A little bit of history (1)

I've always loved magazines, since I was a kid, and I think in this digital era, they still remain irreplaceable, probably have adapt a bit to these days of websites, blogs and live broadcasts, even so I think they're totally irreplaceable.

For this article I must acknowledge the assistance of two friends who like me are great lovers / collectors of windsurfing magazines; Lino and Claus who lent me some of his historic jewels to scan them.

	Here we have the cover of the first issue of the spanish magazine Surf a Vela, wasn't the first windsurfing magazine in Spain, but for most of us was the one we started with, and the one you still can buy every month. This first issue came out in April 1984 and here we can see the 1983 world rankings, published in that issue.
	As you can see, at that time were no specialists, and riders were doing all three disciplines and were in the run for the prestigious overall title.

As I just said, and although many of you may not know (as it disappeared before most of us started windsurfing), the first windsurfing magazine in Spain (of which I have on record) was Vela Libre, which we have here the cover of the 25th issue, in which we see a radical jump of that time (worth a cover) with what was then an extreme wave board.

On this spread from an old issue from the french Wind magazine we see what even today remains one of the most epic days in the history of windsurfing, "The Big Monday" February 27, 1984, the legendary Arnaud de Rosnay was the only photographer that day at a huge Hookipa, in the picture we see Fred Haywood (clear example of the versatility of the riders at that time, since he was a speed "specialist") between two monsters with more than two masts height.

And to finish this first chapter of old windsurfing magazines, which is so far my favourite windsurfing shot, taken by Sylvain Cazenave, one of the great photographers of the time.

In the picture we see Robby Naish at Phantoms, the outer reef of Backyards, at the North Shore of Oahu, in an enormous but  perfect day, dangerous anyway, that day a man died windsurfing there.

Advertising from the mid 80’s, a Fanatic sticker, by then each board from the range had the name of an animal.