Gun Sails Join the PWA
The PWA is proud to announce that international sail brand GUN are joining their ranks for the 2008 season onwards.
With the growing popularity of Slalom and positive growth being seen in the sport, GUN is the latest brand to pledge their support for the pro-tour series.
Head honcho Jörg Müller was similarly excited to commit, and spoke eagerly about his views on the international circuit, environmental issues, and Gun’s role in helping to push the sport towards the masses once again.
‘The PWA World Tour is the Formula 1 of Windsurfing. It’s the elite arena for high performance windsurfers with high performance gear and reflects the state-of-the-art for the sport.
These events are also a constant motivation for the spare time sailor as they demonstrate clearly in every discipline that there are nearly no limits in this game.
The PWA championships provide a high level of promotion for windsurfing in general, and show spectators all the variety available, and hopefully tempts them to join us.
Windsurfing rightly claims to be the mother of all action sports, and we are all conscious of the fact that since the peak of windsurfing in the 80s and 90s, that the numbers of people practicing this sport has decreased.
But looking to the future as a manufacturer of windsurfing equipment, we also have a responsibility for the success of the whole sport and not just our shareholders value.
Gun Sails’ policy has always been to offer a very good product at a very good price to allow more people to spend more time on the water.
Obviously that’s not enough. For us, becoming a member of the PWA means another step to contributing to the promotion of the coolest sport in the world, and our whole team is excited about it.
The image of windsurfing has always been attached to exotic beaches and places, and from this point of view, it’s great that the tour takes in new spots such as it did in Brazil and Cabo Verde in 2007.
On the other hand, it seems difficult for riders and fans to get there.
The growing interest for Slalom seems to better reflect the real situation of windsurfing.
There are definitely more weekend racers out there than weekend freestylers, so they need to identify with somebody, and from our point of view the Slalom tour allows that identification with those riders and their production equipment to be a reality.
In general windsurfing and its industry needs to do more to help the sport flourish and perhaps a bit more?
We’ve taken small steps with our long-running recycling campaign.
The idea came at the time while watching people at the beach having a hard time with real old, worn out and not up to date equipment.
We thought if we make them an easy offer to get rid of their stuff, they wouldn’t have to fight with their old sail or throw it into the household waste.
The success was overwhelming. And guess what? Not every sail returned was that worn out…
We separate them and donate the good ones to public schools who use them for training, some go to companies who made fashion bags and clothes out of old sail material, and the rest was professionally disposed.
We can’t offer this during the whole year, but there are people who really wait for this period to “exchange” their old material.
As a lot of our gear is sold via mail order, so of course we have a lot of packing materials, and we try to avoid plastic and use carton and other materials wherever possible.
If everyone did a little more we could make a significant difference, such as introducing a new friend to windsurfing now.’
Here’s looking forward to another record-breaking season on tour.
Aloha. PWA Team
© PWA / Brian McDowell
