The desire to boost windsurfing’s popularity has people discussing all manner of slick marketing ploys. Harty reckons it’s basically in good shape – it just has to be less annoying. 

Depending on when you joined the party, you may or may not know that the early 80s saw a boom unprecedented in any water sport before or since.

Amongst the facts to amaze are that, in 1982, France had over 2000 windsurfing shops.

In Holland 1 in 3 families owned a board. 100,000 people turned up to watch the 1983 round of the world cup in La Torche, Brittany.

Robby Naish was voted as the 2nd most popular sporting figure in Germany – just behind Boris Becker. 

On a more personal note, in the same year I was selling on average 10 boards a week from out of a disused container on the shores of a gravel pit in Maidenhead.

The clubhouse consisted of one portable toilet and a mouldy two-man caravan. It was a working pit and on the hour a gravel barge would chunter through the fleet stopping for no man, least of all a floundering beginner.

Among the other attractions were the fish that were asphyxiated by the churned up mud and lay dead and rotting at the water’s edge.

Yet, on a typical Sunday morning, over 500 people would queue up at the gates from 9 a.m. to bag a launching spot on the muddied banks. 

But by the turn of the new decade, the numbers began to drop off and, since then, delegates from various arms of the sport have convened intermittently to discuss how we might return to the ‘boom years.’

Another think tank is scheduled for a month’s time. (It was held and Pete was there with us all. Can you guess what the outcome was? Ed.) Be careful what you wish for I say.

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If the sport had continued to grow at the same rate of 1983 (about 150% p.a.), we would have run out of people to sell to.

At the very hint of a Force 4, hospitals, power plants and police stations would shut down, the wheels of industry would cease to turn, anarchy would reign as everyone in the country took a sickie and headed for the water. I jest – but only a little bit. 

Boom years are only great in retrospect. It was incredibly exciting to grow with a new sport, but, as a raft of new companies sought to stick their noses in the trough, the kit became ever cheaper and tackier  – sadly not in an ‘easier-to-tack’ way.

And the true enthusiasts were soon outnumbered by those who were only doing it because it was trendy and everyone else was. 

Cool? (Whatever that is…)
One of the aims of the forthcoming think tank is to conjure up ways to make windsurfing cool again. Surely doing something ‘because it’s cool’ immediately makes it uncool?

The very act of trying to be cool is uncool. It is almost impossible to be cool and massively popular (Perhaps Keith Richards is an exception).

If something is exhilarating and gives you massive pleasure, it really doesn’t matter whether a lifestyle magazine run by an androgynous, urban editor registers it as cool, because it will be cool to you.

Too Difficult  … or just annoying?
The critics still say windsurfing is too difficult. Did you take up windsurfing because it was easy? I didn’t think so.

A comment I hear time after time on clinics where strangers from all parts of the globe are thrown together (often into the same bed if the rooming plans go awry) is what nice people windsurfers are.

It’s because they still have a grip on a former reality and understand the simple equation of effort and reward. The more you have to work for something the more you value and treasure it. 

They relish a challenge and have the grit and character to stick at it, often through some dark, cold days. 

Readers of this magazine – you’re special people. I hope you know that. One-metre-wide boards and tiny fully-battened sails setting on carbon masts – I’m not sure you can make windsurfing much easier at entry level.

But I do see an area where we can improve massively. It’s not to make it less difficult – but less annoying. It doesn’t have to be easy to do, but it should be easy to get to do.

In these days of shrinking fun hours, anything that forces you to waste time pfaffing about, is deeply irritating and sufficient to persuade a likely candidate to spend his leisure dollar elsewhere. 

Convenience
Vassiliki, on the Greek island of Lefkas, is a time warp. Visit between the months of June and September and it’s like the 80s – but with baggier shorts.

Why? Because there’s no pfaffing. Walk out of your hotel room, grab a board and a ready rigged rig, launch straight onto windy (mostly) water and go out where lots of others are doing it.

When finished, drop kit near water’s edge and go to bar. Repeat daily. People fall in love with windsurfing in Vass and return to the UK determined to persevere.

But then it can be like that holiday romance you try to take to the next stage. You meet the lover back home and discover she likes classical and you like punk. She’s a carnivore, you’re a veggie. She chews gum and eats with her mouth open – all gnawing habits you failed to notice under the Mediterranean moonlight. 

When you have to get it all sorted yourself, source and rig kit and find somewhere to do it, windsurfing, that amazing sport you did on holiday, can be equally annoying. It’s sublime in so many ways these days, but kit still lies at the heart of the problem.

A windsurfing friend of mine, Brian Coll from Ireland, lectures on communication. He talks about ‘information in the world’ and ‘information in the head.’ A good design, he says, reveals its function.

For example, by looking at a door you should know whether to push or pull without the need for a sign. That’s information in the world. But even basic windsurfing kit is very quirky.

With its pulleys, clamps, poppers, screws, bolts, it’s confusing and all too easy to assemble badly. You need to be told. That’s information in the head.

So I threw a little questionnaire out there to garner a few more opinions on how windsurfing could clean up its annoyance act and ducked as a torrent of suggestions clogged the inbox.  Here are three off the top.

“Changed brand last year and now all my fins are unusable. Why can’t we have just one system? And surely there’s a better design than the US box? So fiddly. I lose about 100 plates a year in the grass and mud.”

“I love it all but it’s just the size of the stuff and my tiny shed that nearly pushed me to the dark side. If inflatable boards could really perform, I’d have one tomorrow.”

“I never really know how to rig. I follow the instructions but they’re just too vague. Too many options for me. That’s why I like windsurfing holidays – all done for you!”

Well to all of you and your friends thinking of taking it up, rest assured that by the end of our next meeting, it’ll all be sorted.   

PH 

PIC: 1991. Harty posturing in the post-boom decade.

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