What is David Ezzy talking about?!
The maverick behind the popular sail brand on what drives him to design, to sail and, yes, to rant
(by Chris Tauber)
There’s disagreement on what exact time is the dead of night, but if you had to pick, 3:30 a.m. would be about right. Even the late-nighters have crashed at that point, and the early risers are still snoring. No souls are awake.
And that’s the way David Ezzy likes it. This very morning — the same day you’ve decided to read this article about the guy behind all those Ezzy sails, including the two in your garage — Ezzy woke up at 3:30 a.m. He did it yesterday, and he’ll do it tomorrow. It seems like he’s all alone in an empty world. He goes to his Haiku design loft, the one he’s worked in for almost 25 years, and grapples with the problem that’s vexed him all that time: how to make a better sail. By the time the sun finally rises over the Pacific and starts to wash over Maui’s North Shore, he’ll be deep into his work.
“It’s not work,” Ezzy corrects. “It’s more like taking a s*** or something. It just comes out. It’s miserable sometimes. It’s frustrating as hell.” To be fair to Ezzy, there’s more context to that quote. He also talked about loving what he does, which is why he’s been able to do it for so long. But that flash of outspokenness, that image of the ultimate loner, that sweat being poured into the next sail, all of it speaks to who Ezzy is. He has joked about kiteboarding being a bubonic plague, said that several of today’s sail trends abandoned average Joes, and even suggested that Robby Naish should apologize for turning to the kite side. Yet he’s also made what was once a word-of-mouth, go-for-broke sail company into a mainstream brand that’s still powered by his cult of personality and his passion for simple, practical sails. Where the maverick is headed next is predictable. What he’s going to rant about next isn’t. “I say what I’m thinking and maybe I was more of a hothead when I was younger, but I’m mellower now,” says Ezzy, the 49-year-old father of three. “I do still have certain ideas I stand by.” Among them are the beliefs that you have to work hard; you have to enjoy your work; and you have to do good work.
Those ideals have set him apart sometimes, giving him an outsider role that he doesn’t seem to mind. He basically got into windsurfing as a loner, a high-school kid from Canada who tried windsurfing at Alta Lake in British Columbia in 1975. He loved it so much, he later loaded up his Datsun station wagon and trekked all the way down to Baja to do it. By himself. Nobody he knew felt as strongly about the sport as he did. “It was weird I did that,” he says now.
But Ezzy does what he feels he has to. That includes dropping out of college to move to Hawaii to windsurf (he wasn’t quite alone by then — future wife Laura had joined him). It meant offering to work for free for sail designer Malta Simmer to learn from him. And it led him to start his own brand, join a bigger company, North, to advance his work, leave that company when he had philosophical disagreements, and sell everything he had to invest in his own factory in 1993. Since then, Ezzy Sails has expanded to 49 shops in the United States and 35 distributors worldwide.
Along the way, Ezzy’s reputation has spread. “David is definitely on his own flight pattern,” says Tim Ortlieb, who was manager of Windance in the Gorge when he first met Ezzy in 1996. Ortlieb is now Ezzy’s U.S. distributor. “He has a set of principles that he designs by and that he lives by. The man works extremely hard and demands a level of precision and discipline. Those Windance employees are probably still angry with me for making them stay late and clean, but I wanted to have the shop looking tip-top for David.”
“Guys like Tim are going to say nice things,” Ezzy says when he finds out who else is being consulted on this story. “But nobody else in the industry really knows me. I don’t fraternize with my competition. I don’t want to see what they’re doing, and I don’t want them to see what I’m doing.”
By this point you may be imagining Ezzy as an odd cross between a hermit and a talk-radio blowhard, maniacal twinkle in his eye, an iron fist instead of a human hand. Uh, uh. Granted, he can be tough. He did march into the house of a Sri Lankan member of parliament to demand that the guy’s thugs stop harassing Ezzy workers. And he is a little off, bragging semi-seriously that the shorts he was wearing were 15 years old — oh, and so was his underwear.
But really, Ezzy is one of those seemingly nice, quiet guys. Gary Stone of Isthmus Sailboards repeats a story he’s heard many times: “A customer is vacationing on Maui. They’re rigging their Ezzy sail and someone approaches them to help. David doesn’t tell them who he is, and they’re amazed and so appreciative when they figure it out.” That may appear pleasant enough, though even that is an example of Ezzy’s strong opinions. He is very, very, very particular about people not mis-rigging his sails. Kevin Trejo of SoloSports says a few years ago he was stoked to send Ezzy a photo of a windsurfer doing an aerial off the lip. “I thought it was cool,” Trejo says. “The comment back from David was, ‘Why is that guy using a 430 mast?’ In this photo taken on the beach 50 yards away, you’re only talking a two-inch difference! No one else on the planet would notice that.”’ His rants can be just as pointed — with the good of the sport in mind. They’re so soft-spoken, with such an even tone, it’s hard to identify them until Ezzy is in mid-rant. When he punctuates them with a laugh, it’s more of an under-hisbreath chuckle, like the one that came after saying, “I still maintain it’s over-the-hill windsurfers who went to kiting.”
Or when he says, “Sails, they cost a lot of money, but some team riders place as much value on them as a T-shirt.”
The topic of team riders is one that gets him going, with nary a prod. Ezzy has built his brand on very sail-focused marketing (though many windsurfers would say it’s the man himself that people flock to). Josh Angulo is an exception; he and Ezzy have a two-decade-long relationship. But Ezzy says, “I don’t want to base my company on a team rider. When they leave, and they always do, they take a big chunk of your image with them. When I have people call me and say they want to get on the sails, I say, ‘If it’s a deal you’re looking for, a cheap price, look somewhere else.’ Somebody who buys something, when their money is put out, they value it, learn how to use it, cherish it.” He doesn’t say whether he makes his own son, Graham, who competes on the PWA tour and who’s headed to Princeton this fall, pay for sails. But he does acknowledge that he’s held Graham to high standards too. “Maybe I’m a little too extreme, but I’ve never used him in an ad,” Ezzy says. “It’s not fair to my other team riders who have been working hard to get to where they are. Maybe we will get an ad going with him this year. Kids are so me-focused to begin with, once you start stoking their egos, man, that’s a formula for making a monster.” Not that he’s calling anyone a monster, but he’s really not a fan of stories like the one this magazine recently ran on the crop of teenage talent. “They’re getting more attention than they deserve just because they’re little kids doing it. Look at skiing; there are a lot of good little kid skiers on every mountain in the world. It just so happens that Maui is the only mountain in the world, so you get all that attention.”
All that said, Ezzy is still very hopeful for windsurfing. “The last two Sundays in a row I couldn’t find a parking spot at Kanaha. It seems like there are more windsurfers now than a few years ago,” he says. As for the future of the sport, “I have no idea. I just know I came in from windsurfing the day before yesterday” — he goes almost every day in the afternoon, after he’s put in his morning workday — “and said this has to be the greatest sport. Nice wind, smooth water, sailing with my younger son, Hayden. How can people not love this? If they don’t, they’re missing out.”
What will drive Ezzy’s own future is the quest to make the perfect sail, something he’s still advancing toward with each tweak. That means he won’t expand his line (“I probably would if I could figure out why you’d need all those bloody sails. Why do you need an onshore and a side-shore wave sail?”). He won’t slap the Ezzy name on other products (“I’m a total simpleton; I don’t want to do clothes, mast bases,booms, harnesses.”). He won’t take his eye off serving Joe Windsurfer (“What an intermediate sailor wants and what a top sailor wants are the same thing: power and control.”).
His future also involves a return to Baja this summer for an annual wave-sailing Ezzy Rig and Rip clinic that starts July 21. Graham will be there for three weeks. David will join him for at least the third week. Now Ezzy is as far from alone as possible when he goes there. “It’s like a different life,” he says. “I can’t remember or relate to me being down there the first time.” He’s had an epic ride since that Baja trip 30 years ago. At least, that’s our opinion. Ezzy, of course, has his own take on talking about his life: “This all sounds boring to me.”
source: www.windsurfingmag.com
Ezzy SE Wave 2008
For 2008 Dave Ezzy has improved the SE with a flatter profile and more forward draft, the sails have a more balanced feel with less back-hand pressure. The sails rig similar to the 07 range but are less outhaul sensitive. They still have a huge outhaul range, 7 to 8 cm for strong winds and 3 to 4 cm for light winds.
For 08 the tack pulley can be replaced with a d-ring for those people who want to use a pulley hook. The bigger sizes for '08 are now 6.3 (fits on a 430) and 6.9. They are now 5 battens instead of 6 battens. The new profile is so stable that it allowed me to remove one batten, as a result the bigger sails feel much lighter.
The on the water performance is still excellent in both light and strong winds. Ezzy’s in the past were always based to high winds but the 07 and 08 lines exceed most other brands in light wind performance. Josh Angulo has beaten light weight riders on a regular basis in contests using standard Ezzy sails.
Ezzy sails still are built in the legendary Ezzy construction double stitching, Vinyl window, endo batten system, heavy duty lightweight Spectra® X-Film, each sail is rigged and checked in the factory before it is shipped to the UK. Ezzy also have one of the highest second hand values of all sail brands. The sails set on both Ezzy skinny masts and regular diameter masts. For best results check the Ezzy rigging guides, and mast match selector.
Check out the Mix and Match Guide or the rigging guide and the rigging video on www.ezzy.com
Sailsizes/dimensions:
2.9, Luff 318, Boom 133
3.3, Luff 339, Boom 140
3.5, Luff 353, Boom 147
3.7, Luff 363, Boom 151
4.0, Luff 374, Boom 155
4.2, Luff 385, Boom 159
4.5, Luff 395, Boom 164
4.7, Luff 407, Boom 168
5.0, Luff 420, Boom 174
5.2, Luff 431, Boom 179
5.5, Luff 441, Boom 183
5.8, Luff 448, Boom 187
6.0, Luff 455, Boom 192
6.3, Luff 458, Boom 196
6.9, Luff 488, Boom 200
Josh Angulo has beaten light weight riders on a regular basis in contests using standard Ezzy sails.
Ezzy Freeride 2008:
Ezzy Wave SE 2008:
Ezzy Sails Wave SE 2008 rigging video
David Ezzy shows how to rigg your sail perfect ... see and learn
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 1)- threading:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t6PeBOwg7w
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 2)- downhaul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUl9F8ntz9c
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 3)- outhaul:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiTCDKjxj7w
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 4)- batten tension:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5KA0D_mMPo
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 5)- sail profile:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hJe4u4gpCs
2008 Ezzy Wave Rigging (part 6)- de-rigging:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-yH5pIXBNk
Rigging your 2008 Ezzy Sail - adjusting the headstrap:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BGBle1QP3A
What makes Ezzy sails different:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncWzlsgz1s0
Graham Ezzy - movie
The son of David Ezzy, Graham has been windsurfing for 4 years and wave sailing for only 2 seasons. In this short time he's beginning to stand out for his confidence, tenacity, and sheer nerve.
In this video, recorded during 2006, Graham show us all his talent and style.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouBnRMSvY2U
A Grand Day Out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jRgkdPTVHM
For more info on Ezzy Sails click here:
www.windRider.gr
Windsurfing Passion - Knowledge and Service:
FOR SPEED WITH TOTAL CONTROL...........
..............................................................................EZZY SAILS!
FOR WAVES AND JUMPS WITH TOTAL CONTROL...
...............................................................................EZZY SAILS!
Καλές πλεύσεις!
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