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DA WOOD IS DA KEY BY SAM MOSES
Five years ago, Svein Rasmussen founded Starboard on a wooden platform, and the time may now be right for the company to catch fire.
svein.html The windsurfing world would be a lot less interesting and a lot more difficult without Svein Rasmussen. Starboard’s founder, owner and leader is fast becoming our favorite character, as the bold designs he advances are game to the point of seeming quirky. But quirky is relative. In a medium that has gone too long with too few original ideas, any new concepts might seem quirky. And Starboard is nothing if not original.
Rasmussen’s sincere nature, not to mention his candor, is a rare thing in the
business world, if not for a Norwegian. Combine it with his energy and passion, and you have a man who’s hanging it out there. He truly believes that Starboard’s innovative direction will make your sporting life simpler and more fun, and that’s what it’s all about. If that happens, and if the word spreads, he succeeds as a businessman.
“He’s the only guy who has gone to the outer limits,” says Keith Baxter, Starboard’s U.S. distributor on Maui. “He’s gone to the edge of the envelope on a number of things.”
Modestly, he says, in English that’s just a little bit imperfect, “Very little are mine ideas.
I just work with good people.”
It may be true that he often relies on others for the technical execution, but he’s so deeply into the concepts that it’s hard to believe they don’t mostly come from his brain. For example the Carve 99, which was the discovery of this test, and the superwide Go, a board whose versatility staggers the imagination (sail size 2.5 to 10.0 meters, passengers welcome to climb aboard, certified for forward loops). Ideas do come from other free thinkers he has recruited, such as Jim Drake, lured back into windsurfing by Rasmussen to create the Formula and help with the highly functional and oddly exotic Starfish wave board, which was the most discussed board in our test.
“Some people think Jim’s a has-been just because of the direction windsurfing took,” says Rasmussen, “but he is actually a rocket scientist with more scientific knowledge than anyone I have met in the industry. His creativity, energy and exceptional background makes him a fabulous person to work with. I thought it would be fantastic to get a man like him back into windsurfing. It’s very unique to have a creator of a sport still alive.”
Rasmussen is a former racer that entered his first Windsurfer Worlds in 1979, won the Mistral Worlds in 1983, was a gold medal candidate for the 84 Olympics and spent 10 years on the PWA pro-circuit. He is also the first and only World Champion in every discipline in the IFCA Production Board Class which he won in 1991. “But I was always more interested in equipment
development than the competition,” he says.
He began working on new board shapes with Roberto Ricci, a dynamic Italian racer with a parallel career, now founder/owner of RRD. Their mutual respect remains high, and from a design standpoint they have become windsurfing’s two most ambitiously adventuresome boardmakers. They’re still on the same philosophical page, but technically they’re going in somewhat different directions, as the RRD boards are refining high performance, being fast or wavy while still being easy to sail, while the Starboards are.. well, they’re so individually different, and so outreaching, it’s difficult to categorize them. Broadly creative. Groundbreaking. Watershedding.
When Rasmussen retired from the pro tour in late ‘94 and formed Starboard in Bangkok, you might say he was diving into the dark and dangerous waters of the industry, doing a backflip off a 20-meter platform. “We had no financing, only ideas and technology,” he says. At least he landed on his feet. Understandably, also ironically given the commitment of his plunge, he was reluctant to take the leap in the first place. “I promised myself that I would never go in the windsurfing industry because it would spoil the fun of sailing. But then you see there is so much to be done.”
So much room for improvement in the boards, he means. So many ways to make sailing easier, to enable more people to discover and enjoy a wonderful sport and help it grow. The concept for the Go was on his mind even back then. “It has a very long history,” he says. “It was a very complex idea.”
He was only able to start the company by setting up shop inside the Cobra factory, in a special arrangement with its Thai owner and the European management team, which Rasmussen calls “brilliant.” Cobra was just beginning its own boom at the time, and it was a symbiotic relationship. Today the Starboard office is 10 minutes away, and Cobra is hand-building production carbon/epoxy sandwich boards for many other manufacturers, including Mistral, F2, Bic, Tiga, RRD, French, Fanatic, HiFly and JP. With some 1200 employees, Cobra makes more than 40,000 boards a year, a very large percentage of the world market. “We came in just when things started to look up,” says Rasmussen.
You might say that Starboard was built on a wooden platform. Australian pine, to be exact. As Rasmussen says, “Da wood is da key.” Wood inlay dates back at least 15 years, when Jean Louis Colmas began building such boards in New Caledonia, and he continues to refine the method as Starboard’s wood guy. Its main benefit is that it absorbs far less resin than fiber, so by using a thin .6 mm layer of wood in high-stress areas, the boards gain rigidity while losing as much as 1 kilo in weight, with exceptionally tight laminate. What’s more, on the beach, Starboards with wood inlay draw streams of admiring comments on their distinctive beauty.
What’s in the near future for Starboard and Rasmussen? Since May, he’s been working with Jim Drake and Matt Schweitzer on a board to be called the Friendship, as it represents a coming-together of the Drakes and Schweitzers after years of battling over the invention of windsurfing. Says Rasmussen, “It is a wide, light-wind freestyle board featuring a new concept fin configuration. It converts into a great freeride and touring board with some new deck features. It also will be especially easy to learn both windsurfing and shortboarding on. Our target is to simplify windsurfing by developing designs which span over a larger usage area than before thought possible. We hope to have it available sometime this summer.”
So that’s the Starboard theory. For the action, turn to the reviews of our 10 test boards—seven of which, we figure, are at the edge of the envelope. |
