The most hyped movie in windsurfing since...well maybe ever, is here. Was it worth the wait? Does it live up to they hype? Should you throw down your dough? After a three year wait the answers are yes, yes, yes...and many more resounding yeses. (And thank goodness for that. We can all breath a collective sigh of relief.)

We'll get to the story line in a minute, but they day after the videos arrived, Jace Panebianco, one of the producers, called and was anxious to hear what I thought of the movie. I did say I thought they nailed pretty much every aspect of the movie perfectly - filming, riders, stories, editing, soundtrack, marketing, you name it - right on the mark. And these were no ordinary marks they were aiming for, they were lofty goals meant to eclipse anything that had come before it, all without trying to be compared to anything that had come before it. But even though I thought they pulled it off with flying colors I was still concerned, concerned that they did this in...well, windsurfing.

The phenomenal effort, sacrifice and dedication, the traveling, the time, the skills, the equipment, and mostly...the money, all spent on a windsurfing movie. What were they thinking? Since I know a bit about production and a bit about the windsurfing video market I'm wondering if the market can support such a grand effort. You look at larger market sports videos, like skiing, snowboarding, wakeboarding, motocross, etc., and this is what you get - high end film production, huge travelling budgets, mainstream soundtracks, all because either the industry sponsors are big enough companies that can afford it, or because the market can produce a high number of DVD sales. Neither is the case in windsurfing. Sorry. So my concern was that people need buck the action video trend and buy this video. And they should, because it's worth every penny.

This is a video that everyone who used to windsurf back in the Eighties should have in their library. This is a video that everyone who used to windsurf back in the Nineties should have in their library. This is a video that everyone who currently windsurfs should have in their library. This is a video that everyone who cares even a little about windsurfing should have in their library, even if they don't windsurf. If you want this kind of quality then you should buy this video. That's what I thought about The Windsurfing Movie.

So, about the movie. The Windsurfing Movie ties together several stories about individual windsurfers who have made their mark on the sport, mostly in waveriding, of course. In telling the stories of Robby Naish, Jason Polakow, Kai Lenny, Levi Siver, and Josh Angulo, they somehow tie together the entire history of the sport of windsurfing with the current state of competitive sailing, innertwining all that with interesting travel and crazy performances from tons of different sailors. And they do it all without a hint of pretentiousness or cockiness that all points to a bright future for windsurfing.

Oh, and it was all shot in either 16mm film or HD with a soundtrack that probably cost more than the entire production cost of every windsurfing video put out in the past ten years put together. And they made all this storytelling short and sweet somehow not overshadowing what we want - non-stop rocking action. Killer video and that's that. Oh, and best sailing award goes to...Jason Polakow at Backyards...unbelievable. You have to have ridden that wave to know what kind of balls that takes.