My Short History with Windsurfing

With the previous post on the D2 Windsurfer, I had a chance to reflect on my short history with Windsurfing. All of my casual involvement with Windsurfing occurred when I was a young dude. I wrote about my first encounter with the very early Windsurfing community and my breakfast conversation with one of Windsurfer's emergent rock stars over at this post. It was also at Association Island in 1974 that I first stepped on a borrowed original Windsurfer. I took it out close to dusk in very little wind. I got upwind OK without major mishaps and about 200 meters from shore turned around to go downwind and back to the beach when I started falling off the board. I was wondering if I was going to have to arm paddle home when my brain finally re-calibrated my balance and I was able to drift back, standing up, without embarrassment. Back in Annapolis I learned the basics on another borrowed Windsurfer. I still remember how impressed I was with the Windsurfer's easy acceleration with just barely wafting gusts. With the original Windsurfer I was competent up to a mid-range breeze and didn't get comfortable with stronger breezes until I had some time on a F3 board, a design which was already moving toward less length, rig back further, full battened sail. Although I had several sailing friends that got out of dinghies and continued hard-core at Windsurfing (some became pros), I never never went down the rabbit hole of short boards, water starts, wave jumping, camber-induced sails in various sizes, summer trips to the Gorge or Hatteras. I stuck with racing dinghies. With the light air of the Chesapeake, it seemed to be the more comfortable choice.

Grainy photos of the blogmeister from back in the 1970's

A Piece of Furniture: A Division 2 Windsurfer Raceboard

Occasionally I've come across photos of exquisitely built and varnished small sailboats that I have been featured on Earwigoagin under the moniker Piece of Furniture. Such was the case recently when some photos of a beautifully wood molded Division 2 Windsurfer was posted in Facebook.

The stern has very similar conic sections to the Mistral design Classic Moth.

The Division 2 Windsurfer was the odd duck of the Windsurfing fraternity; a long skinny displacement board that was actually designed to go upwind, not so much blast downwind. It was the Olympic Windsurfing class in 1988 for the Seoul South Korea Olympics.

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Update: 8/20. Gui, one of my International Canoe buddies from back in the day, now fully immersed in all things Windsurfing and foiling, begs to differ on my classification of the D2 as a displacement craft:

"The D2 is clearly not a displacement board!...The D2's work OK in light air, but like most other sailing craft, they are much nicer to sail in 10+kts. They are as much displacement boards as the other long raceboards when the wind is down. They plane upwind at ~8-11kts and I got mine to ~20kts downwind, pretty sure a more committed D2 sailor with a modern design would be in the mid-20's."

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Internet research on this woodie picked up a post from Hit the Wave blog, that pointed to this beauty as possibly having a 1984 Brazilian origin from a Greek boatbuilder, cold molded in Cedar; a Greco.

Aussie Chris Thompson seconded Greco as the builder with this comment that I'm dragging over to the main post:

"It looks like a Greco from my memories; I was offered one of the top ones at the '85 worlds for a criminally low price, but had no way to get it from the UK to Australia. There's been a little revival in D2s lately, which is nice to see."

Run Up to the Weymouth Olympics; Annapolis Olympian

For some reason our neck of the woods doesn't produce many Olympians. I can recall only one medalist from Annapolis in recent times; Scott Steele, who got a silver in Windsurfing at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Well we have another Annapolitan Windsurfer on the U.S. 2012 team, Farrah Hall. Some of you may recall Farrah as the one who lost her position on the Olympic team in 2008; where her victory on the water during the selection trials was negated by a botched Request for Redress hearing. It was so bad that the IOC came back a year later, boxed U.S. Sailing about the ears for completely incompetent proceedings, and vindicated Farrah Hall....but much too late for her Olympic dream on that cycle. Despite this she hung in there for another four year campaign and will be in Weymouth in 2012.

I bumped into Farrah and her Polish coach last fall at Severn Sailing Association. They were just about to push their boards into the water (it was dead calm, I wasn't sure what kind of training they were up to) and had a short five minute conversation.

I get a kick out talking to Windsurfer racers. The sport is so different from dinghy racing. Windsurfers can pump.... all the time.... all around the course. Just as Eskimos have forty words for forty different types of snow, the racing Windsurfer crowd have forty different ways to pump. There's the light air upwind pump, the offwind planing pump, the choppy water upwind pump....you get the idea. And that's what Farrah and I talked about; all the ways to pump a Windsurfer. She was very gracious talking to a stranger despite being anxious to go "air rowing" (as ISAF president Paul Henderson, dismissively called the sport several years ago). I wish her the best of luck at Weymouth and it would be a great kick to see her get on the podium (unfortunately not likely as the U.S has been well down the pack in recent Olympic Windsurfing competitions).

The Washington Post did an excellent article on her Olympic quest. Click here to view.

This wraps up my "Run Up to the Weymouth Olympics" series. Now I have to figure where I have to go to view some of the sailing competitions.

Back to the Future.... a little late

King Tillerman has another blogwriting assignment.... what will the future of saling look llke in 2025 or thereabouts. One disadvantage of getting around to the topic very, very late in the cycle is that most everyone else has covered what I wanted to say.... but I'll say it again anyway. First a little history.

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My brush with the original Windurfer crowd.

Back in 1974, when I had long hair, when sunburn was a good thing, and when I also had the vim and vigor of a dinghy sailor in his early twenty's, I crewed in the International 14 Nationals, held at Association Island on Lake Ontario. For those old enough to remember, Association Island was the national sailing center of the USYRU (now US Sailing) for about 4 years in the 1970's. Many major regattas in the 1970's were held out of this rather primitive camp grounds. As we were winding up the International 14 Nationals, what class was filtering in for their first World Championship but the nascent Windsurfer. Already, the sailing media had anointed this odd looking sailing contraption, this surfboard with a sail, as the sailing craft of the future. I was excited to see first hand what this phenomenon was all about. My skipper, Eric Arens, and I happened to sit down with Windsurfer wunderkind, Matt Schweitzer (son of Hoyle Schweitzer, one of the inventors of the sport) at breakfast. Matt, thirteen years of age, blond mop of hair, Californian surfer dude through and through. We eagerly plied the Windsurfer champion with questions..... Are tactics different with a Windsurfer?.....What about the rules? Each question was met with a cheerful admission that he knew nothing about tactics, windshifts or rules, it was just fun to go fast and, somewhere during the race, he found himself in front. And the other favorite to win the Worlds, Robbie Naish, was another, even younger, surfer dude clone! We walked away from breakfast chuckling and also shaking our heads. Was this where the sport of sailboat racing was going?

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Well, thirty plus years on, the windsurfer has evolved, not as a course racing machine, but a wonderful sailing machine in a different realm........

Mark, Matt and Scott from Mark Erickson on Vimeo.

And the most popular racing dinghies and scows of the 1970's are for the most part, the most popular racing dinghies and scows of 2010. The rigs are tweaked, the hulls are stiffer, they may have adopted an assymetric spinnaker, but most of us are racing dinghies/scows as we were racing in 1970.

So we have continuity and innovation. Where do I see the trends in small boat sailing by 2025...

Multihulls will become even more popular. At my old club, West River SC, A-cats, Nacra 20's and F-16's now make up a sizeable portion of the racing fleets. Stability, speed, and the fun factor are all working in the multihulls favor.

And for those of us well into Geezerdom by 2025 and still wanting to bash around in small boats, I see an increase in popularity of those kayak/trimaran hybrids....the ones you sit in and steer with your feet, like the Hobie Adventure Island kayak.....



Some of the Baby Boom Geezers will spend retiremnet building boats and attending small boat festivals such as the Mid Atlantic Small Craft Festival in St. Michaels MD. I expect these festivals to increase in popularity.




I have also been famously wrong in many of my predictions.