THE NEWSPAPER ONLINE : The longboard revival

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Tuesday, 16 October 2007

30th issue

By Chris Thompson

Long abused and almost forgotten, the classic longboard is coming back with a vengeance.

Is the revival of the longboard taking the sport backwards? We hope so. We'd love to go back - back to the days when you have fun sailing anywhere at any time. Back to the days when windsurfing was the world's fastest-growing watersport. Back to the days when tens of thousands of women windsurfed. Back to the days when there were strong racing fleets, at local clubs. Back to the days when there was a growing pro circuit.
It was longboards that created the whole sport and the whole windsurfing boom. Twelve years after Jim Drake and Hoyle Schweitzer launched the original Windsurfer, there were 200,000 of them sailing, along with hundreds of thousands of other boards. The boards that created the boom were "allrounders" like the Windsurfer One Design or early Mistral Competition. Big, simple and designed for light winds, they were perfect for freestyle, teaching friends, class racing or just for messing about on the water. The sport was simple and sociable, and you could do it at your local lake - and so many people did that in Europe they had to ration water space at times. : read more :

By Koen Sonck

This year, I took the Kona Mahalo with me to the south of France for my yearly family summer holiday. It was a holiday never to forget!

After a full year of hard work, you sometimes just need to relax on a day without wind. The Kona Mahalo offers a great and comfortable platform, and it was also perfect for teaching my wife and son. Thanks to the tandem option, they felt really secure and I could instruct them even better. Besides my wife and son, also the beach girls liked a ride on this beautiful flower board. Windsurfing suddenly became a social happening. Of course, the Mahalo is also a nice tool for some decent action. I tried several set-ups and all seemed to work great. Here a picture where I was fooling around on the rail and dagger with my 11m² race sail.
: read more :

By Tor Bakke

The first time I met Bruce was in Bandol, France at the 1975 Windsurfer Worlds. He stood out in the crowd as a very professional and passionate competitor. It was in the brutal days when we were hanging onto the boom until our eyeballs popped. No harness.
The square teak boom didn’t make it any easier – at full Olympic triangle courses –and in Mistral winds.

Coming from dinghy racing, I had that little tactical edge those days – but I soon realized that I was up against a man doing very few mistakes and with his balance and coordination he was super fast. How to beat that guy.? It was irritating to always find him around me on the line. Why are you here you jerk? Although I knew why, and it was not less irritating to see him tack on the same shifts as I was. Bruce was a veteran in 1975- having windsurfed since 1969 and winning the very first Worlds in 1973. : read more :

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