Windsurf · One design boom
1976
Mistral is founded and the Windsurfer gets competition
An importer, a plastics manufacturer and a designer set out to build a better board than the original, and start one of the sport's great brands.
Mistral Competition, one of the brand's early boards · outline traced from a Mistral brochure of 1982–84
Peter Brockhaus became the German importer of Ten Cate’s Windsurfers in 1973. He saw that people hesitated to buy a board they had never tried, and with Ernstfried Prade and others he built a teaching system around “instruction before purchase”. A network of windsurfing schools spread over the German lakes.
In 1976 Brockhaus, Prade and Heinz G. Bader, who owned a plastics factory in Switzerland, founded Mistral. Their aim was to build a board with technical improvements over the original Windsurfer. Prade’s lockable mast foot became the brand’s most valuable invention: for twenty years every sailboard maker paid Mistral a licence fee to use it.
In 1981 Hoyle Schweitzer’s patent lawyers found rigs that infringed his patent on Mistral’s stand at the boot trade fair, and the brand was drawn into the patent battles of the following years. It also looked to Hawaii, contracting Rick Naish as lead designer and bringing in his son Robby Naish as its star rider, and grew into one of the best-known names in the sport.