Sean O'Brien, Pro Windsurfer – seanobrien.com.au™

Wow. Miami. What a place. Took a quick flight in with my good mate Kurosh to compete at the 2011 IFCA North American Slalom Championships. Rented the most obscenely pimped Ford F150 truck I’ve ever driven. Windsurfed all day, cruised South Beach all night … great times! I finished 3rd at the event behind Wilhelm Schurmann and Kurosh but points were tight and we each had a few wins a piece in the 12 races we managed. Miami is such a fun place to visit and my friends there (shout out to Diego, Alex “the Legend” Morales and Rick “Maui Malones” Randall!!) really looked after us and made sure we had a legendary time. Enjoy some pics and soon a quick video I shot with Kurosh driving our truck around the streets of Miami!

So once again we hit Sylt, Germany for the biggest windsurfing event on the PWA World Tour calendar, the epic Reno Windsurf World Cup, and after 10 days of sitting around waiting for the wind we were sent home with NO VALID RESULT for this last contest of the year; despite running a few of the first round heats on the Tuesday where I was in a nice qualifying position holding out Bjorn Dunkerbeck in my heat. That being said, around 100,000 tourists came to the beach over the week to watch the (non) contest and enjoy the insane festivities, beach parties, pro-rider signing sessions, nightclubs, tow-in freestyle competitions, SUP races and all things crazy that is SYLT! Enjoy a few pics from Carter/PWA and ContinentSeven.com.

Today we just finished the Waterz Downwind Slalom Marathon race in Hvide Sande, Denmark. Waterz is a pretty massive watersports event with competitions for windsurfing, kitesurfing, SUP and cable-wakeboarding with the highlight being this insanely long downwind slalom race on the Saturday. Over 250 competitors (windsurfers and kiters) took place in the marathon in about 12 knots of wind with a bunch of jetskis setting off a rabbit start for us. I had a flying start with Ross Williams to get on to an early lead and managed to finish 6th overall with Ross eventually winning. Check a few photos from the Waterz website and of course check www.waterz.dk sometime in the next few weeks when they “actually” update the results on there! Ps. Was a sick party in the evening too!

We just finished the 2011 Pegasus Airlines PWA World Cup in Alacati, Turkey. This was a super tough event with some uncharacteristically windy days in Turkey up to 35 knots. I didn’t have my small board with me at this event so I found it tough on the windy days and also had one of the worst crashes of my life after one of the races totally destroying my ankle halfway through the event. Managed to continue racing but now back in Italy a few days after the event I have been unable to walk on my ankle since! Enjoy some photos from the racing … all photos are by Tommy Della Frana from Point-7 apart from the first two which are by PWA/Carter.

Here you can watch the winner’s final of Round 9 where I placed 6th in my first World Cup slalom final. Hahahahaha, had a shocking start and was going so slow on 2m less sail than everyone but hey! 6th ain’t so bad right ;-)

We’ve just finished the 2011 PWA World Tour Grand-Slam on Fuerteventura, Canarias. This is one of the windiest locations on the tour and this year was no disappointment with super high-winds each day and even 2 full days of winds close to 50 knots !! I had a fairly shocking event not handling the nuking days too well but I did have one super round where I managed to get 6th in my FIRST World Cup slalom winner’s final !! Nice one. So at least I took something away from the event. Also spent most of the week commentating with my buddy Kurosh Kiani as you can see in the first pic; good times.

Photos by PWA/Carter and Dennis Boisen

The 2011 Formula Windsurfing World Championships are about to kick off tomorrow here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Get the live reports from me with all the inside action by clicking the picture above!

This year the PWA World Tour traveled to a little Caribbean island called Aruba. Think blistering 35 degree heat, warm tropical waters and 25 knots everyday; perfect for windsurfing right? The water was super flat making the racing quite spectacular and challenging as not many guys were crashing in the turns like usual so you had to have good top speed to get through to the finals. I had a good start to the event but fell back a bit during the week and ended up in 30th. Not too bad I guess in only my 6th slalom event on the World Tour. To cap off a fun week some bandits robbed a bunch of us sailors at the beach and took off with my Canon 7D camera and a few other things – soooooooooooo devastated.

About 6 months ago I got some emails from some sailors in Mauritius asking about formula sails and fins. With +10,000 islands surrounding Australia, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to quickly throw Mauritius in to Google Maps and just check exactly where it was………. They had heard about me from my blog (www.CarbonSugar.com) where I’ve written a lot about training for Formula Windsurfing so it was good to see I am still generating hits on that site when I’ve had no time to write anything on there in the past year!

The dialogue continued for a few months and eventually the guys over there asked if I would be interested in coming to Mauritius to coach their elite Formula Windsurfing team. Coming up in August is the Indian Ocean Island Games; a mini-Olympics for the nearby islands of Mauritius, Seychelles, Reunion and Madagascar involving many sports – with the two sailing disciplines this time being Lasers and Formula Windsurfing.

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Just got back from the first Formula Grand-Prix World Tour event of the season in Riccione, Italy. We had ultra-light winds all week with only 4 races being held. I’ve had a busy season already just arriving back from South Korea the week before from the PWA Slalom World Tour event so this was the first opportunity to get out on my new sails and boards in an international event.

Here are some comments about the event from an article on Point-7.com:

“Because of the financial climate in Europe last year we actually had ZERO pro Formula events the whole of last season. So it was kind of surreal being down at Riccione and feeling like none of us had done any solid event training in so long. Normally you get a chance to see what everyone has been working on over the season with their gear tuning and know what you have to do to prepare but this time almost none of us had actually raced each other in over 15 months. I hadn’t had a chance to roll out the new sails and actually had a bunch of new fins and a brand new board that I’d never even got wet yet (not the best preparation!).

This time we’ll be prepared and the winds should be much stronger! Luckily on the event side of things, everything was fantastic! Great Italian hospitality and all meals provided at the beach with great entertainment each and every night; couldn’t have asked for more!”