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

Olympic Kiting Windsurfing

Before ISAF Reversal: Kiter discusses Rio Olympics with Gene. Photo: Alan Sloman

Recently, winners and losers have been in the news. Since most of us are at work trying to make amends for skipping out the week of Sandy, this may be a good time to recap. I'm not going to assume that you are actually working while at work but doing the usual, usual - managing your fantasy league team (speaking of losing... ahem).

As reported elsewhere, the ISAF reversed its decision to exclude windsurfing from the Rio 2016 Olympics. The Spanish representative, tired of having to explain his previous vote to the Spanish gal who won gold in London, was among those who voted to keep windsurfing in.

The Olympic sailing classes represent some of the most athletic and modern sailing classes - as they should. Think if the cycling competition was still done on the bicycles circa 1920. Think if track was done like it was in 350 BC - wait, other than being clothed, that hasn't changed that much. Um... sailing, where were we? Oh, the classes include the athletic and ubiquitous Laser, the high performance carnage of the 49er and outright speed of the NACRA 17 cat, catamarans having been restored as well. As well, the classes are evenly split between men and women.

Almost.

Orson Welles scaring the crap out of us. He didn't applaud until his movie Citizen Kane.

A guy who's just bought a new mast because of a comment a stranger made on our web site. Neil Pryde 550cm Mast: MSRP $746 18 ft of carbon fiber love.

When you connect any device to the internet, you can expect visitors. If you have a web site, especially one that's been up for years like we have been, lots of visitors stop by. Some visitors, like the folks that log in, we welcome and enjoy having. Guests like Google and Bing have open invitations as well. Not only do they help people find us but offer us a way to search our own site and produce some analytics that we use to find broken pages and what people like to view on the site.

Then, there are the other visitors. They range from the annoying, to the rude to the outright criminal. Unfortunately, in terms of knocks on the door, they are also our most numerous. If you've ever noticed the stats in our "Who's online" box on the right side of this page, you'll see maybe a couple or handful of registered users and from 20 to 60 or more guests. Of course, some of those guests are members who are dropping by without logging in. We have some pleasant foreign visitors and appreciate that they are part of our community.The rest hail from all parts of the world - Russia, the Ukraine, China, the Phillipines, Romania - places where a lot of people really give a crap about what the wind is like in Atlanta.

As windsurfers living in Atlanta, we have an odd relationship with nature. Atlanta ( cue drumroll Where Wind Goes to Die™) is not an inherently windy place. Aruba is windy. Hawaii is windy. Dahab and Pozo are windy. If you stuck a wind turbine on top of your house, the only thing it would do is mess with your neighbor's satellite dish.

On occasion we'll have a decent breeze. But for real wind, we need Mother Nature to do something quite different. And, when Mother Nature does something different, that is very often a bad thing for someone else. A cold front brings misery to the homeless and poor who can ill afford a high heating bill. A blustery day means a tree is wiping out someone's house or leaving a neighborhood in the dark.

A really windy can mean anything from wide-spread inconvenience - unless you are selling plywood or bottled water - to catastrophic and tragic destruction. This week was uncommonly windy here. This made us happy. This week was uncommonly floody in New York and New Jersey among other places. This made us very, very sad.