.COM - CYBERSAILING!

The tentacles of the internet are wrapped around our generation so tightly that most of us have no choice but to utilize the wonders of this global network of computers in our daily lives. Obviously the first thing any windsurfer should log onto every morning is windsurf.co.uk to start your day in a happy place! But as windsurfers we also have to be careful how frequently we use weather related web sites and windsurfing social media without letting it eat into our actual time on the water.

Words  & Photos  JOHN CARTER

Sure, the advent of deadly accurate forecasting, hour by hour swell models and web cameras at many beaches cuts out the guessing game compared to the old days, so we can be far more efficient with our road trips and sailing time. But conversely, many of us are guilty as charged by allowing our phones and devices to take over our lives with a virtual overload of unnecessary information which distracts us from actually focussing on the real issues and pleasures the world has to offer. Rather than soak up a sunset, chat on the beach or even be out there on the water, how many of us our obsessing ourselves with selfies, Facebook posts and Tweeting in exchange for living the moment? Surely now is the time to get a grip before this situation spirals too far out of control and we end up bogged down in that never ending feed of information being thrown at us every day? Of course the message here is not to ditch new technology completely but rather to embrace it and use it with diligence; there is a right time and a place for the internet, we just have to prioritize our moments and use it wisely. We decided here at Windsurf to recruit a panel of experts – Dr John Skye, Professor Chris Murray, Senior windsurfing research scientist Chris Pressler from continentseven.com and Lord Guy of the Cribb for some varied guidance on both the good and the bad of the internet and the first question we posed was:

WS: What actually is the internet?

Guy Cribb
Internet is communications! On a personal level I consciously make the decision to avoid it. It is easy to absorb more and more from it, but I have been in the fortunate position in Gnarloo, in the Western Australian outback, of having zero internet for two weeks, which is like hitting a reset button on your life. No internet means more time doing other things. It’s like leaping out of bed in the morning and doing something new. But on a business level, the internet globalised INtuition, the windsurfing forums around the world spread the goodness of my coaching and allowed me to have such a life. So without internet, Guy Cribb INtuition could not exist!

Chris Pressler
Technically the internet is hard to explain, but it is quite easy to use. Most of the children use it nowadays, even infants at 18 months scroll for their favourite baby song on YouTube. Just choose your device and favourite browser and then start to explore an infinite parallel world. It can be quite scary. The medium can make people addicted. Or it can become the only medium for answers in daily life. The internet often becomes the doctor, therapist, friend and guidance for wisdom. And that can be dangerous as the answers are often incomplete or incorrect.

Chris Murray
The internet is like, where all the computers in the world are connected together via a wire or Wi-Fi and that makes like a big web shape like a spider or nerves in a brain but the biggest web wraps around world-wide-web.

John Skye
The internet is the most useful thing ever, largely used for wasting huge amounts of time by people like myself. It shares information, which can be correct or incorrect, useful or useless.

Guy Cribb
I answer my emails in airports and on aeroplanes, so the message almost always starts with ‘so sorry for the late response but….’. Other than that I occasionally look at BBC news, classic cars or E-Bay. I only use Facebook to present galleries of images from INtuition courses, for me it is a one way broadcast not a communication, so I often don’t go online for days!

Chris Pressler
Honestly I don’t know. I visit so many different sites each day. At the moment I have the following tabs open: Continentseven, PWA website, Facebook, Google Maps, Leo dictionary, Wikipedia, Webcam Podersdorf and JamieOliver.com because Kerstin and me just cooked the recipe of the day, a Southern Indian vegetable curry. It was actually pretty tasty!

Chris Murray
I spend a lot of time refreshing Facebook, it has become a bit of an addiction. I look at BBC to check the news and Magicseaweed when I am checking forecasts!

John Skye
I wake up, open my eyes and check mails immediately on my phone in bed. Anything important from China needs to be dealt with very early in the morning before they go home. If there is nothing pressing there, I check the BBC news and sport whilst I eat my breakfast. Then more emails throughout the day. Then in the evening whilst Nayra watches some crap Spanish TV I surf pointlessly on my phone reading useless information about unimportant stuff.

WS: Has the global spread of the internet been a positive thing?

Guy Cribb
Absolutely! It has shrunk the world, globalised the youth, educated the
unreachable, it is squashing prejudice and modernising the old school, it is without a doubt one of the most defining moments in civilisation!

Chris Pressler
Of course, without internet our business Continentseven would not exist. If it is positive or not? – everyone needs to find that answer for themselves. But besides Continentseven, it provides possibilities I have never thought about. Just think about online maps. When looking for new spots or planning a trip I just zoom in the map, wherever I plan to go. The whole world is online. You can check out roads, beaches, points and much more. That’s a great help and it fascinates me, as I actually studied geography at university in Vienna.  But, if you look at it more critically, the internet for example takes away many hypes. People don’t have to go to trade shows anymore as they can read a lot about the latest products online. People don’t have to visit events at the beach as they can watch it on the web. People don’t even drive to their favourite spot anymore as they see a bad wind forecast on the internet or poor conditions on the live webcam. And maybe it would have been a great session because the wind showed up a bit later, but people still sit at home in front of the internet waiting for something to happen.

Chris Murray
Yes it is one hundred percent – I think it brings the world together. It makes every bit of knowledge or information just a Google search away from an answer. If you go on to YouTube you can even learn to be a belly dancer!

John Skye
I think the internet is a necessity, at least for me, although it will be fascinating to see where it ends up and what will happen in the future.

WS: Imagine a world without internet, how long could you cope?

Guy Cribb
I survived two weeks in Gnaraloo but to be honest I could last much longer! Fortunately I am not in the slightest bit addicted to the internet, although time apparently wasted on the internet has proven to be vital research for good decision making too.

Chris Pressler
I survived for twenty two years before the internet came along! I really enjoy hours and days without it. And nothing goes wrong if I am not online. As already mentioned, not being online is the privilege nowadays. I have no typical days as the internet is around me most of the time. I can use it whenever I want. What I definitely do every day is checking mails and respond to the most important ones, fly through the social media accounts and check some news or the wind forecasts.

Chris Murray
I survived two weeks in Baja in Mexico without the web; there were just scorpion spider webs out there! I think I am more addicted to staying in contact with people than the internet itself. I like to be nosey and to see what people are doing. I do waste a lot of time refreshing Facebook when no one is doing anything.

John Skye
Since the advent of the smart phone I feel physically sick if I am offline for more than an hour. I actually come in between windsurfing sessions and check my mails with wet hands.We once did a boat trip to the Savage Islands where there is only one satellite phone. That was one whole week completely disconnected and unfortunately corresponded with the big stock market crash in 2011. That trip put a very expensive end to my dreams of being a stock market king. I don’t know anyone that isn’t addicted to it in some way or the other. I am not a big addict of Facebook, but I need to check my mails regularly or it stresses me out.

WS: So has the internet changed the way sailors publicise themselves as pro’s?

Guy Cribb
The net allows me to communicate with my guests all over the world as a pro windsurfing coach, but as a pro windsurfer I have not used the internet
effectively to expand my potential, foolish maybe, but I really can’t be bothered!

Chris Pressler
I have been running my personal blog for many years now and report about my windsurfing life. Additionally I use the social media channels too. The internet gives me the chance to be present and I can decide when I want to be on or off the radar, I personally can plan and influence the visibility. I get the chance to publish things how I want them to be published, completely independent from the goodwill of magazine editors or editors from newspapers.

Chris Murray
Yeah before the Internet the only pros you knew where ones with a DVD. You had to buy it from a shop but as soon as YouTube came out, everyone was
making themselves stars on the internet!

John Skye
Ten years ago, being a pro was all about pictures in the magazines, maybe having a web page and producing a poorly edited movie once a year. Nowadays it is a full time job between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, plus you still need the magazine pictures, plus you now need a top quality Spielberg style windsurf movie produced at least once a month!

WS: Has the internet helped improve your windsurfing in any way?

Guy Cribb
No, because I haven’t spent any time watching other pro windsurfing videos online!

Chris Pressler
Yeah, definitely! Last year on Gran Canaria I tried to improve my back loops. Something went wrong in the air. I walked back to the apartment and went through several moves of other riders in the Continentseven database and realized quite quickly what was wrong. I remember when I got into windsurfing, it was extremely time consuming to order VHS windsurfing movies and the prices for one tape were quite high. Nowadays you just search for your favourite rider, your favourite style and you can start to watch a movie online within seconds. That fact can take away a bit of an excitement, as the internet creates a safe world, where all goods you are looking for are available on demand. Completely
unlimited online and available without any borders, it is too easy! You think about something, you search, you find, you watch, you order or just accept.

Chris Murray
Yes when new moves come out I can watch them in ‘slow motion’ over and over again, that is brilliant.

John Skye
The ability to watch the latest moves online is definitely a huge help to improving. If I am struggling with a move, I come back from the beach and usually watch a video online and see if I can work out what is going wrong.

WS: What’s bad about the internet?

Guy Cribb
The introverted new reality for some youngsters and the general distraction from what we formally knew as the great outdoors is bad, but it is generally recoverable by parental guidance and balance. Also deciphering between valuable and invaluable content is tricky.

Chris Pressler
That it’s not working everywhere and it still takes a fair amount of effort and costs money to make it work at isolated or remote places. I would love to own a private Continentseven satellite.The internet has answers to almost all questions, if they are correct is a different topic. And I am a character who is interested in many topics. It’s a never ending story. I try to avoid surfing the net too much. But I definitely waste a lot of time looking for internet connections during travelling. At the beginning, around year 2000, it was quite hard to get online. I walked several miles to get online once, but then had to eat at a relatively bad restaurant, because of the delicious internet, not of the food. I would say I waste freedom (free time) for the internet. Around ten years ago I tried to send little compressed jpegs from a former military camp in the Western
Sahara. It took ages to get the mails out; this was a massive waste of time.

Chris Murray
I feel like there is too much content these days. I feel swamped by a million videos and my attention span is very small now, .. not that it was ever that
big anyway!

John Skye
Sometimes I find myself completely side tracked without even realising it. I start off doing something work related, and then suddenly find that I spent literally hours watching pointless videos of people falling off skateboards or scrolling through pages of Facebook friends that you don’t even know doing boring things you don’t care about.

WS: Have you any embarrassing internet stories?

Guy Cribb
My email newsletter goes out to over 5000 windsurfers around the world, no one can click ‘reply all’, but once, for about one day only, somewhere in the background my internet gurus were fiddling with something and my guests could reply all. On this very day, the one guest who accidentally clicked reply all is one of the world’s richest men, … who until then was known as the ‘world’s most private billionaire…!’

Chris Pressler
Yeah, the info. on the internet claimed that a beach in the Pacific Ocean I was visiting had a shop and a restaurant. When we arrived there it had nothing, just a few fishermen and a couple, who had escaped the busy life in town. Exactly these people saved our lives as we were stuck 60 kms off the main road in a desert with a broken car, without food and water. Don’t trust the internet 100%. It’s not the expert and perfect travel guide all the time.

Chris Murray
Clearing your search history is the first thing to learn!

John Skye
My mum is brilliant at writing embarrassing comments on Facebook. I think she sometimes forgets that the whole world can read it and it’s not just an email to me personally. I also had a Facebook attack years ago from a “friend”, but I realised just in the nick of time and recovered it quickly.

SUMMARY

So there we go. Plenty of positives in there but most of that is easily balanced out by the negatives, so beware if you are one of those folk with your head down on your ipad, laptop or phone everywhere you go. There is a world out there, real life, real people and real experiences and excitement for everyone to enjoy. And any fellow parents out there: we are the ambassadors and role models to our children, so if every evening we are sat on the couch scrolling through the net on our smart phone then no doubt in time they will follow suit. Folk these days even scroll through their Facebook during a meal, while even at bars all the faces are only lit up by the glow of their smart phones! As windsurfers, we have the glorious coastline to explore nature’s wonders. Maybe next time you go, leave your phone at home or sling it in the back of the car and take yourself off the grid. Be social in real life and not online, surf real waves not the web and enjoy the moment without tweeting or sharing your frolics on Instagram. Social media ironically is pushing us apart not pulling us together; yes there is a time and a place for it but don’t forget those humble traditions that we should focus on in ‘real life’ and not the virtual world. Even the Motley Crew have pledged to attempt a whole mission going back to basics without phones or devices so watch this space. Muzza has even promised not to refresh Facebook for a full hour next Thursday! Yes together we can change the world!, yes, what a statement; I think I’ll post that up on Facebook! – Oops!

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