Choppy waters: the stormy history of windsurfing

The birth of windsurfing began 65 years ago, when 12-year-old Peter Chilvers built and sailed the world’s first sailboard off Hayling Island, on the south coast of England, in April 1958.

Even at the age of 12, Chilvers was a keen sailor and had made his own small dinghies but wanted something that he could stand on, rather than getting wet sitting down in a sailboat. So he designed a wooden board with a mast attached to the back, with a hook and ring allowing the sail to swivel sideways, steered with a boom across the sail.

Chilvers eventually became a racing car engineer for Lotus, but returned to windsurfing and built an improved sailboard made of fibreglass for his own company.

But in 1968 Americans Jim Drake and Hoyle Schweitzer built and patented their own sailboard and sold windsurfing to a wider market. When they learned about Chilvers’s board they took him to court for infringing their patent.

During a lengthy and farcical litigation, Drake and Schweitzer’s star witness, an old lady who lived her whole life overlooking the water in Hayling Island, was brought to the courts to say she’d never seen a windsurfer. When shown pictures of Chilvers’s sailboard she instantly told the story of a young boy using the craft in the 50s. The three judges at the court of appeal in London ruled that Chilvers’s design was the forerunner of the modern sailboard.