My BIC Dufour Wing and how I started windsurfing :-)

Hello:

This is my first entry on this blogger website.
I keep a journal of my windsurfing and my "kids" suggested I blog it as well.

First I will give a little history and then go into a discussion about and give the credit it is due to the Dufour.

I grew up near Lake Simcoe, just north of Toronto in Ontario. Most people, who knew or know me, are not sure I ever grew up :-) This lake is supposed to be the largest inland lake in the province. I have fond memories of walking to the beaches, swimming, fishing in the summer, ice fishing, watching ice break up and falling through the ice. We spent time on many boats, but never on a sailboat.

Around 1988 I spent a long weekend on a large wooden sailboat in the Thousand Islands with my boss and his secretary, who is now my wife. This weekend made me wish I could one day afford and own a sailboat of my own. You probably have an idea , as I got later, just how much money this actually requires !! So, that remained a dream and NOT a vision ...

I was always the big guy with the van. Whenever anyone in the families needed something moved, they were sure to call me. About six (6) years later , around 1994 or 1995, my Unca Freddie called and told me the neighbours of Auntie Laura had an old windsurfer they no longer wanted. Freddie asked if I was "interested". I told him I would be there in about 10 minutes - obviously he lived about 15 or 20 minutes away :-)

At this time I knew VERY little about windsurfing and probably nothing about the equipment itself. My mission was to get the stuff and bring it up to "the country", where the chalets were. The family had about three (3) chalets all on the same lake, which is about one mile long and a quarter mile wide...

One weekend the whole family tried the windsurfer up at the chalet :-) It was a fine sunny weekend afternoon with a slight breeze. We had NO idea what we were doing, butt we had two (2) engineers in our midst. Yeah, like that was gonna help :-) Some things were obvious like the centre-board and the mast foot going into one of the two (2) holes in the middle of the board.  Those of you in the know, know the boom goes on a special way and the stuff actually included a special cord to perform this properly, butt again, what did we know ? We tied the boom on best as we could and people had turns giving it a go ...

Unca Freddie did well going and was wondering why i was laughing  so much

"Hey Freddie. See ya :-)"

      "HELP"

Well, that was the first tow back to shore with the rowboat and definitely NOT the last. 

The equipment had the name BIC on the board and I believe the sail actually had a Niel Pryde/NP marking. On the bottom it has a boat-like hull, not at all like the modern boards of today, which are flat with minor shaping underneath. Although boards like the Serenity and others are changing the ideas of current shapes. 

There actually seems to be a movement back to long-boards. The term long-board seems to imply length obviously, but for many years it also implied a centre-board. Once again, people like Tinho Dornellas in Florida are changing that concept as well. He is building a custom board very much like the AHD ZEN and others, butt without the centre-board.

In those days there was less on the internet, forums, no blogs, etc to help me figure out what the heck we had. Eventually I figured out this was a BIC Dufour Wing - all stock equipment.

here's a shot of me on the lake with the original equipment :-)    

Windsurfing was done on weekends and family members started to lose interest since it required practice and work. One weekend Philippe, a family friend, showed us how he attaches the boom tighter - still NOT the correct way - and how he did a beach start. Wind was great for that setup and my experience and so, I really overdid it. The next day at work I had chest pains to the point I thought I was having a heart attack. The company nurse laughed at me and was surprised I was using codeine. She did not know we could get this over the counter - only 8 mg per pill. Went home early and had my wife laugh at me too. Went to the doctor and the doctor said," no more monkees ..." Sorry, could not resist. She said it was muscles and gave me muscle relaxants.. That was how I discovered that windsurfing was lots of fun and yet one needed to be shape and/or have good technique... 

One weekend I managed to break the rubber on the mast foot, which some seem to call the universal joint. For those who do not know, this is the part that allows one to move the sail in any direction and steer the board. My brother-in-law and I drove into the nearest town.  

There were not many sports shop, so, we went to Sports Experts. {Notice how they managed to put sex in the middle of that name !!} A girl there sent us to a furniture shop. She smiled when we looked confused. She explained the shop owner was an avid windsurfer and sold equipment from the basement. When I presented the shop owner with the broken rubber, he seemed to be in thought. I asked him if everything was all right. He explained that he always had those parts in the shop, but not that day. He would gladly deliver one on Sunday to the chalet, which was about 20 minutes away !! He did deliver the part and explained that the mystery cord was used to attach the boom to the mast. 

The trick was to align the boom parallel to the mast, attach the cord through the boom head and around the mast. Then swing the boom around to the normal placement. Voilà, now the boom was really tight to the mast ! The mast is obviously the "pole" that holds the sail up and the boom is where the windsurfer holds onto...One day the special cord broke; one of the two (2) plastic holding "balls" came off - guess it was too tight. Made a new cord with another nylon rope tied off at the correct length {after many experiments}.
Yes, there is a lot of terminology in windsurfing...

Just in case, here is a pic of a windsurf board aka sailboard with its parts - in its simplest form :-)  

 

I think that's enough chatter and now it is time to review the actual BIC Dufour :-) 

Bic Sport, leaders in water sports (as per BIC)

"Established in 1979, Bic Sport has been dedicated to the sea and water sports right from the start. It all began in Brittany, France just a few kilometres from the Atlantic Ocean, our origins are in windsurfing, having acquired a strong reputation all over the planet, Bic Sport has diversified into the other water sports such as surfing, kayaking and kitesurfing over the past 10-years."

 The symbol at the left seems to have been the Dufour logo. Some people feel it looks like an old man or an old row boat from the Viking times ...

"In the early 80s, more than 186,000 boards were manufactured at Dufour Wing as the factory was called before becoming Bic Sport, with such production numbers we quickly took the lead as the world’s largest producer of windsurfing equipment with an annual production of 15,000 boards in those early days."

1979 | Conté®, French pencils and felt pens, is acquired. BIC acquires boat manufacturer, Tabur Marine, which becomes BIC Marine.     
1981 |  BIC Marine launches the Dufour Wing windsurf board.
1985 | BIC launches its BIC® Mini lighter.  BIC Marine becomes BIC Sport.

One way to tell if your board is a Bic Wing or an original DuFour Wing is to look at the seam around the edge of the board. DuFours had a black seam and Bic had a red seam. My board with the red trim is a BIC Wing. This BIC Wing  is not my board and does not have the old man logo on the sail.

So, what are the specs of these babies ?

Built around 1981

Volume 200 liters or cc

Length 378 cm or 12 feet 5 inches

Width 68 cm or 26.8 inches

Weight 21 kilos or 46.2 lbs !!!

came with stock 6.3 sq m sail - mini-battens

extremely long tie-on boom

small back fin

large centre-board that does NOT fully retract

The first thing one discovers about this "kit" is the sail and boom are really NOT manageable. One fellow called it a sac of potatoes ... Later longboards also had fully retractable centre-boards...

Here's some early adverts:

 

As noted, the sail had no full battens or cams, which lock the sail into shape. The one good thing about the sail was, one could roll it onto the mast and store them together. 

 One fellow on the forum said of racing with BIC Dufours in the day:

For this race, the Dufour boards were as light as possible (18 to 19 kgs instead of the standard 21/22 kgs), and to improve the performance in the sea conditions (3 to 6 feet waves) the boards had more scoop and lift obtained by two cuts, side to side of the deck just in rear of the daggerboard hole.

These two cuts were strongly stiched and glued, leaving two scars on the deck...
 
This gain in rear lift had also the effect to reduce the break effect due of the lack of rigidity of that ABS construction...
 
The only other improvement of these competition boards was a specific fiber or wood daggerboard, and of course the best rigs and sails available.
  No one, in any team, had the idea to work on the skegs...big mistake!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In about 2002 I purchased an F2 Comet 330 with 2 sails. The idea was to try a more flat bottom board, but it also was about getting fully battened sails. Around here I started doing experiments with the harness as well. I thought I had found a trick where I would lean on the mast when I fell in the water hooked in - until I busted a mast. These masts were epoxy and fibre- glass and not the carbon masts of today. I still use the old replacement epoxy masts today. Also purchased a NP Warp speed 7.0 with 3 cams to get really going with the two (2) boards. Found the Comet unstable compared to the BIC and only use it in mid winds ie no schlogging.

Somewhere around 2003 I changed the original mast base to an F2. This was to better accommodate the more “modern” sails like my Niel Pryde  7.0 WARP. Yvan of AuVentFou says this sail is about 20 years old !!  In 2008 I purchased a full kit with Maui Sails Pursuit 8.5 with 490 cm mast and new boom. Sometimes I think of sailing in light winds on a “longboard”. Well, the BIC Dufour Wing is a full blown longboard. So, I custom fit the F2 mast base so that it would fit into the “generalized” mast extension. It is pictured here. How will the BIC fare with the modern 2006 monofilm sail ? The board also needs some ant-skid Antideslizante work. Where the mast foot goes into the base, there are cracks that need fresh silicon yearly. Also, the red plastic clips are all broken, but one. Use a cauter pin on the other side. Just to show you, this board has had its full usage.

The board is still used today when I go up to the chalet in the summer. It is also used for teaching. It has been redecked with Chinook Re-Dek (which comes with a roller) and the hole I managed to punch with a catapault was fixed with Solar-EZ. This year, 2011, I plan to bring the board down to the city to use on the St. Lawrence River and perhaps even Maine in the ocean. It is a great longboard and I have been using it every year since we got it. AND it runs great with the 2006 MauiSails Pursuit 8.5 !!!

Needless to say, the BIC is mine :-)




Check long board forum for more discussions on longboards...