Old is gold

Uncle Tan is always on the lookout for thrown-away equipment; and we'd usually be super excited whenever he comes up to any one of us to say "Today I found this piece of sail/mast/boom/board/*insert any other possible part* at the dumpster..."

Some few weeks back, he managed to find me a brittle and old Naish 6.6metres sail from the dumpster. And from his wide collection of spare parts, he pulled out a boom for my sail too. We (he actually) looked around for a long-enough mast, and found a carbon one that was slightly short, even after the mast extension's been added. No matter about that though, because Uncle Tan managed to further extend the mast extension/foot and now it fits the sail to a T. Activated SK to help me with the rigging up a couple of times until the old sail couldn't take the tension any more and decided to tear right in the middle. :(

Took me quite a while to decide to send the sail for repanelling; I just couldn't decide if it's going to be a better idea to get another set of secondhand sail or should I just send the entire sail for repanelling. Decided on the latter and sent it to Uncle Richard's workshop. So, one week and $135 later, I've got a sail that "looks as good as new" (either it really looks that good or people are just trying not to break my little heart) and have also taken over SK's old raceboard. I brought both of my new, old equipment out for a test-run today and I really love what I have now (despite today's lack of wind and strong currents bleagh). Manja-ed a little in the office after telling Dennis & co. that I'll be taking over SK's board, and yeahhhh, they decided to give me a board rack and sail loft! No more constant derigging/rigging up of sails!

I've probably mentioned this like a million times but I'm still going to say it again, thank goodness for Uncle Tan (and of course everyone else who's helped me obtain my very own first set of equipment along the way)! He's been giving so much of his time and effort into helping NTU/NUS windsurfers all these time; I sure hope everyone will appreciate him for all that he's done. My board and sail may be old and from the dumpster, but they're still very usable and I guess that's what really matters. Besides, I didn't have to spend too much money in the 'repair works'; you really can't be too picky when you don't have a lot of $$ right?

I love my new old equipment, and I'll go get some funky stickers to stick onto my sail soon.

Cheers to happy surfing! <3