The following morning we went around to Sigi’s place and picked him up for our great test. Off we went to the north shore of the lake to an area where there was mostly cliffs and at best, rough trails to the shore. Sigi actually threw the board off the cliff (they were made of extra tough blow molded material), then rigged the sail and threw it off too. He jumped in and swam to the board and rig, plugged them together and sailed away.

Since he had already plenty of experience with the sails he brought the rig back to shore and had several other members of the HiFLy group try it. They were stunned. I’m sure it was a grand leap into the future as far as they were concerned. And just as suddenly I became the center of attention at dinner and breakfast the next morning. By long distance phone, Geoffrey and I worked out a deal with Ernst and his partner, Stephan Biffar, to design three sizes of MauiSail FatHeads for HiFly. They would come to Hawaii in a few weeks to try the final prototypes, after which we would go to Hong Kong to put them in production. Wow. What next? What a beginning.

Both Geoffrey and I went to Hong Kong a few months later. We brought all our heavy monofilm patterns and were picked up at the hotel by a young fellow named Willem Blaauw. He was about twenty-one years old and had only been working for Neil Pryde for a short while. He was responsible for designing all of the sails that Pryde was building at the time, a number in excess of 300,000. These were for Windsurfer, Sailboard, O’Brien, Bic, HiFly, and others. Only Mistral was made in the Gaastra loft at the time. And Willem designed them all. They were making about 1750 sails a day!

When we got to the factory after a couple hour car ride through the countryside, we were taken immediately in to meet Mr. Neil Pryde, and with Herrs Drexler and Biffar right there we laid out a sample sail that we brought with us to show them how we wanted them made. These sails were the first so called FatHead designs. They had a V-batten in the top, and high clews and short booms. Both Neil and Willem had a good laugh. The HiFly guys didn’t get the joke though. They were only trying to get the best price. “Who would ever buy a thing like that?” said Neil.

I think it might have been good thing to be using some stiffer battens in the head, but we were worried that those might break too easy in surf. We had no experience using sails in the surf. Anybody who did that when i was growing up had to be crazy. So we used Lexan strips that were pretty much unbreakable. I don't know how much different it might have made the sails, but it didn't matter anyway.

Drexler and Biffar told us they didn't want a royalty type agreement like we were after. They said they imagined selling only a thousand pieces or so. So we settled for a small fixed fee, and an order for 160 custom sails from our loft in Hawaii. What dopes we were to believe them.

We had no idea about any of it. We had no idea they were going to make more than 40,000 of those sails. We had no idea we would air ship the custome sails and then wait and wait to get paid. Here we were on the cover of Surf magazine in Germany almost every month, our brand was on every HiFly sail, and we couldn't pay our rent or grow. We were bleeding and they wouldn't return phone calls.

So we gathered up the price of a ticket to Munich, and I went to the offices of Akutek Corporation, the group that owned HiFLy, and literally camped there until we got paid. I made them take me to the bank and got cash. We were back in business again.