Mat's Story Part 2

This is my story, I wanted to make it short, but as I was writing, and searching some photos and videos to illustrate, it finally built up. I wanted to share this, as I really feel lucky to have had so many opportunities, making most of my dreams come true. Also, this will let you know me better, and I hope to motivate you to co-design some great gear together.

 

It was around 1974, the first time I started to play with the wind, it was with my brother Fabian
at the age of 6 or 7.
 

I built the boat you see on the video with my Dad the same year when we where living in London.
My first construction experience, I loved it.
It’s cool to see how close it looks to a windsurf, that we started
a few years later in 1976 when we moved to the south of France at Montpellier.

Mai 1976 Montpellier.

So here we are in the South of France, we drove down with all our stuff in a Ford Transit
direct from London.

I don't know how to speak a word of French, even though my Mum is
French. We are thrown in to school, with Fabian, and it turned out to be OK, after a few
months, language was no longer an issue.

One day on that summer 76, we saw something really strange on the water, we tracked it
down to have a closer look. From a distance it looked like the boat we built, but the guy
was standing up, incredible.
It looked really cool, and we had to try, we managed to find a guy who had one for rent,
and the board was not a windsurfer, but was called the flysurf. "a sign from the future"

From that day we where hooked, our Dad quickly bought a first windsurf board, then a few more,
to set up a small school, we became quite obsessed about how much wind we would get the next
day or weekend, not to good to concentrate at school.

We where still a bit small, me 9 and Fabian 8, difficult to lift up the sail, but 3 years later we had
ripped our Dads boards to pieces by cutting the ends off, making shorter boards, with foot traps
made of hose pipes, and trying to hit some waves to get the board to leave the surface of the earth,
our dream.



So very early we started to mess around polyurethane foam and polyester, I build my very first board
when I was 14, in 1981, a Shaper next door to us, was building big fun boards, about 3.2 meters long, using 4 meter Clark Foam blanks.
I managed to recover in the trash the remaining 80 cm left, I glued 3 pieces together and started to shape.
As I wanted to be able to lift up the sail, I made a pint tail, with maximum width around the mast foot, but it wasn't enough.
First go, I had to improvise a water start to get back to the shore, took me over half a hour, but the board was flying, like never before.


So years goes by, the excitement is huge, we seem to have an endless learning curve, with limits of what is possible being pushed every day, Windsurf magazines show up, and we see for the first time guys riding in dream conditions, jumping waves.
I remember looking at how they where doing the jibe and other other moves, Robby Naish and Pete Cabrinha where showing the way, but we where not bad on our side in France where the sport became huge.



We managed to get free gear with local shops, we had older friends with cars that cam to get us in front of our school, as we sneaked out before the end of the class as soon as the wind picked up.

To have a future with the sport, the only way was to do windsurf competitions, I did some, but I hated it, all those rules, I really didn't feel free enough, just a question of mind set , I wanted to experiment new things, making films about the sport, I was always impressed by the visual side of windsurfing, so much power under control in extreme wind and wave conditions. At that time, I had no idea how to concretize this desire.

On the other side Fabian was focused on competing, very young at 16, he decided to stop school to become a pro windsurfer.
My parents supported his decision, I was shocked by the risque he was taking, worried that the challenge was to big to achieve, and jealous that he had the courage to fully go for his dream. I must say I was relieved and proud when he won an event giving him access to a full World Cup Racing contract, that he did for a decade, ranking in the Top 10, competing with Guy's like Robby Naish that inspired us when we where young.



So as I was still at school, I did different things to earn some money during the summer holidays, never far from windsurfing. I build boards for a local Shaper, doing all the resin stuff, sanding, I also had a small business renting and giving some windsurf lessons, but as this expanded a little, I had not enough time for school so I quit.
At 20 I had a nice little set up on the beach with windsurfing, hobby cats, and transate.



During the off season, I built snowboards, and started to make some small movies, I bought a small cheap camcorder, filmed friends riding In some extreme condition, and sent the footage to national French TV, I just wanted to show them what we do when they say to the hole country to stay home.
Well to my surprise, the super star weather man, put my footage on the air and 7million people took a look at what we where doing on our local spot.

In addition the next day, the weather man called me at my home asking me not to hesitate sending him more, and has he had no budget to help me produce these little 30 second films, I suggested him to have a sponsor brand on my gear, he said no problem and even would make sure viewers will see it, I said thanks.

Minutes later I sent a few faxes out to the main soft drink companies suggesting to them to be on my gear and pay me 10 percent of the add cost, and only if I managed to get them on air at prime time. The same day they said yes, and sent me some stickers.

Off I was experimenting and filming some new ideas, like snowboarding behind a small aircraft on the water, speed sail front loops, or putting a windsurf sail on a snowboard and see what happens,



this last experiment got some attention from the the number one French TV station, they produced
this footage in 16mm film, but only have this lower quality:



For sure these experiences are just one shots, some say that I had coverage and money that would be more legit for windsurf riders doing the real respectable stuff.
In my mind I was in search mod, looking for the next killer water sport , hopping to get the excitement ones again, from something totally new to build, and there was no doubt in my mind that it would happen, simply because the facts show that incredible new things come out every day.

I did use my TV contacts and Soft drink partnership to produce a windsurf event part of the French windsurf tour, with all the top riders in 1991.
My brother then was in the Top 5. The event turned out to be not to windy, but we got incredible TV coverage.

After that, I continued to get support to produce and present a 3 mn show on national TV, where I traveled around the world trying out tones of different sports with the best riders, was great.

With the money in 94 I invested in one of the first online video editing machines. this let me produce my own windsurf magazine, that I distributed on video cassettes, I dreamed of CD, but did not exist yet, Wind Magazine in France was my partner and helped to promote.



In 1996 I was windsurfing and producing the number 3 on Maui, Manu Bertin came to see me, and asked if I could film him, he said that the spirit of flysurf is just downwind, we don't want to go up wind, I said that maybe, you could attract more interest if you didn't say that, he said no, don't think about the sport that way, this is different, and added : anyway Neil Pryde that have produced the few kites I have, are shutting down the project, and won't produce any more of these kites, so looks like the sport is dead anyway.



So this is my first real contact with Kiteboarding, I did have a very quick try with
Laurent Ness a few years before, but is wasn't fun like this. When I saw Manu flying off, I was
really excited and was desperate to try, he wanted me to have a go, but Manu was to scared that I would destroy the only kite left on the planet.

The Video came out and everyone was excited to see what this "flysurf" could do, and we could clearly see that Manu was going up wind, probably by mistake.

A few months later, at Gliss Expo 97, a guy came to see me, and said that he saw the video I did with Manu, and was the designer of the Kite, his name was Bruno Legaignoux.
He asked me if I could do a video user guide explaining how to set up the kite, he said that he just set up a new company called Wipika, that will be the brand name for the kite.
He also said that as he was starting, he had very little money, I said no problem, give me what you can and 2 kites to make the film.
Every thing was set, except that to get the kites we needed to wait for the new factory replacing Pryde to be functional, the new factory invested a lot, had confidence in the project , even though Pryde abandoned, that would normally be a good reason not to do it.
So probably this Factory saved the sport, and I am happy to still work with them today for GK.

So I finally got the kites, problem was that Bruno was in the north of France and I was in the south, I had to figure out, how it worked, pumping up was easy, then flying the kite on the beach was easy, but as I went in to filming details, there where some things I didn't manage to understand. I called Bruno on the phone, to get the explanation, but in fact I didn't manage to make it work, because it wasn't working, that's where we started talking about solutions to finish the film and R&D for me began.



From 97 to 99 we where struggling, having a lot to do and no money, I more or less worked for nothing for 2 years, but it was super exciting. I finally got 10% share of Wipika for my efforts, but never got any money out of that.

Cabo Verde I continued to produce my Windsurf Video Mag, the last one I did, number 5 in 98 was half windsurfing and half Kiteboarding, well we were all starting in the film. It was Laurent Ness, Raphael Sales and my self in Cabo Verde. We got a very small amount of wind I managed to film Laurent and Raph in the Waves, I did some footage in the lines. We where really motivated to show the sports potential, and we did give a bit of stress to the pro windsurf riders Josh Angulo, Keith Teboul and Jason Prior who where using a jet sky to try to catch a wave as we where flying across the spot with our strange gear.(in French, need to do subtitle)



From there things where starting to move, production was starting to role, and interest was growing, We had the video user guide shipped with every kite,

North Shore Maui Hawaii 1998, photo shoot with Sylvain Cazenave.

In 98, I go back to Maui, to see how kiteboarding is going, and to make a 1 hour film on the growing sport, it was great to see windsurf legends, learning this new sport, I remember showing Robby how to launch his kite and teaching his wife to kiteboard. I was impressed with Lou and Flash.




There was a lot of excitement, Naish was having a licence deal with Bruno, to produce Naish kites, but it seemed that the potential conflict with the windsurf market was not quite clear, Robby did not want to speak to the camera at the time, but Don his sail and new kite designer did.

Now 4 line kites are on there way, this will open up the sport to even more people.

In 2000, Naish makes a big hit with it's AR 5 high aspect ration kites 4 lines. We at Wipika are still with the classic 3.5 aspect ratio, I really have to push Bruno to make a higher aspect Ratio, he doesn't really want to , saying it would be dangerous. For sure a high aspect ratio on a small size, can fly crazy, Naish AR5 had aspect ration 5 on all sizes, so what I suggested to Bruno, was to do a Variable Aspect Ratio Concept, I called the VARC



From the feed back we got from our experience and general riders feedback, I did an excel file with sizes vertical and AR horizontal, placed points at coordinates of the best known kites, and then linked all the points together with a curve, so this way we could select any size and get the AR. We had one medium and one high AR kite, that I named the Freeair, and Airblast.
Bruno would then design the kite according to the excel file and input all the rest, profile, sweep back and a lot more..

The Airblast was a great kite, and the VARC is now used on every kite on the water.

Mat's Story Part 2

 

Mat Pendle Story Part 2 Posted On: 2012-02-16 02:34:48 ; Read: 1058 time(s)
	Mat's Story Part 2, is about the end of him working with Wipika, Creating Takoon and then finally Globekites. See some Key R&D innovations, that a lot of you use today, Mat living in Mauritius, Globekites products, photo and video shoot, on the Kiteboard Paradise Island.