the Atlanta Boardsailing Club
windsurfing, kiteboarding and wingsurfing in the Southeast

Our dog's reaction to this post.

Yes, we've recycled this pic but, dang, we really like it and Mrs. Carlos Danger, aka Huma Abedin, (Mrs. Weiner) forgives us, too.

Time for more hijinks and shenanigans! Well, not really. Just another shameless effort to induce the members of the local windsurfing community to post a comment. It isn't enough that you have to tolerate a rainy yet windless summer but you have endure your fellow windsurfers' (and kiters, let's be inclusive) poor sense of humour. Yes, 'humour', we're still celebrating probably the first heir to the English throne ever named in honor of the "Seinfeld" show.

This month's pic is truly a blank slate. Interpret it as you will. Although Barrett claims it's the aftermath of a jump, we're not sure. It could be a whale breaching or even worse, a kraken.

But, it's probably something benign. We are prone to over-reacting.

We'd like to say we've been busy lately but that wouldn't be entirely true.

It's been a while since we've had the opportunity to post anything. Not that we haven't been brimming with things to share but some things at home required our attention. Hopefully, we can resume a more steady schedule. We should mention that we favor the British pronunciation 'shejiule' as opposed to the way it's said in the colonies, 'skedyule'. As well, our booms are made of aluminium instead of aluminum. And, it's colour and favour, our engine is under the bonnet; and we pee in the 'loo. Of course, all this is because of our excitement of Kate Middleton having produced a male heir to the throne of the United Kingdom.

"It's a boy. A king is born" (Their words, not ours).

Our last contest started very slowly. For awhile, it was just us and the crickets.

It's that time again, our bi-annual Monthly Caption of the Week "contest", the June edition. Quite frankly, after we posted the previous installment, we thought it might be the end of the line for this moronic excuse for web site content. The entries were so slow in coming in that we almost deleted the page to save ourselves the embarrassment of having a page soliciting community comment with the only comments coming from our alter egos. In other words, we considered giving up and going home.

But we were heartened by the belated response. Our little windsurfing community came together and showed the world that not only do we lack sense (really, do you see anyone else swimming in the lake in February?) but humor as well. So, we're back, risking shame and indignity, posting another photo.

Retro done wrong. Very wrong. Okay, let's play nice and say maybe it could have been done better.

Retro done properly. Very properly. You didn't think we were going to take the easy way and just put up a photo of John Belushi, did you?

We're not ones to reflexively declare that "it was better in the old days" or "all the new stuff is crap". As our music selections indicate, we like old stuff, we like new stuff, and we like sometimes painfully cutting edge new stuff. When it comes to windsurfing equipment, we've been unapologetic about how we think that some older boards need to stay locked away and kept from attacking unsuspecting beginners. And, we've extolled the virtues of some classic boards which still can be a boatload (pun intended) of fun.

We are as guilty as anyone else about lusting over new stuff. New stuff is sometimes demonized as the tool of capitalism which just wants us to consume. A good part of the reality in the little cottage industry known as windsurfing is that the people who make gear just want it a bit better than it was last year. Certainly, people like Dave Ezzy take a lot of personal pride in the stuff they turn out. If they can make it better, they will. Maybe, once in a while, the changes are cosmetic but that's okay, too. After all, we occasionally get a different hairstyle ourselves just for the sake of seeing something different in the mirror.

Sometimes, after all the changes and as much fun as the changes were, we pine for the old stuff. But old stuff can be a hassle -old bikes have scratches and dents and old boards have crappy fin boxes and mast tracks in the wrong place for modern sails. Fortunately, there are merchants happy to solve our problems for us by providing new things that look and behave like the old ones. So we don't look like idiots for paying a lot of money for a board or bike that looks and behaves a whole lot like the one we dumpstered ten years ago, we call the new item "retro".When the good guys and gals produce something "retro", they actually improve things a bit using lessons learned in the last umpteen years since the previous iteration.

We've seen a few boards recently that are retro, either by happenstance or design. Our friend, Dmitris Savidis, reviews a more obvious one, the T1 Thommen eXperience 125. He gives it a thumbs up as a versatile board. It has a winger pin-tail and a quad concave bottom.