WIND-SURFING - that says it all. Our sport consists of two parts: Wind and surfing. Each component is useless on its own. Wind without surfing, surfing without wind? We might as well stay at home on the sofa.
Basically, it's like Bacardi Cola and Spaghetti Napoli, without Bacardi or Napoli it's no good. The two go together - and what did Lothar Matthäus say? The sum is more than the whole! But this formula is crumbling and Loddar's core sentence is beginning to falter, as Italian specialists from the "Centro Ricerca di Vento" in Torbole have now discovered that there is indeed a weighting of the wind and surf components. After countless, unsuccessful series of tests without wind, they believe it has been clearly proven that wind is the more important component for practising the sport of windsurfing. There you go - or for Lothar's Latin students: Quod errat Demosthenes.
Now that this has been clarified, the question remains: Where does the wind actually come from? If someone answers "from the west", this is not only a rather simple explanation, but also a wrong one. Because everyone knows that a southerly wind, for example, blows strictly from the south. But "where does the wind come from" actually means how the wind originates. Well, there is this old, now outdated narrative that large trees generate wind by swaying back and forth, which can supposedly be observed again and again in strong winds. But this is of course ridiculous, complete nonsense. Trees that wobble, what a load of rubbish... much closer to the mark is a group of alternative, slanted-thinking, investigative hobbyists who put forward the following theory: "It is noticeable that wherever there is strong wind, there are lots of large wind turbines with powerful rotors, you have to watch out. And then let the individual parts of the compound noun wind-power plants melt in your mouth. There's more to it than that and it already contains everything you need to generate wind, right? They're not called that for nothing.
This is again contradicted by traditional science. Meteorologists, meteorologists, meteorologists and meteorologists claim that wind is caused by pressure differences in the atmosphere - and that the air therefore always blows from high to low pressure. Let's do a simple experiment and see if this is true. So: Take a bike, preferably a friend's, and inflate a tyre with everything you have. When the tyre is rock hard, put the pump to one side, take a cleanly sharpened, pointed knife and pierce the tyre with it. If the air now hisses out like crazy, there could be something to the high-low pressure theory. By the way, because of this knife - sure, you could just unscrew the valve, but that's not nearly as much fun!
In the end, we don't care whether the wind forecasters or the meteorological professors are right, as long as there is wind at all. But it's not that simple, because not all winds are the same. There is warm wind, gusty wind, tailwind, headwind, crosswind, downdraft, hammer wind, updraft and then there is the apparent wind. And this is probably the biggest mystery in the windsurfing cosmos, because it only exists when we are standing on the board and surfing. And it gets even better: the apparent wind is actually the very wind with which we whizz across the water. If we stand still, it's gone. If we start surfing, it's there again. And so, for me at least, the question "Who makes the wind?" is clearly answered. We windsurfers make the wind ourselves! And the next time you're sitting on the shore waiting for the wind, don't moan about the calm and stuff - get on with it, you've got it in your own hands, go out and make the wind yourself.
Apparently that works.
All parts of the wind special:
- The west wind
- The east wind on the Baltic Sea
- Ora and Vento on Lake Garda
- The foehn in the Alps
- The Meltemi in Greece
- The bora in Croatia
- The sirocco in the central Mediterranean
- The mistral in the south of France
- The Tramontana in the northern Mediterranean
- The Levante in southern Spain
- The trade wind zone
- The roots of the trade winds
- Core trade wind - In the centre of the trade wind
- Passat run-off zone - The end of the Passat
- Interview: Climate researcher Dr Michael Sachweh - "Chasing storms is my passion"
- Windfinder: How wind forecasts are created, the difference between forecast and super-forecast
