The longboard revival

Long abused and almost forgotten, the classic longboard is coming back with a vengeance.

Mistral One Design, once Olympic Class

Is the revival of the longboard taking the sport backwards? We hope so. We’d love to go back – back to the days when you have fun sailing anywhere at any time. Back to the days when windsurfing was the world’s fastest-growing watersport. Back to the days when tens of thousands of women windsurfed. Back to the days when there were strong racing fleets, at local clubs. Back the days when there was a growing pro circuit.
It was longboards that created the whole sport and the whole windsurfing boom. Twelve years after Jim Drake and Hoyle Schweitzer launched the original Windsurfer, there were 200,000 of them sailing, along with hundreds of thousands of other boards. The boards that created the boom were “allrounders” like the Windsurfer One Design or early Mistral Competition. Big, simple and designed for light winds, they were perfect for freestyle, teaching friends, class racing or just for messing about on the water. The sport was simple and sociable, and you could do it at your local lake – and so many people did that in Europe they had to ration water space at times.

But by the early ’80s, the “allrounder” market was becoming saturated, and manufacturers were searching for something to keep their production line going. They found it in the “funboards” that had been created in the surf and strong winds of Hawaii. Where the earlier boards had been designed to perform best in light to moderate winds – the breezes most people normally sail in – the funboard was designed just for strong breezes. The ultimate funboard was the “sinker”; a waveboard so small that it wouldn’t float unless it was planing.
The industry found it irresistible. Funboards look great in photos and videos. Hype sells, and it’s always easier to hype new gear with hooks like “faster”, “new style” and “radical”. Words for old-style boards, like “simple”, “practical” or “tactical” just don’t have the same snap. The “sinker” became the board to sail. The sport re-defined itself. A craft conceived as everyone’s simple beach toy was transformed into an expert’s adrenalin buggy.

“Any board, whether round or flat, strapped or bare decked, is a “funboard” if the person sailing it is doing so for fun…”

The Windsurfer One Design, the original windsurfer, is still racing as a class in Australia in its updated form.

A few people realised that since most people live in comparatively light wind areas, you can’t sustain a worldwide sport as a high wind cult. Ken Winner was the world’s number two pro funboarder, but he regarded the word “funboard” as a destructive putdown of other sailors and boards. “Any board, whether round or flat, strapped or bare decked, is a “funboard” if the person sailing it is doing so for fun” he wrote. “It’s really quite snobbish to imply that only they who sail who sail “funboards” are truly having fun”. In a prophetic comment, Winner warned that “funboard” snobbery would drive owners of old-style “workboards” out of the sport.
But Winner’s wisdom was ignored by most of the opinion leaders of the sport, just as they ignored the fact the wind in most places is normally too light for funboards. Working in the industry tends to make you ignore the average sailor. You’re so surrounded with the sport that you need novelty more often than the weekend sailor does. It’s easier to upgrade your kit and techniques, and you’re less likely to see the sport from the perspective of the average person who may only get one precious day on their local lake each fortnight.
The pros, manufacturers and magazine writers just flew to high-wind spots to develop and test new gear. The very fact that the industry had to migrate to high-wind locations just underlined the fact that the gear they were developing and selling wasn’t suitable for the real world of the everyday sailor, but that basic contradiction went un-noticed.

Windsurfer onedesign setting off

In a sport that had attracted many because of its cool image, sailing an old-style board - one of those ones that actually work most days – became social death. Short boarders would sneer loudly at “goat boaters” on their longboards. “Don’t be gauche; take only your sinker with you” advised one magazine. Magazines printed charts that showed how a sailor should move to a sinker as they became more experienced. They ignored the fact that small boards rarely worked in most areas, or that the pros at the time were using longboards as well as shortboards.
In 1985, epicentre of the sport’s boom, a World Cup champion described how when she raced funboard events, she needed security guards to hold back fans in autograph sessions. When she switched to the unfashionable Lechner longboard for an Olympic campaign, the windsurfing fashionistas were so outraged that they publically heckled her until she retreated to isolated beaches.
The “funboard revolution” did work for a while. Many of the sailors who had learned to sail allrounder longboards in the boomtime moved to funboards through the ‘80s and early ‘90s. But the new image of the sport wasn’t friendly to beginners. The sport basically ignored new sailors, just like it ignored winds under 12 or 15 knots. For every person who was hooked by images of pros looping off Hookipa, many others decided that this wasn’t the sport for them. Keeping up with the fashions with a new board each year got to others. Many more dropped out of the sport through frustration with the wind, which never seemed to blow “like it used to”. They missed the fact that it was the gear and the sport, not the wind, that had changed. Others drifted away when they found that reaching back and forth across the same bit of water in a limited wind range wasn’t always that exciting.
Through the late ‘80s and ‘90s, board sales fell away but the sport kept on pushing the line that planing was the only real windsurfing. Longboards were either ignored or abused.

“Basically at the beginning, the entire world could windsurf, and by the “end” nobody could.” – Trip Foreman

Family sailing, Wallace Lake, Australia

Many of the top minds in the sport can now see the problem with the clarity of hindsight. Barry Spanier, one of the biggest names in sails, wrote that the sinker’s first sail (at the Schweitzer Speed Trials in 1980) was the beginning of the end for windsurfing’s boomtime.
“Somehow, this was the beginning of the decline of the sport. It was fantastic for us on Maui, where we’d have more than enough wind to have fun with boards that didn’t float. But for the rest of the world, where there was rarely enough wind, that high performance possibility only served to take more and more people away from the fun core of windsurfing, and into equipment that would only work when there was big wind.”
Former windsurfer turned kiter Trip Foreman, infamous among many US windsurfers for creating the slogan “windsurfing has been cancelled”, is another of the many experts with the same viewpoint. “Windsurfing lost its focus on the beginner in regard to equipment, schools and the sport” he told Windsurfing Magazine. “When the sport first exploded in the ‘70s, windsurfing could be done by everybody. By the late ‘90s windsurfing and the way it was portrayed to the public was reserved for those who had access to 30 knots of wind and/or 15 foot waves. Anything else seemed boring to those promoting the sport. Basically at the beginning, the entire world could windsurf, and by the “end” nobody could.”
The madness of it all is reflected in the numbers. It’s claimed that in 1985, when the industry was still selling a full range of boards from allrounders through to sinkers, one million boards were sold. Now, it’s said, the number is 80,000. Even the Wall Street Journal noticed, pointing out that the sport in the USA grew 30% annually in the early ‘80s to a peak of 1.26 million in 1986, then dropped by up to 20% a year in the ‘90s.

Australian Raceboard & RSX Nationals '06

By the end of the ‘90s, some manufacturers finally realized that survival depended on making boards that needed less wind. Rather than trying to revive the classic longboard, which does involve problems like building centerboard cases and storing 3.6m boards, they created the widestyle boards like the Starboard Go and Formula Windsurfing. They are short, stable, fast to plane and fast on the planes, and some called them the cure to windsurfing’s light wind blues.
To many, it seemed that the widestyle boards were the last nail in the longboard’s coffin. The funeral service seemed all but over when the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) announced that the Mistral One Design, the last longboard in production apart from the original Windsurfer One Design which was still produced in tiny numbers in Australia, was to be replaced as the Olympic board.

“Longboard wavesailing is the yoga of windsurfing…..this will be bigger in the future as it was bigger in the past.” – Jeffrey Henderson

ISAF may have decreed that the longboard was dead, but many people didn’t listen. Hundreds of them were racing sailors; longboards still dominated racing in terms of numbers (although not publicity) in many countries. Another was Jeffrey Henderson from Hot Sails Maui, who has been sailing 12 foot tandem windsurfers in Maui’s surf for ten years. Longboards, he said, had “the quiet glide that has gone from modern windsurfing. It is a totally unique feel that sets the soul on fire, and revives your energy, instead of exhausting you. Longboard wavesailing is the yoga of windsurfing…..this will be bigger in the future as it was bigger in the past.”
A third figure was Tor Bakke. A veteran of the sport and industry, he had been campaigning for seven years for a manufacturer to take the sport back to its roots – to a simple one design racing board, with weight divisions and no pumping.

The Kona One, the first and most popular of the new. Photo courtesy Exocet

Just a few months after the longboard was declared dead, the coffin burst open in a spectacular fashion. The RSX put the hybrid concept under the spotlight, and it became obvious that while wide boards are great in many ways, they aren’t the only way for windsurfing to go. They don’t perform well unless they’re powered up, they don’t suit all beginners, and they aren’t really that good in light or fluky winds. The various hybrids aren’t usually competitive when racing against longboards.

Warp-X, Photo courtesy Exocet

In 2005, Bakke moved to Exocet and was finally allowed to create the board he had been dreaming of - the Kona One. It was one part original Windsurfer, one part hybrid and one part slalom board, and with clever styling and marketing it was a hit from the start. The success of the Kona One – now said to be the top-selling board in the world – lead Exocet to spin off an entire range of Kona longboards.

At about the same time, Mistral declared that they would continue to support the IMCO longboard, and Starboard launched the Serenity, possibly the longest production windsurfer ever. No board has ever been designed with as much accent on light winds as the double-ended Serenity. It was a sign that one of the most influential brands thought that light-wind longboards had to be revived. Kona and Starboard both launched tandems, and with experience proving that hybrids couldn’t match longboards around the Raceboard courses, both Exocet and Starboard launched new full-length Raceboards.