The Wind Is Free II: Basic and Funboard Windsurfing

Elsie de Bruijn was Associate Head, Woodward Biomedical Library, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Anyone who has tried windsurfing knows that it presents a complex physical challenge. To the would-be author of a coaching manual, the challenge does not stop there. Learning to control a slippy, tippy, all-too-responsive floating platform is essentially a right-brain activity. Trying to grasp what’s involved by studying a text and pictures (left-brain territory) can be more confusing than helpful. In windsurfing, then, it is especially important to break the sport down into a set of skills that can be grasped easily and practised one at a time. A good manual should help the reader feel what will be involved out on the water, and should ensure that each technique builds on simpler ones already mastered. If all this sounds rather basic, remember that windsurfing presents one further complication. The how-to guide cannot, in the nature of things, be anywhere within reach when it’s most needed. So it had better be as attention-getting and memorable as the writer can make it.

The Wind Is Free II succeeds on all counts, and with élan. The original version sold over 150,000 copies in English and went into numerous translations. This rewritten, rephotographed edition deserves to do equally well. As before, each page blends Roger Jones’s well-paced text with his own excellent stop-action colour photographs. (If “attention-getting” and “memorable” are assets in a windsurfing manual, look no further. Those lithe, hollow-hipped brown bodies in high-cut swimwear command total recall.) The style is immediate and personal, taking novices from dry-land exercises through the basic stages of on-the-water practice. Technique is not the only consideration: there is a comprehensive section on safety precautions, and a reassuring one headed “How To Fall.”

A chapter on racing tactics leads into the advanced half of the manual, a dazzlingly photographed guide to funboards, wavesailing, and acrobatics.

Throughout, Jones’s text is conversational and as memorable as a do-it-yourself boardsailer could wish. (“Avoid reaching a wave just where it’s breaking, and avoid walls of white water over one meter high.”) A glossary and index provide added stability when the going gets choppy. All in all, this manual could well be included with a board and bathing suit as basic learner’s equipment.