BOUKE
65
BECKER
(WITCHCRAFT) ON WINDSURF DESIGN:
PART TWO #SAILS
WORDS: WSUK PICS: LUCAS RUGIRELLO, RUSSELL GROVES, BOUKE BECKER
WHEN IT COMES TO DESIGN OF WINDSURFING EQUIPMENT, BOUKE
BECKER – HAVING BEEN INVOLVED IN WINDSURFING SINCE THE
EARLY DAYS – HAS SEEN IT ALL, DABBLED WITH IT ALL AND HAD A
HAND IN (LITERALLY) SHAPING THINGS TO COME AND HOW THINGS
ARE NOW. Whether it be hard wearing windsurf boards or more
recently sails and rig accessories, Bouke knows a thing or two
about creating windsurf products. In part two of this double feature
we catch up with Mr Becker about sail design.
Why did you decide to design a Witchcraft range of sails?
During the first eight years on Fuerte I had started making my own sails in our sail loft and
sometimes a few for customers. Then later on I got too busy with making boards and family and I
could get the Canarian distribution for a sail brand, which at the time were the sails that were
closest to my ideas and were the most durable for our conditions. But of course I kept an interest
in sail design and followed what other brands were doing as well and how they were achieving this
with the sails in our repair loft. Over the years I also had lots of discussions on sail design with the
designer of the brand I was distributing and my Witchcraft dealer in the UK, John Blackwell of
Sailrepair.co.uk. John also had some interesting ideas and has plenty of experience. John made me
some proto sails as he had been saying for a while that if I wanted to start making Witchcraft sails,
he could help designing the sails how I wanted them to be. So in the end we did it.
Where do you start with a new sail shape?
In the 90s, not knowing anything about sail design, I had designed sails from scratch, draw the
sails directly on the sail table starting with the luff curve. That was great fun and sometimes could
not stop to get some sleep. As you do not have to wait for resin to cure, it is quite fast to make
changes but you only see the result when you rig the sail. So we’d sometimes spend the whole
night through modifying and rigging till a sail looked right if it was windy the next day. Learned a lot
from that. Sails were not designed around RDM masts back then but since I had already
completely switched to RDM masts, we did design them on RDM masts. But now we already had
various different prototypes, we did not have to start from scratch but you take an existing design to
use as a guide and tweak it from there.
uk
WIND
SURFING