With his father being in the Royal Navy, the family were constantly on the move and had early homes in Naples Italy (where Peter was born) and Malta. They finally settled in the south of England.
School was all about sport. At 17 Peter was crowned English School’s Gymnastics Champion. He was being groomed for the top when a growth spurt (6 inches in a year!) took him out of the game.
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Rugby, windsurfing and first ever University windsurfing Club
At Southampton University he studied modern languages, French, German and Swahili (unlikely but true.) For the third year of the course he worked as a teacher in a lycee in France and played first division rugby for Vienne, a town near Lyon.
It was in that same year, 1978, that he first stepped on a windsurfer. Peter relates the life-changing tale.”
“I was an avid surfer. I'd heard about windsurfing, was keen to give it a try but had never been in the right place at the right time. But then a gym team teacher in the school lent me his board for the weekend. I drove down to Marseilles without a clue how to rig it, how to do it or where to go. I stopped at the town beach where the Mistral wind was blowing offshore and gusting between zero and 30 knots. It was late April, I had no wetsuit so all in all I was an accident waiting to happen.
By the Sunday afternoon I was blue, bruised, bleeding, freezing and totally hacked off. Ready to throw in the towel, I decided to give it one last go. Perhaps it was divine intervention but three things happened all at once, which were to change my life forever. A gust arrived just as I fell violently back against the sail, just as a big swell arrived. The wave picked me up, I hung on and planed perhaps 200 metres until I was dumped on the beach. Wow! My first experience of proper windsurfing was wave riding. Forget the other 8 hours of violent misery, that was it, I was hooked.”
Back at Uni for his finals, he got enough money out of the student’s union to buy three boards (Barracudas from the early speed man Clive Colenso) and started the windsurfing club. 25 years later and with over 500 members, this is now one of the biggest university sports club in the country.
After Uni and still determined to dodge the spectre of a ‘proper’ job, he took his ski instructor exams and for 3 years worked in the Swiss Ski School of Grindelwald.
In the summers he moved down from the mountains to Interlaken where he landed a job teaching windsurfing on the lake. The owner of the centre, Walter Wiedmer, was a member of the ‘Windglider’ team and something of an early star. Not only did he introduce Peter to racing but also let him use his fleet of prototype ‘jump boards.’
“I’d been windsurfing sporadically for less than a year but immediately I was introduced to harnesses, footstraps and these ‘short’ boards (320 cm – but tiny compared to the norm). Lake Thun wasn’t exactly Hawaii but a couple of times a week we’d get these violent thermal storms. If you timed your run out as the ferry was leaving, you’d get waves as well!”
Back in the UK Peter found himself a little ahead of the game in terms of small boards at least. In the early eighties he ran very successful centres in Oxford and Windsor (Bray Lake) for The London Windsurfing Centre and then turned pro in 1983 to join the UK’s professional tour. The rest, as they say, is history.
