Then a couple of years ago Giovanni Alcedo and Efisio Atzeni, both good friends of mine at Lago di Garda, introduced me to a program they’d been working on for some time. The boom they showed me was based on the same idea of having the boom tubes going directly to the mast, but when closer examining the boom I could see that the design was completely different to the earlier tries that I’d encountered years earlier.

The old systems had pins through the mast and awful adjustment and so on. This one still looked like a traditional boom with cleats and using looped rope to tighten the head onto the mast. Giovanni had developed the system together with Efisio who was also the first tester. We had some meetings plus I took it to our Tenerife centre for testing and was impressed.

One massive difference was the insertion of a disc loaded twist system, integrated in the boom front. Like a suspension system, this allows for the boom-arms to move up and down, or you could say for the two half-moon shaped shell's that surround the mast to swing from side-to-side. Once on the water I recognised the light feel and extra comfort that I had already felt on some of the earlier experiments, which comes from the tube position. The disc system also helped give a very comfortable feeling landing jumps or sailing in choppy conditions. The boom was their baby and it was their motivation that saw this become reality.

I was really pleased with the feeling I was getting from the boom and we decided to design another boom for slalom with identical curves to the traditional boom I had been using for racing, which would enable us to make a direct comparison. The production of course took a while, but when we finally received it and got on the water; the result was surprising.

The two biggest advantages that I found were when using small sails in strong wind, and lighter winds using bigger sail sizes. In strong wind with a small size the feeling was that I had more power and control, so that there were almost no difference in speed whether going downwind and upwind. In light wind with a larger sail, you could feel the whole rig working more dynamically and efficient and thereby producing more power to get acceleration and top end speed even in minimal conditions.

This comes from the mast being unrestricted by the boom. A conventional boom head is fixating the mast and boom in 90 degrees to each other, where the Ωmega system allows for the mast and boom to flex and thus the mast has a much-improved dynamic swing over its entire length. The advantages of the boom on water were so easily comparable that I was 100% sold on the project.

At that moment Massimo Ravasio from Techno Limits, approached me to find out more about the project. I told him that the boom had something really special and that with the right development and testing a very unique product could be launched. The final costs to complete the project were being estimated, but as Techno Limits has a long history in windsurfing booms and all the technology and tooling needed to develop fast and professionally, they decided to go for it and we from Point-7 gave our full support to the development.

Massimo straight away got in contact with the fathers of the project and worked night and day for one full year to get the project ready for production with all the development and testing required. Close Story