Equipment Innovation - who do you rate

When it comes innovation in windsurfing equipment who do you rate , ie. in design, materials, new concepts.

Unsprisingly the guys with the biggest R&D budget are in a position to dominate here and names like Neil Pryde and Starboard standout.

As an example with Pryde - the big luff sleeve and boom cutout were concepts that some other companies shunned but then later jumped on the bandwagon.

Of course SB has come out with some interesting board concepts, some have worked and some haven't...but I feel they've contributed to the evolution of the sport.

I know that you may say some of these things have been done before and they have, but NP & SB stand out as having followed through to make some of these designs commercially viable and also set a trend for others.

An interesting one is Gaastra - with the commercial design disaster that was the TotalFlow concept. Commercially it sucked, needing a new mast length for those sails really damaged it.

that being said - the sails themselves where pretty goddamn fast, and were really the first to examine the "floppy leech" concept where the head of the sail twisted away. I think NP developed the ShearTip concept around the same time.

If you look at pretty much all sails before this, the leech cut away almost directly to the boom, and so could never become loose and allow the sail to breath and increase stability. today pretty much all sails have a square head to allow for that leech twist.

I reckon thats a pretty big step in sail development there.

GEORGE GREENOUGH, is by far is the god father of sailboarding,first with 100% carbon mast,100%carbon one piece boom,full batten wide pocket race sails,carbon race fins cut outs in the sail for the boom all back in the early 1990

Pity they don't do it on most of their sails though [}:)]

but the worst NP sail is still better than the Best ***y sail[}:)][}:)][}:)]

Ha ha we all have our favourites don't we

I'd just like to point out that it's cheaper not to have seam shaping.

So if cheap sails float your boat (and I don't mean inexpensive [}:)]) then good luck to you

All sails have used seam shaping since the days of clipper ships. NP's "segmented seam shaping" maybe refers to some negative shaping towards the leach, resulting in the excess material which characterised floppy leaches from the '90s onwards...

i'd have to say kona-exocet for bringing back longboards...and making them fun to sail.

Agreed, but the Rushwind race sails on their alloy mast was geting pretty close to carbon!

Was Wild Winds the first production monofilm sail maker, and was this an Andrew McDougall company. I'm not sure (old age) but if so, that's another big one for Andrew.

And in reference to Kato's post, Amac is the same Andrew McDougall.

Me too for Exocet Kona and Hot Sails Superfreak!

the dude who thought of putting the loop at the top of the sail, to stick a screwdriver through for de-rigging.

He's a WA bloke

does he own a windsurf shop ?

chinook winde up

micro- adjustment bases from 2nd wind, forget who makes them

shorter luff sails

boom cutouts

I agree, the RAF concept was probably the biggest development in windsurfing sails, it was the lynch pin that lead to the sails that most of us sail today. Personally I think everything else is just evolutionary development, the twist off leech, shorter luffs, new materials, boom cut out etc etc, none of them changed the path of sail design like the RAF concept.

I'd also have to say Starboard have been the force that have pushed the board development over the years and are the main reason boards are so short and wide these days (comparatively). Sure, other people come along and take the concepts further and arguably improve them but it's usually Starboard who tried it first; this is the beauty of being a big player in the game with a lot of resources at your disposal.