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With the recent Olympic committee rejection of the RS:X for the 2024 Olympics, the boys at Gosford decided to review the past and present Olympic WIndsurfer boards to find a clear winner. See below for our findings, which surprised all of us.
So the forecast for yesterday didn't really come true, but we had a fantastic and very interesting day out on the water.
Peter, Lyndon and I arrived at Gosford Sailing Club to a very light breeze, we had decided yesterday that we were going to put the past and present Olympic boards to a test. We would rig one board each with as close to its original rig as we had available. We would then conduct 3 races, swapping boards after each race. We would rank the boards on placings, and then each of us would write a short review of our verdict on each board. So here is our 1st attempt at this, keep in mind it was extremely light wind 0-5 knots.
Race 1
1. Lechner A390 with 6.8m BIC Techno rig - Sailor JD
2. RS:X with RS:X 9.5m rig - Sailor PS
3. Windglider with Mistral 6.2m dacron powerhead rig - Sailor LB
Race 2
1. RS:X with RS:X 9.5m rig - Sailor JD
2. Windglider with Mistral 6.2m dacron powerhead rig - Sailor PS
3. Lechner A390 with 6.8m BIC Techno rig - Sailor LB
Race 3
1. Windglider with Mistral 6.2m dacron powerhead rig -Sailor JD
2. RS:X with RS:X 9.5m rig - Sailor LB
3. Lechner A390 with 6.8m BIC Techno rig - Sailor PS
Individual verdicts
Lyndon Bauer
Windglider - 5/10 comfort. But quite surprising in performance.
Lechner A390 - Slippery and tippy with too small a sail. 6/10 for comfort but would be entirely different with more wind or bigger sail
RS:X 9/10. Encouraged hard work dur to security . Grunty sail. Only draw back is lack of feel and direction when wind really fades.
John Doolan
Windglider - 7/10 comfort. Astonishing performance for a board from the early 1980's with a small floppy dacron rig. This board really glides well through the water and tacks and gybes very quickly.
Lechner A390 - 9/10 comfort and speed. This board effortlessly glides through the water, upwind and downwind. The small rig was the only downside, in really light air it needed more pressure.
RS:X - 5/1-0. The 9.5m rig being the only saving grace. Unresponsive, and feels like a bathtub would with a sail on it. This is possibly my least favourite board of all time to ride.
Overall I was surprised how close each board was in speed, it'll be interesting to see how each boards performance changes with wind strength.
Peter Smits
OK here's my report on the test event at GSC on 15/6/19. Conditions very light, 0 to 5 knots, flat water, minimal chop. High cloud, 90%sunshine,minimal traffic on the Water.
Windglider - The Windglider really susprised me. The soft sail was easy to pump. The board itself had room on on the front for a picnic table and the scoop at the rear would be handy for catching water in a down pour if you found yourself stranded. The mast foot connector needs some attention, have a nice bruise on my forearm when it separated from the board during my freestyle routine. 6/10 for comfort, non skid let it down. 9/10 for performance super easy to tack and quite nice performance up and down wind.
RS:X - Second board is the RSX, visually it looks great but unfortunately it seems mediocre in everything it does. The 9.5 helped in the light but in those conditions you should be on something way longer. Comfort 5/10 and performance 5/10.
Lechner A390 - Finally the Lechner felt very underpowered with the 6.8 twin cam sail. Either a bigger sail or more breeze would boost its rating. Comfort 5/10 and performance 6/10.
My recommendation for world sailing is that we need to go back to the future and put forward the Windglider for 2024. Winglider One design with a 7.5 m soft sail, unlimited pumping and no harness. Let's make it a man's sport again, especially now that they have thrown out the Finn. Ladies could use a 6m sail.
As we only had 3 sailors available to sail, we had to exclude the Mistral One Design from the review, we will however be completing more reviews in varying wind conditions throughout the year, and will be forwarding World Sailing our review, as we feel they have neglected some valid options for the future of our sport.
We will also be including the original Windsurfer One Design as well as a foiling option in future testing as we want to be completely thorough and independent. But so far, the Windglider is the clear leader for our proposal for 2024.
Great work. Will you be including the Windsurfer LT as well as the original One Design? I was informed by a reliable source in NSW that during testing there the RSX had difficulties in beating the Mistral One Design around a course so the results do not surprise me.
I haven't heard about the testing at Toronto, but in actual racing good sailors have proven that the One Design is about as fast in light winds, but no faster. It's certainly nowhere near as fast downwind in a breeze.
The Lechner would be a different beast entirely with a pinhead 6.8 or the cambered 7.3, but I can't get my 7.3 down for the test. Lars reckoned the Lechner was faster than the IMCO to 12-15 knots.
Sure, the fact that the One Design is hard to beat most of the time is one of the good things about the switch; most people would still be competitive most of the time on a One Design because it's got lower drag at low to medium speeds. I would not have been surprised at all if the Womens, Light, Medium and Heavy champs at the last nationals had turned up and won on a One Design - but it was a light wind regatta and in a big breeze there could have been some re-shuffling of positions at the front end of the field.
However, saying the LT is slower seems to be a different thing. We had two good sailors on ODs at the Gosford regatta and in ideal conditions for the ODs, they did not do better than they would normally have done if everyone had been on ODs. Walshy in particular is hard to beat in light stuff but I didn't seem to lose anything to him when I switched to the LT and he stuck to the OD for that regatta. I turned up to that regatta worried that the LT may have been slower in the light stuff but to my surprise, I didn't feel it to be true.
The LT is much easier to sail overall, but judging from the nationals it seems that a few people have found it difficult to get their LTs going as well as they could get the ODs going, which is no surprise when some of them have sailed ODs for 20 years or more.
Just want to invite anyone who is interested to visit us in Gosford. We have a very large range of Boards Rigs and SUPs that we can loan to anyone who wants to visit us. The more the merrier.
Mostly mixed raceboard but if its very windy we do speed at budgie. (sup surf box head umina or sup sail Toowoon bay also possible)
If you are in sydney with no gear, travelling etc , just let us know and ride the train up to Gosford. We can most likely pick you up and organise what ever gear you are interested in.
Send me (lyndon aka heavy 1) or John (aus817) a sea breeze email with a day or two notice so we dont miss it.
Have a look at our forum/
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Windsurfing/New-South-Wales/Gosford-Saturday-afternoon-longboard-racing?page=16#21
I like the look of that flat bottom Windglider a lot more than the D2 Lechner.
I recon I could revive a few old skills and flop some moulds off that no problem. 
We could knock up a whoe fleet of them for some real fun! 
Or maybe someone has already done that? 
I sailed a Windglider for a few weeks Back In The Day, or it may have been the very similar but later Bahia model they made. Better upwind and in light winds than the contemporary original Windsurfer, but IMHO not as good as the original Mistral in that stuff. And downwind in a breeze that narrow tail made it a bit of a beast, and I don't mean that in a good way. It wasn't surprising that it sold well in Europe, where they do a lot of light-wind lake sailing, but was disliked in Australia where we loved our sea breeze blasting.
The round bottomed D2s were also hard to sail downwind, especially the earlier ones with centreboards that did not retract far, but they were (and still are) absolute bliss upwind IMHO. And downwind, it's not that they have bad manners because of bad design - it's just that they are uncompromised triangle racing machines.
