Windsurf · Wide board revival
1999
Starboard Go: the wide board makes windsurfing easy again
Short, very wide and extremely floaty, the Go planes early and forgives mistakes, and aims to bring beginners back to a sport that had grown too technical.
Starboard Go, 279 × 85 cm · outline and profile traced from the American Windsurfer 1999 board test
By the late nineties windsurfing had a problem of its own making. Boards had become short, narrow and low in volume, wonderful in twenty knots for an expert, and close to unusable for anyone else. The number of windsurfers fell sharply.
Starboard, founded in 1994 by the Norwegian former racer Svein Rasmussen, answered in 1999 with what its own history calls the world’s first ultra-wide beginner board. American Windsurfer’s 1999 equipment preview gave the Go as 9 ft 2 in (279 cm) long, 33.5 in (85 cm) wide and 176 litres, and judged it the most innovative design of the year. It floated like a longboard and planed early, and it turned out that experienced sailors liked it too. In an August 1999 thread on the rec.windsurfing newsgroup, most sailors who had tried it praised it as an early planer for more than just beginners, though some found it no substitute for a high-wind board.
The Go arrived in a year when nearly every manufacturer was going wide. Within a few seasons wide, short boards became the standard for light wind and for racing in the Formula class.