Lining up for the start of the race (credit: Jeff Hegwer) By Bill Keitel, VP Emeritus, US Windsurfing So ends the 2023 Worthington Windsurfing Regatta and Music Festival. It was the most pleasant weekend to be found in any upper Midwest community. The newly purchased sound stage took a full day to assemble and was up and running for a spectacular evening performance. Hats off to the City of Worthington for making this investment that will be meaningfully used for years to come. Friday night the crowd was standing room only for a hundred yards in front of the well-lit and nicely-appointed sound ..read more

Dave Gadarian shows and tells at CSC (photo: Randi Shapiro) June was a busy month for WIPA, the official US Windsurfing instructor certification program. More than 20 new instructors got their Level I wings this month in Berkeley (CA), Mill Creek (VA), and Avon (NC), bringing the total of WIPA-certified instructors around the country to 83! No matter where you live in the US, there’s now an instructor nearby ready to take your skills to the next level! Randi Shapiro (Rear Commodore at the Cal Sailing Club in Berkeley) and Chad Perkins (who ran the instruction session in Virginia this month) sh ..read more

Reviving the local AZ windsurfing scene with flying colors! (photo credit: Peter Kirschner) By Stephane Fitch It was a stir that few would have envisioned five years ago. Dozens of windsurfers and their friends gathered on the south shore of Lake Pleasant, Arizona on May 1 to socialize, sail and celebrate the revival of windsurfing in the Sonoran Desert.  The occasion, dubbed the Spring Wind Thing, was organized by a rapidly growing area windsurfing club called Arizona Wind Fanatics and sponsored by the US Windsurfing Association and Murrays Sports. Sailors showed up at dawn and staked ou ..read more

Eduardo Rodrigues, new US Windsurfing director for the Southeast region! We’re stoked to introduce Eduardo Rodrigues as our new director at US Windsurfing for the Southeast region! Eduardo was born in Brazil but now lives in Jacksonville, FL, and he’s been an active one-design racer on the national stage for years, on a Kona at first, and most recently on the IQ Foil. He’s taking up the baton from Ron Kern. Mighty big shoes to fill: Ron has been a pillar of US Windsurfing for decades, and we all look up to him for his achievements on the race course and his involvement with the community. We’l ..read more

The Bonaire Kids, circa 2002! (photo: Bill Keitel) That title sounds like a Beatles song, doesn’t it? Bill Keitel, VP Emeritus at US Windsurfing, digs into his archives to tell us about the time he traveled to the Midwinters in Florida and saw the Bonaire Kids in action for the first time. Twenty years went by in a flash, didn’t they? By Bill Keitel The year was 2002. Race director Tinho Dornellas was hosting the Calema Midwinters USWA Championships in Merritt Island / Cocoa Beach, Florida. We had traveled down from Minnesota to get a grip on the possibility of hosting the 2003 Nationals for ..read more

Group Picture at the ODP Camp in Stevenson, WA (credit: Lyrah Colvin) US Sailing just wrapped up a 1-week training camp for young Olympic hopefuls in the Gorge (capped by a regatta, of course!), and it was en eye-opener for the kids. For those of you lucky enough to have sailed in the Gorge, you remember your first time, don’t you? The camp ended last weekend, but we hear that the kids are still there having a blast. Organizer CarollAnn Alie pulled out all the stops and it showed! Yes, that CarollAnn Alie: You know, three-time Olympian, World Champ, entrepreneur extraordinaire. She moved to th ..read more

The 2021 US Nationals will take place in North Carolina and Florida this Fall! Here’s the schedule: 1) SLALOM + FREESTYLE in Avon, NC, Oct 30-Nov 6 The slalom and freestyle nationals will take place during the 2021 OBX-Wind event on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the largest and badass-est windsurfing event on the continent! With hundreds of riders in town for the long distance race, and everyone eager to jump into the action after more than a year hiatus, this promises to be a reunion like no other. The event is open to everyone, of course, not just pros. If you can gybe and wave your ..read more

Christine O’Connor at the 2018 Kona Worlds in Clearwater! Yes, it was Halloween that day, but she’s Wonder Woman the rest of the time too! (photo: Magi Foster) We’re stoked to have Christine O’Connor join us as the new regional director for the Central/Mid-Gulf region of the U.S.! Christine lives near Dallas, Texas, and will be responsible for promoting our sport in the Central states, including the Gulf Coast. Christine has 25 years of experience at Fortune 500 companies, so she knows a thing or two about building awareness and excitement around global programs! But she’s just as adept at bui ..read more

UPDATE: The 2020 US Nationals are cancelled. The events below are still proceeding as planned, as regional events, but they will not award US Nationals titles. Please support them and attend if you can! In light of the current COVID-19 pandemic situation, the 2020 US Windsurfing Nationals have been rescheduled as follows: Oct 24-31: FREESTYLE and SLALOM in Hatteras (NC) during the OBX-WIND event Nov 6-8: COURSE RACING (kona, LT, open, techno, windfoil) in Clearwater (FL) during the Gulf Championships event For registration and updates, please check out 2020nationals.uswindsurfing.org We’re ..read more

Smiling faces all around! (credit: Britt Viehman / nbwindsurfing.com) By Janice Anne Wheeler Last June I was the new girl, and wrote my first-ever US Windsurfing commentary on this same Macintosh watching the Nationals in Worthington, Minnesota. This weekend at the 2020 Midwinters in Florida, one of the veteran racers tested my knowledge of the sport by asking me the difference between a Raceboard sail and a Windsurfer sail. “Most folks just call it windsurfing,” I tell him with aplomb, “Only the sport knows the particulars of Kona vs Windsurfer vs Raceboard vs Foil.” Nice non-answer, don’t yo ..read more