First attempt at Windsurfing

The first time you attempt windsurfing, you wonder how it can even be possible. The experienced boarders are racing over gentle waves and medium winds at many miles per hour with sails and boards of varying colors, materials and dimensions, plumes of white water following in their wakes. Men and women of all ages and expertise are out here today shooting past me with such apparent ease that I’m excited that I might be able to learn to do this. Each graceful voyager reaches the endpoint of his or her range and then flips the sail around with one quick arm twist, stepping around the mast on an ocean-slippery and bouncing board to careen along again in the other direction. Many have harnesses attached to the booms from their waists in a classic position - recommended for experienced surfers only.

The variety and conditions of boards, sails, center boards or their absence, as well as the human stances and positions on different areas of the board depending on skill and conditions shows how each person follows different pathways towards differing goals. Some people want high velocity at all costs, while others desire a more controlled ride. Some want the board to fly through the air, others want it to plane over the water with just the rudder or skeg touching. There is a board for every range of skill and pocketbook. Some of the people here bring several boards and sails for different conditions.

I get acquainted with a retired couple who have equipped their trailer specifically for the sport. Sailing together every weekend in the summer, they have sailed for over 15 years. Today their trailer carries a dozen boards and sails for different conditions, several wetsuits, booms, masts, harnesses, helmets and a toolbox filled with accessories and hardware. She likes a short and wide board with a medium sized sail and wears a purple helmet. He won’t go out unless the wind is at least 10 miles per hour, and carries a wind meter to check its speed. He watches her today from a chair on the beach next to a table containing a backgammon board: he says the wind is too light and it’s not exciting enough to sail.

A very slender young lady from Germany brings a beach chair and reads or talks on her cell phone waiting for the right conditions: it’s not windy enough to provide the challenge she prefers today.

I borrowed my to-be-husband’s board and his advice to learn how to windsurf this summer. It was a 20 plus year old board, probably the oldest here this weekend, with a few dings and dents in it but absolutely indestructible, as I found out sailing directly into a buoy with it. The sail and mast were heavier than normal, created before the days of lightweight carbon composites requiring less weight for sail, mast and booms.

It was a good beginning, I thought, after three days of trial and error, and I was really having a lot of fun. I watched a young man being taught by a pro on a newer and more stable board, who sailed better on his first day than I on my third. While they were still in range I learned some tips that helped. For instance, it makes a great difference to the rider the position the hands on the boom takes, and also the distance of the boom from the center of gravity. It was not intuitive, certainly. There were some basic rules and I could learn a lot from a class. But not today.

On my very first day I knew very little, with a partner who was still learning and hadn’t been out on his board since his children were teenagers more than 20 years ago, who could offer only a couple of his gleanings. He also had never had a lesson, but was able to sail around the cove and back, falling off very occasionally. All I wanted was to get up on the board, get the sail up out of the water, and take a few short sails around the cove.

It was a perfect day for a beginner: warm with a relatively steady 8 mile an hour wind and a beach littered with windsurfers and windsurfing gear. I was ready to give it a try.

Imagine small ripples of water on the bay side of the ocean, with no big crashing waves, and the surface almost as calm as a small lake. The wind is blowing so lightly that a flag waves gently on a pole. This is a perfect day for you to learn to windsurf.

You push board and sail away from shore until it’s about thigh deep. Your sail is downwind lying in the water (if it’s a big one) and your boat is upwind. You hop on the boat from upwind. The tiny waves are bouncing the board up and down while you attempt standing on it with the board parallel to the waves. You pull on a knotted cord called an uphaul to raise the mast carrying the sail, which is lying in the ocean in front of you who are now squatting on the board. Smaller sails and more stable boats can start with the sail out of the water but this is an old, heavy sail and board. On a newer, lighter model, you can easily hold the sail straight up over the boat as you walk into the water, and when you’re deep enough to clear the rudder, also known as the skeg, merely step onto the board and sail away. In my case, with a heavy older sail, keeping your knees bent and back straight rather than hunched forward, you pull the uphaul cord slowly up, allowing the water to slide off the submerged sail to lighten it enough to pull it out of the water bit by bit. Your hands grip the furthest knot, then moving through the knots, one by one as the water falls off the sail. You have started out using your legs and leaning backwards to let your body weight pull the sail out of the water, which seems to weigh a ton. By the time it is fully out of the water, it weighs less than twenty pounds, and perhaps ten. Now you straighten it by resting one hand on the sail mast to fully upright, between your feet, with the waves still rolling beneath you, and you are wondering how to possibly keep your balance. Up and down, constantly the waves are moving, carrying you vertically and horizontally towards shore and forward slowly in the direction of the wind. Your tiny steps bring the forward foot slightly backward, keeping the boat balanced with as little turbulence as possible from your motions. Now comes the big moment: it’s time to catch the wind in your sail. You open the sail an inch or two, like opening a fun-house door, worried what you may find when it is fully open. Put your outer hand on the boom at shoulder level several inches from the mast. Remove the other hand from the mast to the boom a few inches from your other hand as you open the sail an inch or two. This is also known as opening the door a crack…

Falling off the board several times when attempting this feat, in spectacular splashes, you’ve swallowed the equivalent of a half of a cup of salt water, but you keep getting back on and trying again because you think, if I try harder I will get it right. This results in escalating smaller to larger triumphs, interspersed with swallowing a lot of the ocean from falling backwards and sometimes getting pushed underwater with the sail falling on top of you. Your stomach feels a bit queasy as you regain your stance on the bouncing board again and again to attempt what seems to be impossible. Finally you hang on with the sail up. When the sail catches the wind it pulls the board with you standing and trying to shift your feet back a few inches without rocking the board and falling off. Your concentration and tension sharpen to a point of almost spiritual clarity while you inch both hands further sideways on the boom, leaning back with arms stretched out in the classic seven position, and by some miracle you sail several feet, maybe even a dozen. This is great! The water makes a whooshing sound as the board slices through and over it, a rushing torrent under and over your feet. Exhilaration is short-lived however, because you are so surprised to be actually sailing that you forget to feel with your feet the rolling waves and lose your balance. Or, you are unable to compensate quickly for the variable gusting of the wind whose period of motion is unpredictable. The split second change in wind velocity requires your entire concentration. You will still pitch off easily, because you cannot react quickly enough. It’s too fast a change to adjust your stance adequately. Your muscles have to learn to accommodate these wind gusts second by second, with the sail in any of a number of different positions. If there is any wave action, the complications double with keeping the board from tipping. All the experienced boarders speak of muscle memory to learn this sport. Your muscles, from your arms, through your shoulders, back, legs and feet, are balancing the weight of your entire body on the board in a stable center of gravity, while holding the sail in a position allowing you to move the board in control without falling off.

You fall off and submerge again and again. You look around, ocean water pouring out of your nose. The other surfers are zipping through the water at what looks like a hundred miles an hour. They may offer you useful tips after they’ve seen you a few times. You watch them, listen, try it and believe it. You want to experience that ecstasy of sailing along the water at any speed again so you get back on to try it again.

There’s nothing that comes close to the sensation of sailing through the water. You keep trying until you’re so tired you must stop, and with legs rubbery from overuse, you stagger out of the water to rest, dry off, drink fluids, and browse on a sandwich or two. Watching the surfers zooming along the water seemingly effortlessly, you can’t wait to get out there and try it again.

Like many great discoveries, the first person to try the sport did not know that it was impossible. In the late 1940s Newman Darby found he could steer a conventional 3 meter sailboat by tipping it fore and aft enough to make turns even without a rudder. Several sailboards and 2 1/2 decades later (1964) he designed the first universal joint to go along with a flat bottom sailing scow. Fitted with a universal joint mast, a centerboard, tail fin and kite- shaped free sail, he and his wife Naomi Darby built and designed the first sailboard. Windsurfing was born. In 1968 sailor/engineer Jim Drake and surfer/skier Hoyle Schweitzer filed for the first patent on a design called a Windsurfer, based upon Darby's original ideas and fully crediting him with its invention. The early Windsurfer boards measured 12 feet long and weighed 60 pounds. Today’s models are considerably lighter and shorter, and most don’t have a centerboard. In the 1980s, Darby received a design patent for a one-person sailboat, the Darby 8 SS sidestep hull (from: The Birth of Windsurfing by Newman & Naomi Darby at http://www.computerknowhow.com/darbyweb).

My board was a two decade, obsolete 11’7” long by 2’ 1” wide older boat built in the early days when surfboard shapes were considered hydrodynamic. Unstable when you added a sail, the design changed over the years towards much shorter and wider shapes, with quality controlled material characteristics like density. The current sales brochures contain no long boards like this. Our board did not come with instructions, and we tied the boom, harness lines and sail in place the way they looked like they should go. Over several days of sailing in front of the same folks, we were shown the correct intricacies for tying and placement. It was interesting how the lines holding the sail in place locked down when you threaded them through the machined holes in the boom, and how tightly you could pull when you used a mechanism specifically created to do so. We learned about a tool you can buy to tighten the lines, bringing to the sail a stiffer and more efficient face to catch the wind.

Having sailed six times at the same beach, and talking to several veterans of the sport, I talk with a woman in her early fifties who is an acknowledged expert. She tells me that no matter what bad mood she paddles out there with, the exhilaration of a sail removes it totally from her consciousness. The soft caress of the wind sliding you over the water on the board even on the first day was such a mind-altering experience that I know this must be true. As I plan my weekends in the future to windsurf all summer, checking wind speeds and weather forecasts over the Net, I know I was already converted to the sport that very first day.

I thought of how easy it would have been on one of the new boards with shorter, lighter sails, with a teacher showing me how it’s done. I had learned on a tippy, obsolete long board with a massively heavy sail, little instruction but lots of motivation. I didn’t regret one moment of it, even falling off and swallowing sea water.