Hualien wants to promote sailing. The organizers of the first annual East Coast Tourism Cup Invitational, which drew around 200 sailors from all over Taiwan, felt it was pretty urgent to get this message across.
"You can help us write an article," they told me about a hundred times. I thought it was pretty obvious that that's what I was doing, spending two days at a regatta with a camera and a notepad.
Apparently, this urgency about promoting sailing had something to do with the desire to develop new types of tourism in Hualien.
"There's no industry here and it's beautiful. It's like Hawaii," one of them told me. This isn't altogether true, but I liked the logic that any unindustrialized place with natural beauty is like Hawaii.
Unfortunately the 30km stretch of highway connecting Hualien and its resident natural wonder, Taroko Gorge, is little more than a series of mineral processing plants, whose massive conveyor belts, towers and other steel works seem to get in the way of every ocean view.
The same mountains that give Hualien its majestic scenery serve as a giant rock quarry for marble, gravel and constituents of cement, in short, an industrial and economic base for the region.
But the mineral industry hasn't made Taroko any less awe-inspiring and hasn't left oceans and rivers polluted.
Away from the rock piles, in fact, Hualien is still impressively scenic. The huge harbor works which stretch 1.3km out to sea have also created a section of flat water perfect for small boat sailing. The regatta was a good idea.
It was also successful. Participants' T-shirts carried club slogans like "Think Windsurfing, Think of Changhua" and "Fulung Sail Service System."
The best sailors from every club in Taiwan were there, including Hsin Jin-lung (
"This is a big race," said Hsing, a 33-year-old sailor from Penghu who will next month compete against the world' s best in the third ever Adecco Penghu Pro-Am. Hsing won the men's formula board division.
Formula boards are windsurfing boards that are very wide, offering easy stability and light work for the sailor. It was an unusual choice for Hsing, who usually sails short, thin boards with small sails in the overpowering winds of Penghu.
"One big reason [I entered formula board] is that it had the best prizes," he admitted shortly before carrying away his new NT$36,000 Kinetic brand formula board. But the moral of the story is not so much about mercenary greed as about how to promote specific classes of sailing.
Hsing has been windsurfing for 17 years. He works for the Penghu County government teaching windsurfing. He estimates he's in the water at least 200 days a year.
Australian Alex Mowday, who has organized all three Penghu Pro-Ams, described him and a few other Penghu sailors, "In terms of board speed, they're right up there with the world's top pros. They just lack the head to head competition experience."
Hsing didn't do well at the Asian games because he had to use a kind of board he would never otherwise use, a bulky, long type designated by Olympic rules. In Penghu he normally sails a 270cm board with a sail of 4m2 to 5m2 , the kind of rig that lets the world's best sailors deal with blasting winds and pull huge aerial stunts.
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