CarbonSugar.com : About

Welcome to CarbonSugar.com - a weblog about high performance windsurfing.

My name is Sean O’Brien and I’m a professional windsurfer from Brisbane, Australia. I have been racing internationally around the globe for the past few years as well as actively involved in event organisation and management here in Australia and managing my own sports team in my hometown.

Sean OBrien - AUS120.com

From the Beach to the Computer.

As a keen formula windsurfer and slalom sailor, I’ve always been interested in the science behind the equipment as much as I am with the actual sailing. My father, a keen sailor himsellf, has been very interested in designing and repairing windsurfing gear as well as tinkering with carbon and fibreglass products. Between him and myself, we have built our own boards, sails, wide-tail boom-ends, repaired and modified booms and even made our own racing fins. As a national level racer himself in various dinghy and skiff sailing classes, my father made sure I spent the time to learn and understand how the equipment went together in the design and construction stages, to better analyse how we could make it go faster on the water.

Having learned a lot of the skills from my father, as my windsurfing progressed I began to read sailing books on tactics, technique, weather, design and construction, to improve my sailing both physically and mentally, however these were all books written for sailing boats and not windsurfers. Why is that?

Getting the opportunity to live in Europe a while and race on the windsurfing pro tour I realised that not many (if any) of the top professional windsurfers ever wrote anything about tuning ideas, technique or tactics anywhere on the internet. That suprised me! Due to the lack of anyone else stepping up to the plate I tried as best I could to participate in forum discussions about tuning ideas for the windsurfing brands that I have been sponsored by but there were so many answers I couldn’t provide because I haven’t been directly involved with the development of a lot of the gear on the market.

So I decided that something needed to be available on the internet whereby people could find a decent archive of information about design, technique, tuning, tactics, ideas or anything else relating specifically to high performance windsurfers like Formula Windsurfing gear. Being good friends with most of the guys directly involved in the development teams of many windsurfing brands, I have a little bit of inside knowledge that the general public wouldn’t know about and I hope to share it hear to help people understand why gear is designed the way it is and what you can do to make it go faster if you don’t feel it is fast for your body type.

The Carbon Concept (Help Windsurfing Succeed Please!)

As a webdesigner, I could see the benefit in making the information on this website available as a weblog (blog), whereby each post is tagged, archived and categorised so that down the track when there is a lot of information on this website it can be easily navigated through to find the right stories quickly and easily. There’s also a lot of opportunities available on modern social bookmarking websites to share the information out into cyberspace, so that even non-windsurfing people can come across this information and learn a little about the sport.

At the moment, something that windsurfing REALLY lacks in my opinion is any decent cross-linking between windsurfing and non-windsurfing websites to get the content out to the non-windsurfing world. Spending a lot of time on the internet I end up surfing through websites about things I haven’t heard of before but if the website is cool, interesting and designed well then I might read a little into the topic to see what its about. Imagine if people started coming across windsurfing websites by accident and thought, hey, this is a cool sport! I bet nobody comes across the RS:X Class Website by accident! The online windsurfing world really needs to catch up and join the 21st century in cyberspace!

So help me help windsurfing. When you see links like the Digg This, Del.icio.us, and Technorati pages at the bottom of each article, click on them and send this information out to the WORLD, not just the tiny secluded windsurfing world!