The Windsurfing Funboard Handbook

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Personal preference leads a reviewer to head for the beach, smooth a strip of sand, spread a towel, and sleep. Occasionally, he’ll look up and see, out on the water, a rainbow pageant of sails stretching out to the horizon. Surfboards with sails, sailboats without seats — and people actually standing on these hybrid craft (or trying to stand; or falling into the water).

I saw my first windsurfer on a beach on Long Island in the late ‘60s. By the end of the decade there were thousands of these brightly coloured objects making inroads into powerboat lanes and fishing haunts up and down both coasts. In Vancouver they are everywhere, in winter as well as summer (this is Vancouver), skimming the surfaces of the bays and inlets along the coast. The authors of The Windsurfing Funboard Handbook, Clive Boden and Angus Chater, hope to grab this growing group by the sails and teach them how to do it right: how to handle wave sailing and surf sailing and wave jumping, how to choose (or even build) a board. Also included is a brief history of the sport and a glossary. The book is chock-full of big, beautiful pictures, most of them in full colour — pictures of boards and of bodies on boards, twisting themselves into interesting directions. There are diagrams of knot-tying and sail-rigging, and of windsurfing techniques. There are illustrations of the different sorts of wet-and/or-dry suits one might wear while engaging in the game. It’s a beautiful book, well bound, thoroughly indexed, narrow enough to be pocketsized. The authors are to be commended. Here is (one would guess) just about all one would need to know to become a (or become a better) windsurfer. Now, if I could just lift myself from this towel and make it to the water...