Windsurfing. It's on!

I’ve decided that I’m going to make a real effort to go windsurfing this year. I’m not exactly sure how or when but I think I’ll get a few days in. My general plan is to watch the wind forecasts on the weekends. If things look promising I’ll be trying to do first light. I figure I can get to Spanish Banks within 30 minutes and the ferry spit in maybe 50 minutes. That should maybe give me 2 hours of sailing time. The big problem is that the kids are signed up activities on the weekend mornings at 10:30am and I would need the van to go windsurfing. I’m sure something will work out.

One thing that I’m really interested in is getting a new board. “New” could either mean “new to me” or new as in “no one has ever used it before.” The last time I got a new board was when I was around 16 years old, kindly given to me from the folks (thanks mom and dad!). I spent the 90’s and early 2K sailing on a used Seatrend 72L ATV. I bought it off a guy named Dale Cook. He was probably 16 when I bought the board from him and his dad. Here’s a video of the guy now, check it out he gets crazy air:

I think Dale Cook had just picked a http://www.robertssailboards.com/ sponsorship when I bought the Seatrend from him. Roberts is Rob Moulder’s company based in North Vancouver. I know Rob a bit because I used to race bikes with him. Dale’s other sponsor is Sailworks. Sailworks is owned and run by Bruce Peterson, another Canadian. My whole quiver is from Sailworks (3.5, 4.1 and 4.7 revolutions, 5.3 syncro, 6.5 retro).

I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a board but it would be nice. The 72L won’t really cut it for the sailing I can do now, it is too small and needs 15 knots to be useful and 18knots+ to be fun. Just before Mercy was pregnant with Grady I had bought a larger 6.5m2 sail (a Sailworks Retro) and another used Seatrend, a 105L Accelerator. I’ve never actually sailed the Accelerator and I now consider it to be a sunk cost. I did sail a 85L Accelerator and I know that they are stinking fast. I also know that they don’t jibe all that well. In order to maximize my fun time on the water it would be great to have a board in the 115L to 125L range. With that size of board I could easily uphaul the sail if needed and slog back in to shore if the wind dies. As well, newer board shapes will plane quicker and jibe nicer. They sacrifice some top end speed to achieve this but that doesn’t bother me at all.

There are quite a few boards that interest me. I think the one that I dig the most is a Tabou Rocket 115L. It’s light, get’s good reviews and is a bit on the cheaper side of things. The Mistral Screamer 116L might be an even better board and almost as cheap. Another option for slightly more volume would be the Mistral Explosion 130L. Two more boards I would consider are the Tiga Free-X and Hifly Free 118. Pricing has changed over the years: back when I used to drool about buying a new production board, Mistral were at the tops in design and price while I’m pretty sure that Hifly was a cheapish brand. Nowadays Mistral is priced very competitively (30 percentile?) while from what I’ve seen, Hifly might be the most expensive. When reading board specs and reviews, I also wanted to find an F2 board that suited my purposes. I used to drool over F2 boards, wishing I had a Sunset Slalom or Comet. I also coveted the Mistral boards such as the Tarifa.

One interesting thing about production board prices is how much they dropped over the years. A good quality brand name board in 1988 would have cost about $1200, which is probably equivalent to $2100 in today’s dollars. Nowadays all of the top brands sell for between $1300 and $1700, which gives you a 15lbs board and G10 epoxy fin.

I most likely won’t be getting a board unless I manage to sell something for cash, make some money in stocks or basically get rundown and stressed out to the point that if I don’t do more activities I go crazy. I’m not there yet but you never know!