have been 12’ long, fibreglass with hard chines. Heavy and boxy looking with a battenless triangle sail. Big, maybe 7 square metres with a massively bigger boom. It had a daggerboard that dropped in through the centre case just like a sailing dingy. I first saw a Comet in 1978 while at a sailing dingy contest and managed to get a couple of goes. True to the brochure, it was remarkably easy to use and didn’t take long to get going.

Freedom

With the big sail and large flat wetted area, it didn’t take a lot of wind or hull speed to plane. Not a blasting along, skipping across the chop plane, but a sedate, Sunday afternoon kind of plane. Surface tension broken and water coming off clean from the transom. I couldn’t believe the freedom of it. Leaning against the pressure of the wind, pushing the power through my body onto an overgrown surfboard, steering with the rig, and going fast, at least fast for that wind strength, without all the ropes and wires and rudders and things.

Born into a sailing family, I’m not sure if I actually really liked sailing or if it was just part of my DNA. But with the Comet, there was a sailing connection I truly understood. I guess it was that way for so many people, as the Comet developed into the ‘Superstar’ and a line of production boards that were probably the most successful brand in New Zealand.

Home-made

I went home after distinguishing myself at the sailing contest as an ‘also there’, however, the trip was a success, I’d discovered windsurfing or boardsailing as it was commonly known. But bored I was not. It was all I could talk about.

In keeping with the times, my dad was very much a ‘do-it-yourselfer’. We probably rummaged around for that old copy of ‘Seaspray’ magazine for ideas before he framed up a windsurf board with a plywood skin. It had a plywood fin and a drop through daggerboard.

Everything was home made, the triangle sail, mast and boom with the arms bent in a vice. The universal mast base was rubber tubing from an old washing machine or something. It was basic, no question, but I soon had it going fast enough through the estuary chop to feel the need for footstraps. Or just maybe, footstraps were the new cool thing, the latest from overseas, meaning, they’d been around for ages elsewhere. Anyway, I screwed some footstraps made out of inner tubing from a bicycle to the deck.

Last ride

The last ride on that gear was across the harbour in 20 knots. By that time I had incorporated a harness system. Basically just rope on the boom and a chest harness / hook set-up that was converted from a sailing dinghy trapeze system. It wasn’t a great set-up as the boom/mast connection was floppy to say the least and hooking into the soft rope on the boom while bouncing along was nothing short of a Houdini act.

I hung the daggerboard over my back arm, as was the fashion of the day, to lessen the drag if you were hoping to go fast, and headed off on a broad reach. Way overpowered, I was almost instantly in trouble. Thinking about it, it was a miracle the whole thing worked out. Everything was stretched to the max. The shape shifted in the battenless sail with every gust, creating a power struggle in either the front or back hand. The mastbase washing machine tendon stretched so much that the mastfoot sat out towards the windward rail. The footstraps stretched as well, so it was easy to lose connection with the board and I ended up standing over the screws on stretched out rubber.

One way

As I flew downwind a fire hydrant flow of water spewed through the centre case and deflected off the sail and onto the now blind and terrified rider who was just hanging on, but too electrified to let go. Ah, that ride was a mess. So close to the edge of disaster, a catapult into a better world, or just a rupturing of gear. It was the fastest I’d ever been. Terrifying and exhilarating all at once.

That ride also turned out to be a one-way trip, in two separate ways. I was committed, forever more a loyal, die-hard windsurfing pilot, but I also needed to get a ride back to the launch point with a boat. My first ‘walk of shame’. There were to be many more. After that I forked out something like 700 bucks, a small fortune at the time, for what was then known as a ‘wave jumper’. A custom-made 9’ board mown out of foam, surfboard style. A sort of a fat version, thickness wise, of today’s ‘mal’ style surfboards with a pintail.

Thrusters

By this time it was the early 80s and my wave jumper was a thruster fin set-up, it was the new rage. Everything was thrusters. Inspired by the surfer/ shaper Simon Anderson and his need for tight manoeuvres in powerful waves, thrusters became the fashion. I really didn’t need a thruster, but man, back then, it looked so cool.

My wave jumper came with an old school sail, but I stitched up a more high aspect one, made to my own design that had one full length top batten, but still essentially a shape shifting soft Dacron sail. It was truly a terrible sail with a leach that flapped in concert to the wind strength. As it turned out, I didn’t have to put up with that for too long.

In those days, the mastbase would plug into the board and be held in place with a pressure pin. It was standard for the time in New Zealand, elsewhere in the world they must have moved on to better ideas, because it was a flawed system. The weakness would be exposed during a heavy crash, in a catapult for example, the board and rig would separate. And my fatal catapult happened far from land in gusty conditions on the cold waters of a high alpine lake. I remember unhooking myself in the water from under the sail, only to see my wave jumper sailing off downwind on its own. It took hundreds of metres of panic swimming to catch it. By the time I got back to the approximate position of my gear, the rig had sunk. And so happened my second ‘walk of shame’.

80s

By the late 80s windsurfing was the thing. Everybody had one. On their car, in their garage, stashed under their holiday home, and on the water. Around this time possibly the biggest step forward in windsurfing crossed New Zealand shores. The advent of fully battened, rotating asymmetrical sails, shortly followed by camber induced sails, greatly increasing the power delivery and controllability of the sail, which pretty much meant more speed and flow without gritting your teeth in abject terror. Also the boards got stronger and lighter as construction techniques improved. All too late for the windsurfing masses. Gradually at first, but quickly gathering momentum, the windsurfing fashion faded. I’m not sure why.

Mountain biking was just beginning to become popular, not just for the off-roading, but fashionable for the grey heads looking to replace the Sunday drive. Paragliding was also getting a look in. What could be better, walk up a hill and jump off. In the last decade of a ‘do it yourself’ New Zealand, this was a freedom not to be ignored ……. until the reality of smashed ankles and ruptured shoulders saw a lot of paragliders back on the market. Mountain biking however, continued to expand.

Inside the windsurfing faithful, there was a push toward smaller and smaller boards. The thinking was if you could still stand on your board without being up to your knees in water when the wind dropped, you were over subscribed. ‘Sinkers’ were the go. This trend made the sport less accessible, especially if you were making the transition from a big floaty board to something sportier. The transition was just too radical and those that floundered got frustrated and drifted away.

Fanaticism

Windsurfing is a sport that is easy to pick up but takes many years for the average weekend warrior to get proficient in. It’s a fun journey if they are progressing. Otherwise, they walk away. And walk they did, in large numbers.

Fanaticism however, is not to be laughed away. The die-hards rode on, they still do. I love the power of a sail in my hands, the direct feel. I’m a sailor at heart no matter if it’s through DNA design, or choice. And when the wind blows and the waves are right, I love the feel of driving a carving rail turn, riding down the line, having the power to outrun a closeout section only to bottom turn back onto the clean face for another ‘swing in the ring’. I love boosting off a lip, a straight air, because that’s all I can control at best. Throwing head and shoulders back in the quest for height, while trying to keep it together enough to stomp a landing.

Even just a Sunday drive, flat water sailing into the sunset. It’s all good.

Motivation

I know what motivation it takes to get as far as I have in this sport, and still, I’m a thousand dropped rigs away from a ‘kono’, and many yoga sessions away from the unearthly contortions of switch stance. So when you see those guys on YouTube doing double forwards, or busting 40 knots, or throwing down some crazy freestyle move, or hacking a huge turn off the lip of a massive peaking monster, or gathering in there tens of hundreds to do a long-distance race, or travelling half the world with their kit to some fabled spot to act upon their utopian dream, you know….. you can be absolutely certain of the fact, that there is no shortage of motivation, that there are a lot of people still putting in a lot of hours on the water. A lot of hours. And for good reason. Windsurfing is in good hands. Here’s to the die-hards!