More Speedsailing history.

Now I remember why I picked the sail number 20.


Lots of great tandem action in this one too. The French were way ahead in that area.

Not only was Pascal Maka an excellent sailor, but his sails were so far ahead of the rest.

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Adriano said..
Not only was Pascal Maka an excellent sailor, but his sails were so far ahead of the rest.

Yes, that struck me as well! . They have obvious twist and were slightly flatter in the upper sail. Looked very stable also!

Eric Beal's sails look really different as well but still very full right to the head in these pics.

^ Excellent.

I have a Wright Designs epoxy board in the shed. I might take it for a run and see if it still floats.

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Dr Speed said..
do you have this already ?

Regarding the early days at Weymouth, I sailed at Weymouth Speed Week each year from 1980 to 1984, and although the gear in the 1981 video looks embarrassingly primitive, things developed pretty quickly after that. For each of those years I set an Australian speed record, mainly because virtually no other Australians were doing speed sailing competitions at the time until Pete Dans beat my best speed in the 1983 Safety Bay speed trials.

My first Weymouth week looked like this, 3.5m board (stepped hydroplane design that I could stand on and uphaul)) and no decent sail when it got really windy.



In 1981 things were developing quickly. I built my first really small board (240 x 46) in the few months before having never water-started a board before. I did my first ever water start 2 weeks before Weymouth.

The Paddy Payne video of the event is a bit deceptive as it was all shot in about a one hour period, and at that time it was seriously windy, but very square to the course, so no-one is going very fast. The footage of Jurgen Honscheid is all of him on his large wave board, the runs he set his fastest times on were on a thin and skinny 8 foot long Waimea gun he had brought back from Hawaii, and were done when the wind was at a much broader angle.

Conditions that year were pretty severe, and the sails were rubbish, particularly in the smaller sizes. Wind was brutally strong at times, as can be seen in the photo of Honscheid at top-left, below. I cracked two ribs in a crash during one of the windy sessions on the second last day and was out for the rest of the event. That's me top-right, below, and my board just below that, styrofoam core, kevlar and epoxy laminate.



For 1982 I built a three-point stepped hydroplane board (will look for the photo) and in 1983 I built a solid wing that could sail on both tacks and go upwind, but quickly discovered the value of twist and flexibility in a rig.



By 1984 it was a different matter, I had a small speed board that would be considered conventional today, fully battened sail, wide boom, carbon mast, and a 20 kg Musto weight jacket.




The difference in equipment and speeds over those 5 years was dramatic, a period of experimentation and change that was a lot of fun to be part of.

Thought I should add this for posterity as well, 1984 Windrush speed trials at Woodmans Point:

Great stuff, Pacey. I've got one or two copies of that Windsurf mag some of those pics came from in the shed.

I confess to getting a bit melancholy when I see the state of the sport these days and think of the late '70s and early to mid '80s. We were so optimistic at that time, and had reason to be. The sport was growing so fast and the age of excess was yet to dawn.

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Chris 249 said..
Great stuff, Pacey. I've got one or two copies of that Windsurf mag some of those pics came from in the shed.

I confess to getting a bit melancholy when I see the state of the sport these days and think of the late '70s and early to mid '80s. We were so optimistic at that time, and had reason to be. The sport was growing so fast and the age of excess was yet to dawn.

Yes it was an great time, the pace of development was amazing. From the time I started Windsurfing in 1977 until 1984 the sport and the equipment changed radically, and while boards and sails have improved dramatically since then, the rate of change in those first few years of custom boards was huge.

For me the starting point was meeting Mark Paul in 1978. I was sailing on Pittwater in a very fresh southerly on a stock windsurfer (full sized daggerboard and no harness) and he sailed past me doing 3 times my speed on a custom board with footstraps. I was stunned, I'd never seen anything but stock windsurfers before, as there were virtually no custom boards anywhere in the world at that time.

I stopped to watch, and he sailed over and asked me if I wanted to try his board. His board was still big enough to stand on and uphaul, although pretty tippy, but once I sheeted on and managed to get my feet in the straps I was hooked, I couldn't believe how fast it was. After tracking him down later and getting some design and construction details, I built a board for myself (10'6" long x 26" wide, epoxy, kevlar and divinycell sandwich over a styrofoam core) over the following month in Freddy Phillip's factory in Mona Vale.

That board was seriously fast compared to anything else that was around, other than some of the few boards built by Mark Paul and Mike McGuire, so after spending a few months sailing around passing every other boat and board on the water I got the idea into my head to go to England, build a board and do Weymouth Speed Week.

Some of the inspiration was the stepped speed board Mike McGuire built for Scotty O'connor to sail at the speed trials held at Maalaea Bay in Maui in either 79 or early 1980. Called "Dart Vader" it had a deep V forward section and a deep step about 3 feet from the tail:


At the time no-one had figured out that water starting was feasible on a really small board, so all the speed boards were built within the constraint of being big enough to stand on and uphaul, or started by stepping on in shallow water. We knew we had to reduce wetted surface area and get higher aspect planing surfaces, so the deep stepped hull approach was attractive.

I sailed the Laser Worlds in Canada in 1980 and afterwards headed to London to build a board for Weymouth. I tried the same approach initially, building a wide flat board with a 3" step in London and first tested it at Grafam Water. It was fast in the flat water but bounced terribly in any chop and ventilated the fin atrociously and spun out whenever it got the chance. Quite scary to sail in its first setup.


I took it back to the workshop and put some fences on the fins before heading to Weymouth the following week. Once there discovered that the fences worked beautifully, the spinout had gone and it was reasonably docile as long as the water wasn't too rough. The sail was reasonably advanced for it's time - instead of the pinhead sails everyone else was using, I put a square head and reasonable roach with battens onto a relatively short, stiff mast and low-aspect rig. This worked quite well for downwind speed courses.


Unfortunately Weymouth at that time was still using the circular course in the middle of Portland Harbour, rather than the Chesil Beach course used in later years. As a result the course was very lumpy if the wind was over 15 knots, and only one boat/board could be on the course at a time as they were still using stopwatches, pen and paper for timing. So getting more than half a dozen runs in a day was difficult, and being lucky enough to get a patch of steady strong wind and flat water was almost impossible. And being on a board that loved flat water and hated chop was not a strategy for success. Even so, I still managed to finish fairly high in the rankings, so I was hooked into coming back the following year with something even more radical.

When people talk about wind strength during their sailing sessions, it is often an estimate based on local weather stations or sometimes even a wild guess. Not always very reliable IMHO. Over the years I have been actually taking wind readings at all the places I sail with my very accurate German made Anemometer, including, of course, the big days at Sandy Point,

I have been looking for this for a while:

This is from 27-09-09 at Sandy Point. I think Issac Perkins was filming this. We saw gusts to 60 during during this this, but the reading here is 55 knots, and just standing there and holding this to film it was quite difficult!

The screen grab is from Mick Greens excellent movie Quickly Go Mad.

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azymuth said..
Nice posts Andrew - the board development and the characters in the early 80's (wave and speed) in Sydney was so much fun.

Yes definitely, Mark Paul and Mike McGuire led the world in composite board construction at that time, and there was a pool of exceptional sailors as well.

Unfortunately small boards ended up needing more wind than the Sydney sea breeze had to offer and I ended up moving to Perth for the wind in 1984.

Still trying to work out how to use my GW-60 - I'm not very good with computers!

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Pacey said..
Still trying to work out how to use my GW-60 - I'm not very good with computers!

That's very funny