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A Blast from the past
By Laurie Nadel



And I was not alone. As a popular 1980s bumper sticker put it, "Happiness is a hand-held sail". Soon, thousands of people around the country were getting swept into the romance and excitement of floating on the surface of the water, holding onto the wind, enjoying the colorful geometry of those flashing, rainbow-colored, cloth sails.

Although the original, twelve and a half foot long boards themselves weighed in at ii cumbersome, tortuous fifty-five pounds, they were floaty and stable riders. And those sails., which we would laugh at today, could be rolled around your mast, like a flag, instead of needing to be babied and battened each time. (If you found yourself contending with too much wind, you could pull the rig out of its slot, untie the boom, and roll the sail around the mast, positioning your rig along the length of the board, so

that, as you paddled back to safety you kept everything together.) Even if you didn't like rigging, it was a good way to make friends, as we would often stop to talk, and watch, helping each other get the hang of it. Many a more experienced sailor would take time to initiate a frustrated novice into the unique mysteries of duct tape. (Like Yoda's proverbial force, duct tape has a dark side and a light side, and yes, it holds the universe together-the windsurfing universe, anyway.)

This shared feeling, that we were all learning something new, together, made those early years of windsurfing seen both a party and a celebration, where each of us discovered and tested our own strengths, focus, humor, persistence, and limit. And then went past what we had done before.

As the spirit of windsurfing spread, our population expanded. In less than a decade, we grew from thousands to more than one million. By 1987, there were 1.2-million people windsurfing in the United States, according to the National Sporting Goods Retailers' Association. The excitement of those early days held a certain innocence. We were pioneers, in a sense, discovering the contours of new water the way our forefathers went forth across new land. It didn't matter what kind of contraptions we used-my own first sailboard was a three-piece monster from Germany called a "Shark". Before each session. it had to be assembled with various metric nuts and bolts, then taken apart at the end of the day. With its heavy teak daggerboard, two piece aluminum mast, and stainless steel rods, the Shark would bring on howls of laughter if I brought it to am windsurfing beach, today. But, like the original Windsurfer, the Shark proved itself worthy the wind called from the high trees.