Windsurf

A board with a free sail, steered by tilting the mast

105 boards · 5 brands · 450 sizes

Windsurfing puts a sail on a universal joint in the middle of a board, so the rider holds the whole rig and balances it against the wind. It ranges from light-wind cruising on long boards with a daggerboard to slalom racing, jumping and riding waves on short, compact boards, and now Olympic racing on hydrofoils. Because the rig is free to tilt, the sailor steers it with their body and has no rudder.

A typical windsurf board, 2280 by 676 mm
the typical outline: every board’s shape averaged at the median length and width

The typical board

The typical windsurf board is 2280 × 650 mm, 105 L, with a rounded pin tail and its wide point ahead of centre.

2180–2550mm long · median 2280

565–820mm wide · median 650

78–169litres · median 105

3.5length over width, median · derived

Ranges hold the middle 80 % of every size listed · tails: rounded pin tail 50, square tail 18, pin tail 16, swallow tail 12, round tail 9

How It Rides

What moves it

The sail works as a wing: air flowing around it produces lift, which the sailor carries through the boom (and, at speed, a harness) down into the board, while a fin or daggerboard resists the sideways push. Tilting the rig forward or back moves the centre of effort in front of or behind the fin, which turns the board away from or into the wind. Once there is enough wind, the board rises onto a plane and skims the surface: lighter riders get there from around 10 knots of wind, heavier riders need 15 or more.

Reading the shape

Beginner longboards are long (260–350 cm) with a daggerboard to stop sideways drift in light wind. Freeride boards (230–250 cm, 100–170 L) are built to plane early, slalom boards trade length for wide tails and speed, and wave boards are the smallest, with narrow tails and a rounder rocker for turning on a wave face. Since about 2009 wave boards have carried twin, thruster or quad fins instead of a single fin. Surf magazine's rule of thumb for a first board is volume in litres = body weight + 80–110 for a longboard or + 50–80 for a freeride board, while a wave board's volume roughly matches the rider's weight. Foil boards such as the Olympic iQFOiL are short and very wide (95 cm) because the foil, not the hull, does the work once flying.

How to read any board: length and width, wide point, tails, rails, rocker

Wind

about 6–8 kn to uphaul a big board; 8–14 kn to learn; roughly 10–15+ kn to plane

Water

flat water, chop, open-sea swell or breaking waves

Worth knowing

Beginners want cross-shore wind and flat water; wave sailors want strong side-shore wind and surf.

The Rack

Every windsurf board, shortest to longest, one scale · from the Slingshot Freestyle V3 (1720 mm) to the Starboard Phantom Windsurf Board 2025 (3770 mm)

All 105 in the catalogue

Good To Know

  1. Antoine Albeau holds the windsurfing speed record: 53.49 knots (99 km/h) averaged over 500 m on the purpose-built Lüderitz speed channel in Namibia on 1 December 2024, ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council. It was his fourth record, beating the 53.27 kn he set on the same strip in 2015. [1][2][3]

  2. The women’s windsurfing record is 48.02 knots, set by Britain’s Jenna Gibson at the 2024 Lüderitz Speed Challenge and confirmed by the WSSRC. It replaced Heidi Ulrich’s 47.06 kn, set on the same channel in 2022. [2][4][5]

  3. Olympic windsurfing has changed boards almost every decade: Windglider in 1984, Lechner Division II in 1988 and 1992, Mistral from 1996 to 2004, NeilPryde RS:X from 2008, and the iQFOiL hydrofoil at Paris 2024. Women got their own medal event in 1992. [6][7]

  4. The foil changed the wind range. The iQFOiL, approved by World Sailing in November 2019, can race from about 5 knots, using an 8.0 m² sail for women and youth and a 9.0 m² sail for men. [7]

  5. Björn Dunkerbeck counts 42 world titles, including 12 consecutive PWA overall championships from 1988 to 1999, plus 7 wave and 9 slalom titles. [8]

Watch And Read

Who Makes Them

Where And When

Where to watch it

  • Lüderitz speed channel, NamibiaAn artificial channel about 1 km long, built for speed records, where the men's and women's 500 m marks were set.
  • Ho'okipa, MauiHome since 1984 of the Aloha Classic, the wave-sailing season final, with 15–20 ft wave faces common in late October.
  • Torbole, Lake Garda, ItalyMountains funnel a thermal wind, the Ora, from the south from about midday at 20–25 kn.

Where it came from

Peter Chilvers sailed a free-rig board on Hayling Island in 1958, and Newman Darby built and published his sailboard in 1964–65. The design that took off was Jim Drake and Hoyle Schweitzer's 1967 Windsurfer, with a universal joint and wishbone boom, patented in 1968 and mass-produced from 1970. Harnesses (about 1974), footstraps (about 1977) and shorter funboards took it into strong wind and waves, and it became an Olympic event at Los Angeles in 1984.

More disciplines

Sources

  1. [1]

    Fastest 10 m² windsurfing speed (male)

    Guinness World Records, 2024-12-01 · tier 1 · record

  2. [2]

    New windsurfing world speed records

    Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 2025-02-22 · tier 2 · article

  3. [3]
  4. [4]

    Heidi Ulrich: record breaker

    Windsurf Magazine (UK), 2022-11 · tier 2 · article

  5. [5]

    Speed surfing: Heidi Ulrich with new record over 500 metres

    surf Magazin, 2023-08-18 · tier 2 · article

  6. [6]

    Windsurfing as an Olympic event

    Scuttlebutt Sailing News, 2018-01-05 · tier 2 · article

  7. [7]

    The iQFOiL story

    Windsurf Magazine (UK) · tier 2 · article

  8. [8]

    Bjørn Dunkerbeck biography

    dunkerbeck.com (the athlete) · tier 1 · article

  9. [9]

    List of speed sailing records

    Wikipedia · tier 4 · reference

  10. [10]

    Guide: my first windsurfing board

    surf Magazin · tier 2 · article

  11. [11]
  12. [12]

    Wind speed for windsurfing: knots to plane

    WindUp · tier 3 · reference

  13. [13]

    Aloha Classic

    Wikipedia · tier 4 · reference

  14. [14]

    Torbole (Northern Garda Lake - Italy)

    Waterwind · tier 3 · reference