It all really started for me back in 1990 when I was an energetic, slightly chubby and water loving 10yo. In fact it probably started a few years earlier when on one of our round Europe family car trips we've passed a sea bay with a few colourful windsurfing sails and said to each other - "This new sport looks rather calm, wish we could do that one day". Which eventually led to my dad's purchase of our first board - a Mistral Malibu replica made either in Poland or one of the other ex communistic bloc countries and weighing circa 37.7kgs, coupled with a 5m, no battens sail, rope mounted boom and a one piece mast. After a year or two of using said beast as a sup/surf/floaty fun device on a Dominickie Lake in SW Poland and watching the old man progress, there came a time to finally use it powered up. With the type of sail that just didn't want to unstick from the water no matter how hard you pulled that uphaul. Not that it could stop a determined 10yo me.

Soon the gear got upgraded to an original Malibu at circa half the weight and a first battened sail which in hindsight resembled a pride flag in its design (even tho no one knew what 'pride' was back then). With a secondhand fibreglass mast so worn out that your hands hurt every time you rigged with it.

Aka the good old days. With few seasons when I was actually wishing for less wind to be able to go out ;P Then soon came the harness, the first 'near planes', straps, then finally planing and of course catapults, including one in which my hand-me-down, recycled plastic clips seat harness broke, got tangled with the lines, trapped me under the (5.5 North Sails Idra sail which I have to this day) and nearly drowned me at 16. Life movie flash and all that jazz. Powidzkie Lake as the drama's venue.

Anyway - I was well 'hooked' by then if you excuse the pun. 

That was also the year when I went on my first snowboarding trip to Strzecha Akademicka near Karpacz in the Karkonosze mountains. Tried skis a year before but never looked back after that one year even tho I was the only one on the board with just a vague idea of what I'm supposed to be doing and no one around to teach me. The setup was a stiff slalom Santa Cruz 156 with hard bindings and no ready made inserts. The kind stuff that legends are born from :D
The guy in the shop did the 'push him and see which leg goes first' thing and it landed on me being regular. Tho he never asked which way I skateboard / slide I don't think. Thus to this day I'm a skateboard goofy and a snowboard regular kinda fucked up weirdo guy. Which should theoretically make me good at riding switch in both but it somehow doesn't which I find mildly annoying yet still hoping that I'll all come together one day..

         To Be Continued.... 

Board based action sports are certainly fun tho they also require a little elbow grease every now and then to keep the gear functional and safe. Over the years, we've been maintaining, repairing and modifying various riding equipment with the view of keeping those most beloved boards running smooth for as long as possible.

We also openly recognise the rarely spoken of problem of the modern sports equipment manufacturing / evolution / fast obsolescence creating mountains of waste from products which were once a pinnacle of engineering and highly priced/desireable pieces and are constantly looking for creative solutions to address it.