Driving home on saturday after a day on the water I started to think about that moment when I knew windsurfing was going to be my thing...
I was 12, on summer holidays staying at Paynesville and a mate from the caravan park brought a Windsurfer One Design with him. 3.65 metres, 20 kilos, giant 6.5 metre RAF sail....it was the duck's guts!
I remember hauling this barge of a thing down to the lake and spending an entire day getting up , trying to uphaul, falling in, repeat. This went on the next day and by the third day I could get going in a straight line with the dodgiest manhandled tacks to get the board around!
Anyway , late in the arvo, I was just crusing along when a knock came through.
With 0% control I held on and leant out as far as I could. I expected to be catapulted and mashed, but bugger me if the board didn't take off and start planing!.
To this day I can rewind back to that point and hear the hum of the board and feel that rush.
Anybody else remember??

Her name was Caroline... oh, wait, wrong topic.

A friend had a flatmate with a board back in Christchurch in 1979 and we borrowed it one day and took it out on a weedy swampy farmers pond in what must have been 25-30knots on a cold grey day. We flip flopped all over that pond for about three hours and got nowhere, neither of us having a clue what to do.

A week or two later I tried again at the mouth of the Avon on the estuary on a sunny 5-10 knot day and to my surprise sailed it straight across the river and back without falling in. I was hooked. A few weeks later I traded down my beloved MkII Jaguar to a VW beetle and used the balance to buy my first windsurfer - the one in my avatar. Lived and breathed it for about 6 years then got out (lack of time and money and getting a bit bored with big boards), only to get totally re-hooked 23 years later!

After lifting this beast (with the help of others).

Remember it well...it was only a few years back.
Had been attempting to learn along with a mate on his 165lt GO & uphaul the sail on & off for a few weeks during summer with near-no wind, not worrying about the failed attempts as it was pretty hot & the constant dips in the sea kept me cool. We both decided to go out on a gusty hot noreaster and I was just mucking around in our harbour when a huge gust hit, and as said earlier...I decided to try to hang on, hanging off the boom...got my first taste of planing! Quickly decided that it was too fast & I didn't know how to stop, so I bailed! haha...hooked ever since. (I still bail sometimes, but not as often & only in big gusts when I can't sheet out my cammed sail!)

My first experience of windsurfing was hiring a board at Kalbarri. This looks like fun I thought. There was no instruction, it wasn't a beginner's setup and it was windy. I'd never done any sailing before and was doing things like uphauling with the sail on the upwind side of the board and of course getting the sail blown down on top of me. I got nowhere. All in all it was a frustrating and very disappointing experience.

The Eureka moment came when I was organising a sailing camp for Camp Quality. The kids were out having their first windsurfing lesson and I said to the instructor "I must give that another go one day", and he said "grab a board and hop on".
It is amazing what a difference a small sail, light wind and some good instruction make. The kids were really keen to see me fall in, but I didn't want to be outdone by a group of 10 - 16 year olds so I tried really hard and found I could uphaul, stay on, and tack and gybe. The kids were really impressed (and having always been useless at anything sporting I was very proud of myself). At the end of the week I was aching all over but I didn't want to stop windsurfing so I went out and bought my own board.

I wanted to hire a sailing dinghy in Greece and they only had windsurfs.
When I got back to the UK i sold my Laser & 470 and got an old longboard.

I'd known months before that windsurf was the way forward and I was just waiting for the right weather to do the learning curve (not the UK winter)

The critical moment, still subplaning, was when I managed to go from balancing by standing up straight on the board and just holding the sail to fully commiting my weight to the sail and balancing by sheeting in & out. It was like first getting a bicycle going and realising that your forward momentum is actually helping and making it easier.

Oh, and first getting to FULL planing, when everything suddendly slowed down and went all Matrix on me and the physics of the whole thing changed in an instant