no arguments there! with no mainstream media coverage to expose people to our chosen passion, it's up to us. we all know the addiction factor, just a matter of getting someone else to get a taste of it, and they're off. just a bugger it's so frustrating to learn, but i think the keys are the right gear and conditions. i learnt back in the mid eighties on an original wally, in about 4-5 knots, got going and tacking, (was sailing dinghys which helped), and have been hooked ever since (except for about 10 years where i became addicted to rockclimbing, but all the time having this thought in the back of my mind that it wasn't as good as windsurfing). anyway, lets help and all get someone hooked by the end of summer!

yer i got one of my mates into it. the only problem is that it is very hard to teach my mates becaus kids my age get frustrated very easily as all teenagers do, and tend to give up to easily. I also dont want him using my expensive gear, so the old gear with old sails and heavy 'fiberglass masts' and 'booms' probably isnt ideal either.

I think the problem these days is how expensive all the gear is. It is a very hard sport to get into when you have to spend the kind of money needed to get a good rig these days. Now days most teenagers like me are going off to surfing because it is cheaper and easier to find leassons and what not. It also ties in with skating a bit more, sadly.

I also think that it is much easier to teach people when they are younger and can use tiny sails without drifting down wind as much and having to walk back up wind. My dad taught me when i was very young as he also didnt with my older brother. So yer. i think it is much better to teach your kids when they are very young and get them into it early like my dad did with me, because i am still finding it much slower and more difficult to teach my mate now he is older.

But none the less, i think for the sport to grow would be great especially down here in SA where theres realy only two stores. Its very hard to find good gear at a good price here so a growth in the sport would hopefully provide a larger market and would be great.

hi guys,

almost everyone i know that has gotten their kids into windsurfing has done it by either towing them around or sitting them up the front of the board. so they get a taste for it and want to try it themselves. 5-8 years of age seems to be the most popular.

i am looking at developing a windsurfing library to help with the gear issues as well. check out the Windsurfing Library post...

cheers.

kecksoff:
I started when i was about six or seven but my mum and dad made me have swimming lessons before i started, and i always had to ware a lifejacket and things like dat. just to be safe around deep water. I also learnt on a 260l, T.C beacher with a 2.0 triangle sail. made things very easy. Got up very early in the morning to miss the wind aswell. My dad didnt tow me around at all or anything like that, but when i was up hauling the sail he would hold the board still, and point it in the right direction for me, which was very helpful for starting.

butchyboy191:
i think you just got to keep and eye out for learning gear. sometimes over the summer theres quit afew learning rigs that come up on the tradingpost. My friend that im teaching got his for free through family friends and i know my grandpa and uncle both have gear that they never use. Quite afew people who own shacks around the place have them sitting in the shed from about 20 years ago. thats what my dad had done to his but as soon as my brother and i said we wanted to learn he was stoked.

How much are you looking to spend by the way? I've seen them round realy cheap. Bit of luck involved aswell.

Down at Iron Cove in Sydney, we've got about 30+ people into the sport in the last year or so. The gear mainly comes from Macquarie University Windsurfing Club, with vital assistance from Dobroyd Aquatic Club and Windsurfing NSW.

The new sailors have mainly come from the local sea scout group, the Dobroyd Aquatic Club dinghy fleet, and Macquarie Uni. Unfortunately many of them are overseas students who have since returned home, but when the twilight season starts we'll have dozen or more sailors who have got into the sport over the past year or so. In fact we've started twilight sailing well before daylight saving starts, because some of the kids and uni students are so keen. We've only had about half a dozen people give up; about 8 now have their own boards (most of the rest are uni students who use uni boards, or kids who use their parents').

We're normally using Wallys with the Barracouta 3.5 and 4.5 sails (the Wally with these sails is now the AWA's official under-15 board), which make the board much, much easier to learn on. We know that widestyle boards have their advantages but in our environment the One Design works better, and many of the problems of old gear for beginners are down to the sails rather than the boards. And the Wally is so cheap that sailors can get slalom, wave, freeride or FW gear as well.

The sport may never be as big as it used to be, but someone reminded me a while ago that it was almost too big in the '80s....it was crowded, impersonal, and there were too many people in it for the image. With a bit of work and the sort of thinking and cooperation we're seeing now, in a few years we could end up with a sport better than it has ever been before.

Hey Gestalt love the WS library idea!!!! I am so so annoyed that whilst the gear has become MUCH better for learning on, the tradeoff is that it is too expensive for most..... even secondhand. That is, many ppl can afford it, but they cannot risk $$$$ on it (they think 'what if I hate it...?' )

Butchyboy and sailhack... I am in WA but if you were here I'd give you some stuff for free in an instant. NEW recruits to our sport is unfortunately dying in the face of an onslaught from the (gay) yo yo cuzzy bro backwards-cap wearing sports like kitesurfing and BMX & MX freestyle / skating which are cool because they are seen on MTV / Gravity Games / Today Tonight / the back of a weeties packet in the school canteen.... all because WS still has the 1970's 18ft long, narrow board, 5knots sub planing image that it started with.

ANYONE here in S.A, or east coast, who can support these guys with some free sh!t? Fight the subversive teabagger skate-park half-pipe MTV "Yo yo mah bro wassuuup!!!!" board shorts over the wetsuit Fiddy Cent mentality and help these new windsurfers out fellas!

Peace.

actually, Ill just add here as well, those of you who have seen the whole snow ski/ snowboard era will understand this, skiing was too old school in the late eighties early nineties, anyone new to the snow snowboarded, simple.

Now, skiing is the new cool, those loyal to skiing stayed skiers, now all the new blood is skiing. Why? more freedom to enjoy the sport, you can access more places on skis, you can traverse to get into thew trees etc.

lets make this happen with windsurfing.

quote:

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Originally posted by Chris 249



When the sport had the "1970's 18ft long, narrow board, 5knots sub planing image that it started with" it was the fastest-growing sport in the world. Sydney had 26 shops or something. We got used to working windshifts from the downdraft of TV camera choppers overhead in the big pro races. You had trouble getting space rigging up.

Then it all died. Why? A growing number of people reckon the extreme image that developed is a lot of what killed. The extreme image came around partly because high-performance windsurfing is so much fun we tend to think it's the only part of the sport, and partly because there was a concerted effort from some misguided people in the industry to diss "old style" windsurfing just so they could get people to buy new gear.

Problem is, that Joe and Joanna Average don't want to seem daggy and and (in the eastern states, at least) they can't do the extreme stuff when they only get away to sail at their local beach every week or two. For a start, if (like most people) you can sail one afternoon per week, there's not much chance you'll get into the waves very often.

Why push the extreme side when the extreme sports are fairly small in terms of participation? Netball, soccer, walking etc are all vastly more popular than any extreme sport. The national annual survey on sports sponsorship (Sweeney report) makes the point there's not much of a link between a sport's publicity and its participation.

Look at surfing - longboards dominate around the world in terms of boards sold because they're cruisey and easy and you don't need good conditions. Look at sailing - the simple cheap boats (Lasers) are getting record fleets, the "extreme" side (Sydney-Hobart, skiffs) isn't doing so well. Both of the sports windsurfing evolved from tell us the same message - what people want is simple, accessible stuff they can use any day. We need to push windsurfers that are like that, as well as the "extreme" side.

Look at the sports you mention - kitesurfing, BMX & MX freestyle/ skating. They're not just cool, they're fairly easy to get into. My kids want to go skating, they walk out the door....they want to go wavesailing, they'll have to drive 50 minutes and hope like hell the wind will be at the right strength from the right direction with the tide right and the swell right. Skating is way older than windsurfing, mountain bikes aren't much older - but you don't rely on having the right winds.

Fact is, extreme sports are much less popular than non-extreme sports, so why promote just the extreme windsurfing?

If you want to get kids in, it's fairly easy. Our kids' "programme" is based on old-style windsurfing*, and it's limited only by board storage and instructors/coaches.....the kids (and parents) and uni students are dead keen and if we could handle more of them, we'd get more kids easily.


* "old-style" only in some ways. The sport has been pushing the high-performance thing for over 20 years, so that's not exactly new. Realising that it may have been wrong IS comparatively new.

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For anyone in S.A this may help to get started

Tradingpost South Australia:
Free Windsurfing Lessons - Come and try on Sat The 28th and Sunday the 29th Oct. Yachting Australia qualified staff. Contact West Lakes Wind surfing school for details WEST LAKES 0417-85 8641

butchyboy191

yer check out the trading post theres always something there. and you can always work prices down alot with that old gear.

also when you do get some good gear i found goolwa is a great spot to learn because you can touch for such along way out. I found learning at west lakes and places like that harder because i couldnt touch.

hope to seya round some time in the future

Agreed Bubs! If you could find a 2nd hand $100 2 piece carbon mast, a $50 1999+ model sail and using the old boom, then stick that on the TC beacher...
The lighter rig would be more user friendly, the newer sails leach out in a gust that would have sent someone using an old sail over the handlebars & perhaps discouraged them from continuing. Agreed that the old daggerboard boards keep a good line to give confidence in response to rig input.
I am concerned that windsurfers sold at "boot sales" for the $200 are worth far less than that, havig made the mistake when I entered the sport.
Information on the correct gear to invest at the start could give someone a real head-start in the right direction

yer. the old gear may not be as user friendly to start off on but i found that all i needed, and all my friends needed was a taste for the sport just to get us into it before having to spend big money.

When your learning in such light winds like i did, i didnt need a new sail with alot of give, because i never had gusts of anything like that to pull me over. however after about 2 years when i had been using my dads old gear for a while and at the time was probably sailing a 4.5 in about 7-8 knots of wind, i decided to invest in a newer sail (5.0 with cams) which was only $50 and was actually quite a nice sail (i only stopped using it realy about 2 years ago). I still used the sail on the old Beacher though, but started goin out it bigger winds in the arvo. When my dad and i decided that i was good enough to get a bit more lively board than a Beacher, i ended up getting a hole range of gear for $200(including a quite old Bombora board, a 75L fiberglass wave board which i still havnt used and a 4.0 to 4.5m wave sail). When i was finally going out in the afternoon sea breezes and things like that, only last year did i decided to spend big money and get some realy nice new gear which i love, and i agree is much nicer and easier to sail.

I think that if i had spent the big money first up i wouldnt have liked it as much because there is no way i could have learnt on my board for sure. I do not think the board has anything to do with learning as long as it is very stable. The Beacher may be very slow turning but for its price is ther prime learning board and i have still not found a more stable board. New sails are much nice to sail and maby to learn on but like i have said before the new gear is getting way to expensive and there is no real need for gear that good when you are in such little wind with no gusts. For the amount of times i changed my gear over in the learning process i would have spent thousands on dollars by now which i deffentaly cant afford. It was a rather long process for me to get where i am today, but i didnt sail very often and i took it very slowly so that i could get the most enjoyment out of the sport as possible.

My friend started learning on my dads old gear to get a taste for the sport and ended up realy likeing it. he has now ended up buying my old gear off me which i bought after i was going well on my dads old stuff. Now he is progressing just like me and when he becomes more compitent he will hopefully buy some realy nice modern gear like what i have now.

I do agree that people these days are asking way to much for that old gear. I dont think that my dad gear with all its sails and everything would be worth more that $150 but i have seen people around asking 2 or 3 hundred for the same kind of stuff. Every now and again they go cheap when people just want to get rid of them but i do think people are asking to much and people are paying to much for learning gear these days.

When i was learning, a store in S.A held grommy days and demo days around the place with gear there that everyone could use. i used to try out many different boards to find out what i realy liked. These sort of free things are not held in S.A anymore (i'm not sure about other states) which i think is a big loss to windsurfing, as that is what realy got me into the sport when i was real young.

Without these sort of things i have seen people who have bought old second hand gear to learn on by them selves, without much idea of knowing what to get. I have heard of people trying to learn with a 85L board and trying to up haul it but after afew goes giving it away straight away. The learning days that i use to go to, pointed me in the right direction and helped a huge amount which i think is absolutely vital. (I also think that the poeple who sell small boards to learners must have absolutely no morals what so ever.)