Bogus Is As Bogus Does by Sam Moses

If the introduction to this 2000 board and sail test reads like the introduction to a book, it’s because the project became like a book. Having written two non-fiction books, I know. The amount of research and the number of hours spent at the laptop were comparable. Most of those writing hours were all-nighters in Baja (sleeping evenings, napping mornings, sailing afternoons), buzzed on Cuban coffee and listening out my trailer window to the roosters crowing and street dogs barking (and the occasional stray cow clomping down the street), either at each other or the Mexican moon. As Winnie the Pooh says about bees, “You never can tell, when it comes to them.”
One could say the same thing about windsurfing equipment testers. Or testing in general. Here’s the deal with this test. It’s based on the reality that such tests are impossible. The physical variables inherent to windsurfing make authoritative performance pronouncements unattainable. If what the reader thinks he’s getting, or what the testing publication believes it’s delivering, is a reliably true or precise description of the performance characteristics of a board or sail, there’s a whole lot of delusion sailing around. And if that statement sounds stunning to you, turn right now to the sidebar titled, “Top 10 Reasons Why U.S. Board Tests Are Bogus (or at least have been until this one, and this one will be too, if you take it as gospel).” You ask, quite reasonably: If that’s so, why bother doing them? Why bother reading them?

The answer lies within the words of this one, our justification within the structure. This test brings you background information like you’ve never gotten before. It avoids the pretense of authority and attempts not to tell you what to buy. It tries to enlighten, entertain and assist you to “know thyself” and “know thy stuff”. We hope it also makes you laugh. I don’t mean to dismiss all previous magazine tests. But I do think they might have made you cry. Certainly there has been much excellent technical information in them. But it’s so easy to be misled by one little thing that isn’t quite true in a review, and those untrue things in previous tests have been like fleas on a Baja dog. Published critiques have carried the air of conclusiveness, and trusting readers buy equipment based on them. Far too often, it’s equipment that’s not right for them, bringing tears.

That said, it should be emphasized that there are many specifically untrue comments in this test—testers’ opinions. But the larger truth is the truth of what actually happened, not necessarily what should have happened. All that any comment reveals is the experience a tester—guest tester, pro sailor or magazine editor—had with a rig on that day, in those conditions, in that state of tune, with his style and skills. Which is why the ratings are anything but gospel. It’s probably safe to say (with an exception or two), that all of the boards and sails in this test perform well, in the right hands at the right time. Behind the specific points of any negative comment is usually a mismatch somewhere in the mix of board, sail, sailor and conditions. A number of negative comments on any board or sail, no matter what they say, might merely indicate that the comfort zone in that mix is narrow.

One object of the theme of this test is to get the reader/sailor/consumer to realize that he or she should know what he/she wants and needs, before he/she can buy the thing that will make him/her happy. Everybody wants control, everybody wants easy planing, easy jibing. But technically, what features in a rig will deliver those things for you, given your skills, your style, your sailing conditions? How much rocker suits you? Where do you like your draft? It might sound daunting to think you must know, but the reward to knowing is way high—and sometimes, so is the price for not knowing. The correct answer might take years to find, without help—and the best source is an attentive dealer who’s progressive enough to realize that the hard sell is the short sell, in the long run.

Matching sailors’ skills and styles to board and sail performance features has to be one of the biggest and most important challenges to growth of the sport. It will require a great deal of commitment and attention. It can’t be casual. Conclusions can’t be found in magazine pages. At least not until magazines adopt Barry Spanier’s suggested approach (see Top 10 Reason Number 7). Even then, there’s plenty of room for error. But if conclusions can’t be found, direction can. If you can define yourself, we can define the boards and sails.

We’d like to steal some words from the opening page of the Sailworks pamphlet, to further explain our own approach to this board and sail test. “Sails, like art, emanate from the head, heart and soul of the creator. Understand the talent, the commitment and the philosophy and you’re a long way to understanding the sail.”

When American Windsurfer announced that dealers would be invited to Maui to be testers, eyebrows were raised over the legitimate issue of bias. But the fears were never my own, and they proved to be way overblown. The word “bias” might suggest some sort of lack of integrity to some, but it really only means “preference.” So what. Any windsurfer has likes and dislikes, which they bring to the test. Each dealer was informed at the test that he or she would be called on their ratings, publicly, if their numbers or comments suggested an attempt to manipulate the results. In the end, frankly, the dealers’ input saved our ass. It was fair, it was informed, it was enthusiastic, and it provided substance without which this test would be lacking. Maybe now is the time to present my own position. From a professional standpoint, I’m absolutely indifferent about advertising revenue to this magazine. I think the industry needs a credible publication, because windsurfers need one, and for that reason I’d like to see American Windsurfer assume that role and thrive, but I was merely contracted to write this test. I was asked to use my experience to raise the journalistic level of the equipment test. My personal economic survival does not depend upon satisfying manufacturers or making them happy. As I write this, I haven’t seen the edited reviews, but I trust they haven’t been watered down.

There are many shortfalls in this report and one of them are in the reviews of the sails. They are thinner than those for the boards; the details on individual sails are more in the specs than the copy. Sails are so much more mysterious and ethereal than boards, maybe because wind is less tangible than water. Testers know less about them, so they have less to say. Test writers know less about them, so ditto (but this one is learning). Sailmakers tend to be farther out there than board shapers, so their explanations of their creations are sometimes as mysterious (or thin) as the creations themselves. And sail tuning is the Great Bugaboo, as mentioned elsewhere, again and again.

An omission that needs to be addressed, although by no means is it a shortfall—in fact, it turned out to be a blessing—is the absence of some major manufacturers, most notably Mistral, F2, Naish and North. Their distributor asked to be paid a significant amount to have his products evaluated before the 120,000 windsurfers who will be receiving this issue, a precedent that American Windsurfer thought best not to set. The test would have been more comprehensive with their inclusion, but by the same token it’s richer without them. There was more time and space to explore and introduce some truly dynamic new heavyweight contenders, such as Starboard, RRD, Tushingham and The Loft. As well as learn more about smaller high-quality manufacturers such as Sailworks and Windwing.

When I began crunching the numbers from the testers’ ratings sheets, there were two surprises. The first, a disappointment, was how few ratings there were, given the number of testers and 32 days of sailing. The only possible explanation is that testers frequently sailed but didn’t rate. Maybe that’s good, because it indicates they only rated when they were sure of their impressions. The other surprise was pleasant. Despite my tongue-in-cheek trashing of the numbered ratings in Top 10 Reason Number 2, I believe they reflect general accuracy in a way words can’t—words do better with specifics. Even though it was painful to include ratings I knew were simply wrong, and tempting to throw them out (a slippery slope I turned away from), when I added up and averaged the numbers, if there were enough of them, what I believe to be a generally accurate portrait of the boards and sails magically emerged. Moral to the story: use enough testers, and they’ll eventually get it right. Kind of like the proverbial monkeys in a cage writing “War and Peace.”

Of course, there are wrongs in testing procedures, and they will yield wrongs in evaluation, no matter how you try to justify it by stretching the argument, contending that those procedural wrongs reflect real-world realities, and reality is the bigger right. You can also say a novel contains more truth than non-fiction—but this is supposed to be science, ha-ha. So better control is a target for next year.

Next year, this test will probably be structured differently—because it can and should be refined, not because the structure didn’t work this year. I believe it did work. On Maui, I had my doubts; but after the picture began growing, literally before my eyes on my laptop screen, it started to make sense. Even those testers’ comments that I was sure were off base, if not off the wall, had validity, as long as they were balanced by… yes, contradiction. And sometimes that contradiction was between two same-sized experts on the same day. They both couldn’t be right, could they? Welcome to the real world of windsurfing. As Jay Valentine, a veteran of the windsurfing wars, told me in Baja, speaking of equipment evaluation, “There’s no right, no wrong, there just is.” So here’s our report on the 2000 boards and sails of those manufacturers who were confident enough to present themselves to you in this no-holds-barred medium. It just is.