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Chris 249 said..
Great stuff, Pacey. I've got one or two copies of that Windsurf mag some of those pics came from in the shed.
I confess to getting a bit melancholy when I see the state of the sport these days and think of the late '70s and early to mid '80s. We were so optimistic at that time, and had reason to be. The sport was growing so fast and the age of excess was yet to dawn.
Yes it was an great time, the pace of development was amazing. From the time I started Windsurfing in 1977 until 1984 the sport and the equipment changed radically, and while boards and sails have improved dramatically since then, the rate of change in those first few years of custom boards was huge.
For me the starting point was meeting Mark Paul in 1978. I was sailing on Pittwater in a very fresh southerly on a stock windsurfer (full sized daggerboard and no harness) and he sailed past me doing 3 times my speed on a custom board with footstraps. I was stunned, I'd never seen anything but stock windsurfers before, as there were virtually no custom boards anywhere in the world at that time.
I stopped to watch, and he sailed over and asked me if I wanted to try his board. His board was still big enough to stand on and uphaul, although pretty tippy, but once I sheeted on and managed to get my feet in the straps I was hooked, I couldn't believe how fast it was. After tracking him down later and getting some design and construction details, I built a board for myself (10'6" long x 26" wide, epoxy, kevlar and divinycell sandwich over a styrofoam core) over the following month in Freddy Phillip's factory in Mona Vale.
That board was seriously fast compared to anything else that was around, other than some of the few boards built by Mark Paul and Mike McGuire, so after spending a few months sailing around passing every other boat and board on the water I got the idea into my head to go to England, build a board and do Weymouth Speed Week.
Some of the inspiration was the stepped speed board Mike McGuire built for Scotty O'connor to sail at the speed trials held at Maalaea Bay in Maui in either 79 or early 1980. Called "Dart Vader" it had a deep V forward section and a deep step about 3 feet from the tail:
At the time no-one had figured out that water starting was feasible on a really small board, so all the speed boards were built within the constraint of being big enough to stand on and uphaul, or started by stepping on in shallow water. We knew we had to reduce wetted surface area and get higher aspect planing surfaces, so the deep stepped hull approach was attractive.
I sailed the Laser Worlds in Canada in 1980 and afterwards headed to London to build a board for Weymouth. I tried the same approach initially, building a wide flat board with a 3" step in London and first tested it at Grafam Water. It was fast in the flat water but bounced terribly in any chop and ventilated the fin atrociously and spun out whenever it got the chance. Quite scary to sail in its first setup.
I took it back to the workshop and put some fences on the fins before heading to Weymouth the following week. Once there discovered that the fences worked beautifully, the spinout had gone and it was reasonably docile as long as the water wasn't too rough. The sail was reasonably advanced for it's time - instead of the pinhead sails everyone else was using, I put a square head and reasonable roach with battens onto a relatively short, stiff mast and low-aspect rig. This worked quite well for downwind speed courses.
Unfortunately Weymouth at that time was still using the circular course in the middle of Portland Harbour, rather than the Chesil Beach course used in later years. As a result the course was very lumpy if the wind was over 15 knots, and only one boat/board could be on the course at a time as they were still using stopwatches, pen and paper for timing. So getting more than half a dozen runs in a day was difficult, and being lucky enough to get a patch of steady strong wind and flat water was almost impossible. And being on a board that loved flat water and hated chop was not a strategy for success. Even so, I still managed to finish fairly high in the rankings, so I was hooked into coming back the following year with something even more radical.
sailquik
> 9 months ago, 11 Oct 2017
. They have obvious twist and were slightly flatter in the upper sail. Looked very stable also!
