When surfing is gliding across the water, standing on the water, being pulled by an unseen force.
Wind surfing isn't really sailing. It's kind of a form of flying. It's like a one-winged creature.
This guy, he would take a little piece of cloth about this big like this with a couple of little poles,
and he would roll it up like this and put it in his shorts and go out surfing.
So he'd ride the wave in, and when he got in there and started having a paddle all the way back out,
he'd take this out, unroll it, and just sit there like this, and he'd get a free ride back out.
So that was the beginning of sailing surfboard.
Tom Blake was a young man from the north woods of Minnesota who happened to encounter Tukahana Moku,
and was inspired by Duke to follow his path and the Hawaiian path and learn the various water sports of Hawaii.
In the 1930s, he took one of these hollow boards and came up with the idea of putting a sail on them,
and thereby created, as far as we know, the first modern sailboard. Of course Blake didn't stand up on it.
We call it the thing sailboards. Maybe we could make those things and sell them.
So we decided we needed some publicity.
We decided the first people to contact was the California Surf Magazine.
So we sent a whole article that I wrote, and we did photographs and all sorts of things,
and sent it to the California Surf Magazine.
Finally they sent us a letter back that this is not surfing.
So I called the editor of popular science, and they just laughed.
They thought it was the funniest thing we ever heard.
I wanted to start with the wind and the water, the rules for which your physics is very well known,
and standing sail a surfboard.
And I knew all the forces were there. The question was whether a human being could control it.
In theory, and in my mind, I had it all figured out.
We were in a party at Hoyle's house. Jim was there, and they showed me a diagram of the windsurfing.
And I remember going to the Malibu Yacht Club, and I told them about it.
They said, oh, that's an old idea. We used to take beach umbrellas and sit on a big surfboard, but it doesn't work.
Here it is, and today is the day. Let's get it going. Let's see what it's going to work.
Well, the day itself was a big disappointment, just a big disappointment.
Maybe I'll go out and do it again, maybe not.
Well, the next time it succeeded, and it was simple.
Drake was a senior advisor for the Air Force, the Defense Department.
He just didn't have the time to devote to this.
Hoyle made a big gamble and made it a full-time thing for himself.
In 1969, this guy dragged this surfboard thing, and this plastic mast, and some big old wooden booms, and all this whole thing up into our little sail loft at San Francisco.
And it was Hoyle Schweitzer, and he wanted us to build 2,500 sails for this thing.
My boss, he just laughed and told him that nobody's ever going to do this. Are you crazy?
Well, the first time I saw a windsurfing, I thought, that's a neat idea.
And three of the sails were in this lagoon with the windsurfing, and we watched them flounder in there for about 45 minutes, and concluded, well, it looked like a good idea, but it simply doesn't work.
Most people didn't believe in it. If you just sold a windsurfer to a boat store, it would sit there for months.
It was only through passion, I think, from the Schweitzers that the whole thing grew the way it did.
Windsurfing could have died out, except for the fact that Hoyle said, I like this idea, I'm going to go for it.
So he's undoubtedly the father of windsurfing.
He kindled the fire and nurtured it and covered it when it rained.
It was very much their baby. They were in control, but it was very benevolent, and they just wanted everybody to have a good time, and they wanted to spread the word about windsurfing.
Early memories of the Schweitzer family was windsurfing stickers on their car, going to their house.
It was just an album of windsurfing everywhere he looked. It was their job, it was their love, like this thing.
That whole family spirit thing was part of the windsurfer culture, and I think Hoyle and Diane really helped to keep it that way.
It was like a little cult that just started growing. People would stop on the highway, pull over and go, what is that?
And you could just see it, like they wanted one right now, what is that?
They would tell them, this is windsurfing, this is the new sport, man. It's hot.
Kailua Bay was a real seminal proving ground for windsurfing. It's basically a flat water bay, but it is tantalizingly fringed by reefs that have waves.
So it was really a natural place to combine the flat water sport of windsurfing with the beginnings of wave riding.
That's exactly what happened there with the pioneers of Kailua Bay.
From the outside, somebody looking at us superficially might think, yeah, a bunch of hippies out there sailing around.
But if they got to know us, they saw that we weren't hippies that were enjoying windsurfing. We were windsurfers that were doing anything we had to to stay windsurfing.
And because of that, the lifestyle that we lived was more counterculture-like than your 9-to-5 working.
I didn't feel guilty at all about not having a real job or not pursuing a career.
Ring! Hello? Did it stand there? No. He's out testing equipment. That's his job.
You could always foresee how it should work. We want something to do this. How do we make it work?
And I can remember working 12 o'clock at night or later. Hey, you know, we're working on this thing.
It's a great idea and we're trying to come up with it because we want to try it tomorrow.
You'd change one thing and something else would change and so you'd change that thing and something else would change or maybe the first thing would change again.
He'd come up with an idea or I'd come up with an idea and the other guy would go bullshit on it and say, nah, put it on backwards and try it and it would work.
And so we were constantly chasing things around on the board.
That would lead to this and off to that and it's two o'clock in the morning and we're still working on it.
The development process and the learning process was really quick and these guys very rapidly got better than the equipment
and wanted to find ways to make it better for the conditions we had here, which was stronger wind, waves.
Jumping happened. It's not like I'm going to jump now. It's kind of like I'm going as fast as I can.
Landing was the key. You wanted to be able to land and sail away.
You were always falling off the windsurfer and I didn't want to fall off the windsurfer anymore. I wouldn't stay on the windsurfer.
Ooh, what if you did this?
It didn't even feel like I was on a windsurfer anymore. I was on a machine, a wave machine.
I knew the footstraps were going to work and man, did they.
With the stock windsurfer and all the little doodads that we built for them and custom sailed in our little harness,
at the time we thought, wow, this is it. This is killer. This is as good as it's ever going to get.
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na.
Those guys were great but they set the stage for Robbie Nash.
I thought windsurfing was kind of a dramatic curiosity and all that.
But when I saw Robby's go rocketing off the beach with such pristine cleanliness, you know,
and it was just amazing and I go, whoa, now I get it.
The first time I actually stood on a board, there was, I think, eight or ten wind surfers
at the time.
That's all that existed in the whole state, and I was too small at the time to even try
it myself.
So Mike Horgan would sail along and let go and let me continue sailing until I crashed
and then he'd swim over and lift the sail up again.
Stan and I both knew that we got something, that this kid's going to be good.
When I went to Berkeley to the Nationals, Mike Walts and Matt Schweitzer were there,
and that was like going and meeting God.
They were in the magazines and Matt was reigning world champion, and it was super cool.
Mike won, I got second, but I got a free trip to the world.
I think the rest of the world from the stuff I read, they thought his win was a big fluke.
A little blonde-haired punk coming there and beating these guys, you know, that looked
like they're Hercules and a windsurfer.
Next year he came back and Robbie won again.
We weren't there winning Sardinia or Berkeley or the Worlds or wherever Robbie went, but
he was kind of our boy, you know.
He was our club.
He was our windsurfer.
He was from Kailua, you know, so sure, we felt proud.
Robbie knew he wasn't anywhere near as good as all of these guys here, even though he
was world champion.
These guys were all much better sailors than he was, and I think they all knew Robbie was
very special, and then he had, you know, so much talent, but they never let him know that
he was that good.
The first time he won the Worlds, Robbie came down, you know, as world champion, and those
guys picked him up, carried him out to the end of the boat ramp, threw him in the water.
So there you go, world champion, you know, big deal.
They were very, very impressed, but they didn't let him know.
The great mystery of windsurfing is whatever happened to Arnaud de Rene.
He was egotistical.
He was driven.
He disappeared in 1984, and nobody knows where.
The first time he came into Kailua, he drove up to the shop and jumped out and introduced
himself, and he whipped out his portfolio and showed us all the famous people that he'd
slept or had been with, and all the neat things that he had done, and all of the things that
he had planned for the future.
He'd supposedly land sailed across the Sahara.
He had gone to India with the Beatles.
The only living person with a champagne named after them.
He was the backgammon champion of France.
Fashion photographer.
Totally tight with the Rolling Stones.
He was really a dynamic guy, and by God, I'm here now.
Let's get going.
He was very interested in the public being able to appreciate windsurfing.
He wanted to go fast because he thought that speed was something the public would understand.
I remember him having a big argument with Mike Waltz.
He said that, oh, you are like a clown who dances out in the waves and does silly things,
but I am a speed sailor, and I go through channels to other countries, and this is more
magnificent.
He was telling us that he was going to cross from U.S. to Russia, cross the Bering Strait.
Yeah, he wanted me to train him to do this, and we used to go off Diamond Head and sail
around, and he couldn't keep up, and he wasn't a very good sailor, and I was going, oh, my
God, this is hopeless.
But by the end of the time that he spent with us, he was a good sailor.
He had good equipment.
He knew his equipment, and he was still enthusiastic, and I began to think, well, maybe the guy's
got a chance.
Because he didn't know what he was up against, he just did it.
He ended up being arrested by the Russians, and within an hour, it won them over and was
having vodka and caviar and eventually flown back to Moscow.
From then on, it was just his intention to sail across all of these contentious straits
between Iraq and Iran, between Japan and Korea and Cuba and the United States.
He wanted to be a peacemaker.
I sort of figured that someday he would bite off more than he could chew, and he couldn't
be lucky forever.
The next crossing was from mainland China to Taiwan.
Permission was refused, so he got our standard visa to go into China and went to this beach
that he wanted to leave from, and under observation from the police, took off.
It was about an 80 or 100-mile crossing.
It didn't show up in Taiwan for that night, and there was no trace of him.
It was highly suspicious, so that turned out to be his last crossing, as far as we know.
Media wasn't that attracted to windsurfing until it entered the extreme sports category.
There's no longer a stand-up sailboat.
We knew we were going faster than any other kind of sailboat any of us had ever been involved
in.
We used to hear from the surfers, throw a sail, catch a wave, and they're laughing at that
ungainly contraption over there.
Well, now it's the fastest sailing vessel on the water.
Everything about the sport, on and off the water, changed when it did that gigantic growth
spurt.
We wanted it to be more popular, and it's one of those things where you be careful what
you wish for.
It wasn't just fun and games anymore, and it wasn't just your friends.
There were people now in it for money.
They're out there searching right now for a hundred foot wave, they intend to ride it.
The level of performance today is just not even comparable.
It's so far above anything, 10 years ago, and especially 20 years ago, and we're sure
25 years ago.
It's incredible what they're doing.
We had visions of some of that.
And you imagine if, and now they're doing it.
Even though the equipment has evolved to an unbelievably high tech level, we're like
Formula One.
It's composite carbon fiber monofilm.
It's still just a windsurfer, a surfboard with a sail, and the feeling you get standing
on the board and holding the rig and going what feels like a million miles an hour.
Now, you don't want to sit here and be all nostalgic and go, oh, the old days were better,
that kind of thing, but they were good, huh?
Woo hoo.
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