WindSkate Press Release 1

First Encounter With the Desert

SkateBoarding Magazine, February 1977

Part 1

WindSkating the New Frontier

by JamieBudge

We are bounding down the old dirt road at top speed, swerving to miss potholes, and compromising by launching ourselves over sagebrush moguls. Everything and everybody slams around the back of the van as we touch ground. Rally driving out of the sagebrush and cactus obstacles, we break free on the lakebed itself. The driver opens full throttle to the other end and pulls to a halt. We get out, three of the driver and us with three WindSkates, rushes off to find the rest of the caravan still dodging sagebrush at the other end.

We all stand out in the middle of nowhere with miles of flatness in every direction bordered by sagebrush, ending in low mountains. There is nobody, and nothing, around anywhere. You wouldn't expect them to be. There is an eerie silence. There is wind, but it is strangely quiet. The sagebrush and moguls right behind us, with the sun low on the horizon, give the impression of craters and another planet. It's like being dropped off on the backside of the moon and having your landing shuttle go back to look for the other space ships.

Your fantasy ends and you come back to a reality almost as bizarre. "Here I am on a California desert dry lake bed with my skateboard and my sail." That makes perfect sense. Doesn't it? Doesn't everybody do this? Nobody has. You look at the surface and it is white and chalky and hard, with little cracks in it caused by months of sun blistering out every molecule of moisture. The skateboard rolls easily across it. That is half the battle. The other half buffets at your sail as you struggle to set it up without any protection of a wind block.

Your sail is set up with crossbar in place. You pick it up by the mast and set it into the nose of your skateboard. Well, here goes. You give a push, and reach out and pull in on the boom to "sheet in" the sail and bring it into position and trim. On a normal beach parking lot with afternoon sea breezes, this is enough to get you moving at a good speed. Out here it is like hooking onto the jet stream. You don't just start moving you instantly accelerate as if you had just punched a high-powered throttle to the floor.

With your throttle in the mast in one hand, and the boom in the other, you adjust them to the wind, and punch it for speed. You head almost directly down wind, the slowest position to get the feel of the motivating energy. It is there in abundance. With this situation under control, you pull back on the sail and tighter to the wind. Another surge of speed and the wind foils off trimmed sail, and you shoot ahead, wondering how much wind and speed the situation will tolerate before something gives. Nothing does, and you trim out in position for full speed.

You don't know how fast you are going (yet) as there is nothing close enough to give you normal references, like whizzing by a bicycle. You just continue shooting off into unobstructed infinity. Seconds later you slow down and look back to where the van and other cars have arrived. They are tinker toys on the horizon with toy people shouting with enthusiasm and setting up WindSkate to join you. You have covered at least a mile in a matter of seconds, and you have not yet begun to head out onto the main part of the lakebed. You have been heading mostly downwind (in sailing they call it a downwind reach) so you contemplate a tack crosswind to the other side of the lake, with an upwind tack back to the cars.

The high-speed turn on a WindSkate presents a new challenge you have not yet encountered in any other sport. In surfing, you are always going for the maximum speed before you turn. The faster the speed, the better the turn. In skateboarding, you set the speed and momentum of your turn before you go into it--once into the turn, you are somewhat committed by your previous positioning. In WindSkating, you hold the throttle in your hand clear through the maneuver.

In your trek across the desert, you are moving so fast that it would be craziness to attempt anything you could really call a turn. To break speed, you head slightly upwind. This is somewhat like climbing to the top of a wave before jamming into a turn-back. On your WindSkate, you linger, stalling upwind, waiting for the right gust. This breaks your entrance speed, but gives you the juice to perform the maneuver with high velocity.

When the gust hits, you pull the sail directly flat back against the wind and bank sharply to the left, your speed increases about 25 percent as you enter the turn. Directly mid-turn, with your body banked against the centrifugal force, you release the boom, and the sail shoots around the front of your board under the power of the wind. As you switch hands holding the mast, you grab the boom as it swings around to the other side of your board, and here you control the juice coming out of your turn. You pull swiftly and powerfully in on the boom, bringing the sail into instant trim to capture the ensuing gust. As it hits, you arch back and lean to offset the force. In seconds, you have regained full speed in the opposite direction. The size of a wave or the grade of the hill does not control the speed of the turn. You control it, all the way through the turn, almost as if you had your foot on the accelerator. If you were punching it, you could go into it at 30 and come out at 40. Out here, on your first run you figure you opted out for about half the speed and twice the control.

Coming out of your turn, you could go immediately into another, slalom style, working into a series of tight, wind-punched turns, criss-crossing your way in and out of imaginary pylons all the way down the lake. But the opposite bank and the pull of the distant speed run excite you more. You set your board for the ultimate speed channel, and lean back against the sail for full speed. You start to fly.

But the opposite bank and the pull of the distant speed run excite you more. You set your board for the ultimate speed channel, and lean back against the sail for full speed. You start to fly. You are going for the limit of what the wind and lakebed has to offer. But it doesn't seem to have a limit. You just keep accelerating in subtle stages, each one building on the last, as a new gust pushes you ahead to a new high. You wonder how many of these you can take before something gets out of control. You hang in there with your adrenaline channels open full and your excitement wide to the sensation. You've had speed before, but the hill always had an end in sight. You've been in the tube before, but the rush only lasted for seconds. Your body's been torqued over in mid-air, but you always came instantly down off the bank. Out here in the jet stream, it goes on and on as long as you can stand it. How long can you stay on top of the rush until your reflexes make the wrong response to the right signal? You don't know, and you don't want to find out. The lake may not have a limit, but you do. You let go of the boom to free coast to a gradual slow-down. Now, for the first time, without the pull of the sail to stabilize you, you realize just how fast you are going on a skateboard and just how vulnerable you could be to a soft spot or speed wobble. You glide on frictionlessly for hundreds of feet before your speed becomes comfortable again.

On a high-speed skateboard run down Signal Hill, your reflexes are all geared for that one-minute drive to maximum speed and control. You've had minutes, hours, and days to prepare to hit that top speed. Your adrenaline gears you to the high point and carries you through at the peak of excitement. But when it is over, it is over, and you relax.

Out here, on the desert, with the jet stream constantly shooting you through the cosmos of infinite salt flat, you don't hit a high, and then slow and stop. You hit top speed, and go and go and go. Thirty m.p.h, begins to feel like cruising speed, and you relax with it. Carving into a series of high-speed slalom turns, you weave in and out of rocks, divots, dark spots, and gusting, surging sections of wind. You lean out to counterbalance the force in the sail, and you are pulling with all your weight against an invisible source of power

that threatens to dislodge you at any instant with a quirk of nature, or a laziness of attitude. Your attention span can only focus on the danger factor for so long before it drifts off to take in the environment. You look down at the ground shooting by beneath you and at the sail up above you, piercing into the cloudy deep blue. Acid, surreal. You must have transgressed into part of a skateboard cartoon. Any second now the scene will end, and you will get to the real movie. But it doesn't end. Like the animated skateboarder hurtling through empty space, you continually fly across the expanses of your unlimited environment.

You have spanned the width of this section of lakebed, and you are about to turn again and tack back upwind to the cars and van. Only this calls for a back-sail tack. The sailors back at the beach would laugh and say, "Let's see you jibe on that thing." (turn into the wind, blowing the boom across the board and your body--a sure wipeout in their minds). And you did, and wowed them every time, as you caught the boom and leaned into the sail after a perfect upwind turn to tack back upwind. But that was at the beach, and it was difficult in a ten m.p.h. wind. And you don't know what the jet stream out here registers on the wind meter.

So you head up into the wind, making the turn as gradual as possible as the sail starts to blow with force across your body. You lean into the sail from the backside of the wind to counterbalance the pressure coming from the other side of the sail. At the beach it felt really uneasy. Out here, it feels impossible.

The problem is that if the wind gusts, you can't let out on the sail. Your body is leaning into the sail to hold it in place; if the wind gusts, you have to lean in harder or go over backward onto the ground. Uncomfortable at 20 m.p.h. (Your upwind tack is slower.) Not only that, but if you start to head downwind, you will pick up speed, while losing control of the sail till it snaps you off the board in a second. Why are you doing this then? It is the best and only good position for a good upwind tack to get you back to the cars. If you can only hold in the slot between an upwind stall and a downwind dive, you'll be back at the cars in no time.

But there is a lock-in commitment to this position. If the wind gusts too much, you won't be able to turn into it to break your speed. And it is certain disaster to let yourself start to head downwind. That means you have to stay in the slot, and if the wind gusts, you lean in harder and go faster. But you can't change direction if there is something in the way. This is your course as you head back to the van. And you are doing all right. You have it down to a system.

The wind is consistent, and you can head into it to break speed, and then blow slightly downwind to regain speed, before heading upwind to break again. By this process, you have control, like climbing and dropping across the face of a big wave, you always have the position you need to handle the sections. If it is not too long a section.

For More Information Contact:

Windskate Santa Monica
P.O. Box 3081
Tel: 310.453.4808
FAX: 310.829.9511
email: windskate@windskate.com


First Encounter With the Desert SkateBoarding Magazine, February 1977 Part 1 WindSkating the New Frontier by JamieBudge We are bounding down the old dirt road at top speed, swerving to miss potholes, and compromising by launching ourselves over sagebrush moguls. Everything and everybody slams around the back of the van as we touch ground. Rally driving out of the sagebrush and cactus obstacles, we break free on the lakebed itself. The driver opens full throttle to the other end and pulls to a halt. We get out, three of the driver and us with three WindSkates, rushes off to find the rest of the caravan still dodging sagebrush at the other end. We all stand out in the middle of nowhere with miles of flatness in every direction bordered by sagebrush, ending in low mountains. There is nobody, and nothing, around anywhere. You wouldn't expect them to be. There is an eerie silence. There is wind, but it is strangely quiet. The sagebrush and moguls right behind us, with the sun low on the horizon, give the impression of craters and another planet. It's like being dropped off on the backside of the moon and having your landing shuttle go back to look for the other space ships. Your fantasy ends and you come back to a reality almost as bizarre. "Here I am on a California desert dry lake bed with my skateboard and my sail." That makes perfect sense. Doesn't it? Doesn't everybody do this? Nobody has. You look at the surface and it is white and chalky and hard, with little cracks in it caused by months of sun blistering out every molecule of moisture. The skateboard rolls easily across it. That is half the battle. The other half buffets at your sail as you struggle to set it up without any protection of a wind block. Your sail is set up with crossbar in place. You pick it up by the mast and set it into the nose of your skateboard. Well, here goes. You give a push, and reach out and pull in on the boom to "sheet in" the sail and bring it into position and trim. On a normal beach parking lot with afternoon sea breezes, this is enough to get you moving at a good speed. Out here it is like hooking onto the jet stream. You don't just start moving you instantly accelerate as if you had just punched a high-powered throttle to the floor. With your throttle in the mast in one hand, and the boom in the other, you adjust them to the wind, and punch it for speed. You head almost directly down wind, the slowest position to get the feel of the motivating energy. It is there in abundance. With this situation under control, you pull back on the sail and tighter to the wind. Another surge of speed and the wind foils off trimmed sail, and you shoot ahead, wondering how much wind and speed the situation will tolerate before something gives. Nothing does, and you trim out in position for full speed. You don't know how fast you are going (yet) as there is nothing close enough to give you normal references, like whizzing by a bicycle. You just continue shooting off into unobstructed infinity. Seconds later you slow down and look back to where the van and other cars have arrived. They are tinker toys on the horizon with toy people shouting with enthusiasm and setting up WindSkate to join you. You have covered at least a mile in a matter of seconds, and you have not yet begun to head out onto the main part of the lakebed. You have been heading mostly downwind (in sailing they call it a downwind reach) so you contemplate a tack crosswind to the other side of the lake, with an upwind tack back to the cars. The high-speed turn on a WindSkate presents a new challenge you have not yet encountered in any other sport. In surfing, you are always going for the maximum speed before you turn. The faster the speed, the better the turn. In skateboarding, you set the speed and momentum of your turn before you go into it--once into the turn, you are somewhat committed by your previous positioning. In WindSkating, you hold the throttle in your hand clear through the maneuver. In your trek across the desert, you are moving so fast that it would be craziness to attempt anything you could really call a turn. To break speed, you head slightly upwind. This is somewhat like climbing to the top of a wave before jamming into a turn-back. On your WindSkate, you linger, stalling upwind, waiting for the right gust. This breaks your entrance speed, but gives you the juice to perform the maneuver with high velocity. When the gust hits, you pull the sail directly flat back against the wind and bank sharply to the left, your speed increases about 25 percent as you enter the turn. Directly mid-turn, with your body banked against the centrifugal force, you release the boom, and the sail shoots around the front of your board under the power of the wind. As you switch hands holding the mast, you grab the boom as it swings around to the other side of your board, and here you control the juice coming out of your turn. You pull swiftly and powerfully in on the boom, bringing the sail into instant trim to capture the ensuing gust. As it hits, you arch back and lean to offset the force. In seconds, you have regained full speed in the opposite direction. The size of a wave or the grade of the hill does not control the speed of the turn. You control it, all the way through the turn, almost as if you had your foot on the accelerator. If you were punching it, you could go into it at 30 and come out at 40. Out here, on your first run you figure you opted out for about half the speed and twice the control. Coming out of your turn, you could go immediately into another, slalom style, working into a series of tight, wind-punched turns, criss-crossing your way in and out of imaginary pylons all the way down the lake. But the opposite bank and the pull of the distant speed run excite you more. You set your board for the ultimate speed channel, and lean back against the sail for full speed. You start to fly. But the opposite bank and the pull of the distant speed run excite you more. You set your board for the ultimate speed channel, and lean back against the sail for full speed. You start to fly. You are going for the limit of what the wind and lakebed has to offer. But it doesn't seem to have a limit. You just keep accelerating in subtle stages, each one building on the last, as a new gust pushes you ahead to a new high. You wonder how many of these you can take before something gets out of control. You hang in there with your adrenaline channels open full and your excitement wide to the sensation. You've had speed before, but the hill always had an end in sight. You've been in the tube before, but the rush only lasted for seconds. Your body's been torqued over in mid-air, but you always came instantly down off the bank. Out here in the jet stream, it goes on and on as long as you can stand it. How long can you stay on top of the rush until your reflexes make the wrong response to the right signal? You don't know, and you don't want to find out. The lake may not have a limit, but you do. You let go of the boom to free coast to a gradual slow-down. Now, for the first time, without the pull of the sail to stabilize you, you realize just how fast you are going on a skateboard and just how vulnerable you could be to a soft spot or speed wobble. You glide on frictionlessly for hundreds of feet before your speed becomes comfortable again. On a high-speed skateboard run down Signal Hill, your reflexes are all geared for that one-minute drive to maximum speed and control. You've had minutes, hours, and days to prepare to hit that top speed. Your adrenaline gears you to the high point and carries you through at the peak of excitement. But when it is over, it is over, and you relax. Out here, on the desert, with the jet stream constantly shooting you through the cosmos of infinite salt flat, you don't hit a high, and then slow and stop. You hit top speed, and go and go and go. Thirty m.p.h, begins to feel like cruising speed, and you relax with it. Carving into a series of high-speed slalom turns, you weave in and out of rocks, divots, dark spots, and gusting, surging sections of wind. You lean out to counterbalance the force in the sail, and you are pulling with all your weight against an invisible source of power that threatens to dislodge you at any instant with a quirk of nature, or a laziness of attitude. Your attention span can only focus on the danger factor for so long before it drifts off to take in the environment. You look down at the ground shooting by beneath you and at the sail up above you, piercing into the cloudy deep blue. Acid, surreal. You must have transgressed into part of a skateboard cartoon. Any second now the scene will end, and you will get to the real movie. But it doesn't end. Like the animated skateboarder hurtling through empty space, you continually fly across the expanses of your unlimited environment. You have spanned the width of this section of lakebed, and you are about to turn again and tack back upwind to the cars and van. Only this calls for a back-sail tack. The sailors back at the beach would laugh and say, "Let's see you jibe on that thing." (turn into the wind, blowing the boom across the board and your body--a sure wipeout in their minds). And you did, and wowed them every time, as you caught the boom and leaned into the sail after a perfect upwind turn to tack back upwind. But that was at the beach, and it was difficult in a ten m.p.h. wind. And you don't know what the jet stream out here registers on the wind meter. So you head up into the wind, making the turn as gradual as possible as the sail starts to blow with force across your body. You lean into the sail from the backside of the wind to counterbalance the pressure coming from the other side of the sail. At the beach it felt really uneasy. Out here, it feels impossible. The problem is that if the wind gusts, you can't let out on the sail. Your body is leaning into the sail to hold it in place; if the wind gusts, you have to lean in harder or go over backward onto the ground. Uncomfortable at 20 m.p.h. (Your upwind tack is slower.) Not only that, but if you start to head downwind, you will pick up speed, while losing control of the sail till it snaps you off the board in a second. Why are you doing this then? It is the best and only good position for a good upwind tack to get you back to the cars. If you can only hold in the slot between an upwind stall and a downwind dive, you'll be back at the cars in no time. But there is a lock-in commitment to this position. If the wind gusts too much, you won't be able to turn into it to break your speed. And it is certain disaster to let yourself start to head downwind. That means you have to stay in the slot, and if the wind gusts, you lean in harder and go faster. But you can't change direction if there is something in the way. This is your course as you head back to the van. And you are doing all right. You have it down to a system. The wind is consistent, and you can head into it to break speed, and then blow slightly downwind to regain speed, before heading upwind to break again. By this process, you have control, like climbing and dropping across the face of a big wave, you always have the position you need to handle the sections. If it is not too long a section.

For More Information Contact: Windskate Santa Monica P.O. Box 3081 Tel: 310.453.4808 FAX: 310.829.9511 email: windskate@windskate.com