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HISTORY of http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com part 1
by Roger
This month it is 5 years ago that this website was launched. Just to give you an idea how it all began and what happened I will write the story in steps:
It was the year 2002 that I sometimes windsurfed at Strand Horst. I did not really like the spot a lot as it was shallow, there was this annoying seegrass and it could be really busy.
That time I was not doing any speedsailing, but was just sometimes trying to go fast on my freestyle board. What I did notice when I was there was this guy who was sailing in totally different angles then all the other 500+ surfers. This turned out to be Martin van Meurs who was going downwind and then upwind again to prepare for another crazy run. It was crazy as the water was very choppy because of all the other surfers and he had to evade everybody on the water. What was furthermore interesting was that after a run (or a big crash) he took a little yellow apparatus out of his wetsuit, look at it and put it back.
I watched this a couple of times when I was windsurfing there and was amazed at his speeds. It took a while when I dared to have a chat with Martin and we talked a little about the boards (Van den Berg) he was using. I had just ordered a Starboard Hypersonic 105 and Martin explained that he was also designing speedboards with these concaves.
It became winter and at Boot Dusseldorf I also looked at some handheld GPS’s but thought that it was a bit too expensive. In the rest of the year I met Martin a few more times and also some other guys like John Overmeer, Frank Heinen and Onno Pierik. When checking the internet I found out that Garmin would bring out the Geko series. I decided to have a go for such a model and wanted the 201 type. Unfortunately the delivery time was very long, so first started with a 101. After a few months I bought a 201 and a few weeks later also a data cable. I checked the internet for software/ways to download the data from the GPS and see how fast I went. It took me some time but after some trial and error I learned how to do work with the program Gartrip. It turned out to be pretty easy and I had lots of fun with it.Next time: How Martin went crazy when he saw Gartrip!
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HISTORY of http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com part 2
by Roger
This month it is 5 years ago that this website was launched. Just to give you an idea how it all began and what happened I will write the story in steps:
I had been playing around with Gartrip for a while and it was working nicely. One day it was windy again at Strand Horst and I met Martin again at the beach. I told him that I was able to download the trackdata to my laptop. He was very anxious to see it, but I did not have my laptop with me. As the wind was not there yet I rushed back home to get it and the datacable. When I was back at the beach I downloaded Martin his GPS and there were also a few others around who were also really interested to see how it all worked. It took a while to download all the trackpoints, but when the screen filled in Martin went totally crazy… He was jumping around and saying that we will have races and 1000’s of people around the world will use a GPS. We were all thinking; “yeah right”…
After that day we met again a few times to check out the possibilities of the GPS’s and some settings. We tested with the GPS intervals for AUTO setting and 1 and 2 seconds. After a lot of testing the 2 second interval seemed to be the best as we had too many spikes with the 1 second setting. Also the (now worldwide accepted) 5×10 seconds AVG ranking comes from the way Gartrip worked. We thought that 10 seconds would be great as this would would suit lots of different locations and levels of riders.Next Part I will tell more about the way all started at the forum from windsurfing.nl.
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HISTORY of http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com part 3
by RogerThis month it is 5 years ago that this website was launched. Just to give you an idea how it all began and what happened I will write the story in steps:
After testing some of the settings we thought it would be nice to setup a sort of ranking. As Onno was the moderator of the forum from windsurfing.nl we thought of a possibility to use that. A new section was easily setup and in the beginning of 2004 we started the first postings. Everything was manual and I made rankings by typing over all the information to Excel and then create graphs etc. In the beginning it was not that much work, but after a few months I had to type over a lot of sessions per day. All the sessions can still be viewed at: Forum Windsurfing.nlMore and more surfers were buying GPS’s, but also needed help with calculating the runs. This was done with Gartrip, but took some getting used to as it was quite a manual job and prone to errors. It was good that Miquel got in contact with Yann from GPS Action Replay as that program made live much easier.
After a few months it became clear that it was not a good way to keep working with the forum. Both Dylan and Peter contacted Martin, Onno and myself and we decided to setup a group and start a website. Onno would do the building of the website and the others would support him as good as possible. We quickly made sure that http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com was on our name and after lots of days/nights work Onno showed the first versions of the site.Next Part I will tell more about the first Ultimate Speed Meeting and the launch of the website.
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HISTORY of http://www.gps-speedsurfing.com part 4
by RogerThis month it is 5 years ago that this website was launched. Just to give you an idea how it all began and what happened I will write the story in steps:
The end of October 2004 the first Ultimate Speed Meeting was planned at Strand Horst in the middle of Holland.
We expected around 25-40 competitors, but around 80 showed up! It was very hectic with registration etc. but all went well. We had a nice race and as we had planned a pricegiving directly after the race with some prizes from our sponsors (also a F2 Missisle) we had to download all data from the Geko’s and Foretrex’s. This took a while and it also started to rain so we had problems with the laptops… As we also had a diner planned at Bellini’s (favourite restaurant for a lot of speedies) we continued with the prizegiving there.The website was also available that night, so after that loads of riders posted their speeds. We also had a lot of contact with speedsurfers from especially Australia who were very cooperative and helped us make the site big!
In the beginning the site was still basic, but Onno worked day and night to improve it with new features. The number of riders grew steadily and at the end of 2004 we had 125 riders which grew in 2005 with another 350.Next Part I will tell more about the European Speed Meeting and have some more statistics
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