NEW SCHOOL: WING KIDS
PHOTOS – Tony Logosz // WORDS – Wyatt Miller
From our August issue we hear from Slingshot’s windsurfing brand manager, Wyatt Miller, who has noticed that kids are drawn to playing with wings and puts forward an interesting case as to why he thinks this could help entice them and others into windsurfing.
The simplicity of the wingsurfer is attractive – easy rigging, no running of lines (though still some pumping) and a limited amount of easily packable equipment. The surfing population does not want to take up the beach real estate of kiteboarding or hassle with the technical nature of windsurfing…. but this wing thing stands a chance of bridging the gap between surfing sports and windsports. The wing can be used to get out to the break and catch the wave, and then it can nearly disappear from the equation allowing the rider to focus solely on the board and the swell. That simplicity of board and rider is very attractive for some hitherto windsport sceptics.
Now throw in the fact that most folks are not eager to take lessons, they want plug and play instant gratification, especially kids! Kiting absolutely requires lessons to avoid being dragged into trees in your first week, and the learning curve of windsurfing can take years without good instruction. Enter wingsurfing – you can walk into a shop, buy a wing, jump on an old windsurf board or SUP, and you are on the water. It doesn’t get much more plug and play than that! When I give people the basic how to in wingsurfing, I hand them the wing on the beach and say, “You kinda just hold it like this…”. That’s it, that’s all you need to know to hit the water; no long lessons in rigging or dire warnings about attaching a kite line the wrong way. Maybe that’s exactly what windsports were missing…. a toy! A plaything that anybody can pick up and use without expensive lessons, something you can hand a kid on the beach and just say, “Here go for it!” While windsurfers and kites are definitely not toys, the wingsurfer certainly is, and it’s an even more versatile toy when you are less than 5 feet tall and 50 kgs! This winter I handed my Slingshot ‘Slingwing’ to a bunch of kids staying at my beach resort in Baja, Mexico. I showed them how to hold it and that was it, they entertained themselves on the beach for hours, running and jumping in the wind, using it to get extra hangtime before crashing in the sand. That whole time they were learning all about wind power and how to harness it. Time and time again kids would come back to their windsurfing and kitesurfing parents and exclaim, “This is my new favourite watersport”, without ever having touched the water. Next I bring out the skimboard, already a favourite beach toy for those less than 5 feet! They need no instruction on how to combine the two toys and once they get the hang of it, kids can fly down the beach for 100’s of yards in 1 inch of water piloting their own sailing craft without any real instruction at all.
So how does this help reinvigorate windsurfing you say? Well here’s my theory….a few years from now, with a little acceptance from the surfing community and a plethora of wings on the market we are going to see (and we already do) a generation of kids who have grown up playing with wingsurfers on the beach and then learning to foil with them on the water. And let’s be honest, wingsurfing is just windsurfing without the mast connected to the board. The balance is almost exactly the same, sheeting in and sheeting out, leaning back against the power of the wind and adjusting in a fraction of a second to gusts and lulls. Because of this similarity in balance, windsurfers pick up the sport almost immediately, and it will work the other way around. Any kid who can foil with a wingsurfer can climb onto a windsurf foil board, uphaul the sail and will be able to successfully foil across the water within minutes…short-circuiting the learning curve. Most of these wingsurf kids will be deep waterstarting their sinker foil board and that will translate in a matter of hours into how to pull off a waterstart with a windsurf sail. So, for the first time in the history of windsurfing, people have a crossover sport that allows them to smash the learning curve and be out there with the die-hard windsurfers on their first day. And all it took was a windsports toy!