If you want a glimpse into someone’s psyche, look at their playlist. Bernd Roediger, the wild-haired, 29-year-old style master from Maui, was in total flow state on finals day at the Maui Quatro Pro last April. Fresh off a win at the Puerto Rico Windsurf World Cup, Roediger left the judges at Ho’okipa slack jawed as he executed a taka into white water, followed by a one-handed clew first bottom turn with minutes left in the competition. “Wizardry,” shouted announcer Kai Katchadourian. “I am absolutely mind blown.”
Watching from the beach, it’d be easy to imagine the radical riding was set to an amped soundtrack of Rage Against the Machine or AC/DC. But the Speaqua Cruiser H2.0 speaker Roediger had stuffed in a waterproof bag was playing The Tao Te Ching, or the Book of the Way, by Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu. The wave received an 8.93, the highest score of the event, and secured Roediger’s victory. He is unique in the way he approaches sailing not as sport, but art.
Bernd Roediger’s skillful down-the-line riding has earned him nicknames including the Magician, the Samurai, and the Wizard. Paul Karaolides, who along with his partner, Sofie Louca, shoots the Fish Bowl Diaries, likens watching him sail to watching Gerry Lopez surf at Pipeline, all laidback with his hands down in a massive barrel. “Bernie pulls these insane moves in critical sections and just stays super relaxed,” says Paul. “He’s like a ballet dancer. Even on head high days he makes it all look so choreographed and fluid. He doesn’t force anything, he just flows.”
Maui-based surfer, windsurfer, and artist Pete Cabrinha says you can tell Roediger spent years as a kid on a board in Maui’s wide range of conditions. “That background provides a loose confidence to his style,” says Cabrihna. “A way to let his instincts fill in the blanks on the fly while coordinating his next set of moves. Add in creativity and competition savvy and you have a unique representation of windsurfing’s generation now.”
Roediger savors his wins, but his performances are equally dazzling when he’s free sailing. The contest arena isn’t what motivates him. He sails to sail. “Taking up windsurfing isn’t like taking up baseball,” he says. “It will be with you your entire life. It enriches your way of being and thinking. For me, windsurfing is an avenue to express myself in a special way.”
Inheriting a Family Passion
His father, Norman Roediger, got hooked on windsurfing as a teenager while living in Corpus Christi, Texas. “It sounded like a pretty horrible place to sail,” says Roediger. “Once my dad ended up in an oyster field. He had a choice: Sacrifice his gear or his feet. He walked across the shells to salvage his gear and ended up in the hospital getting his feet stitched up.” When Roediger Sr. entered the military, windsurfing fell by the wayside. His son’s birth reignited the passion. At just a few months old, Roediger fell seriously ill and was diagnosed with autoimmune neutropenia, a blood disorder that causes the immune system to attack the white blood cells.
“It was a massive shock for my parents,” he says. “They were preparing for me to be a bubble boy and then randomly I got better. I think that experience brought out all of these suppressed desires in my dad, like windsurfing.” When it comes to sailing, South Carolina, where Roediger was born, is even less desirable than Texas. “It’s totally windless but we’d take my dad’s tin fishing boat, Bodhi, to the outer sandbar islands so he could try to sail,” he recalls. When the family got invited to a wedding in Hawaii, his parents saw it as an opportunity to set down roots in a place Roediger Sr. could windsurf every day.
At age seven, Roediger got his first taste of windsurfing on his dad’s board. The father-son duo quickly became fixtures in the Maui windsurfing scene. “Bernd was this little grom rocking a mohawk and his dad would rig and carry his gear down to the beach for him,” recalls Sofie Louca. “You could already tell back then he had raw talent.” By the age of eight, he was sponsored, and by fifteen he had joined the PWA World Tour.
While most saw a prodigy harnessing his physical potential, Sam Bittner, creator of the American Windsurfing Tour (now the International Windsurfing Tour or IWT) saw more than a gifted athlete. Bittner competed on tour with Roediger and served as his guardian, traveling with him to competitions until he turned eighteen. “I remember being in Washington D.C. and he was in absolute awe of being surrounded by so much history,” says Bittner. “He was still in high school and he kept telling us all to stop and look around. This is where our country was founded, he marveled.”
Bittner said from an early age, what set Bernd apart was his interest in life beyond the water. For Roediger, competitions weren’t just an opportunity to win, they were an opportunity to experience the culture of a destination. “People like Bernd add heart to the windsurfing community,” she says. “He is so deeply in tune with his emotions. He’s competitive, but at the same time humble, mindful, caring, and loving.”
The Evolution of a Waterman
Being surrounded by the innovators and innovation on Maui, it was only natural that Roediger started to experiment with other sports. “I remember being eleven and watching Dave Kalama, Laird Hamilton, and Kai Lenny—my heroes—on SUPs,” he says. “Back then, it was a form of recreation, like riding around on your cruiser bike.”
Roediger spent a summer playing around on an old nine-foot longboard, eventually doing a downwinder on it. Soon he was competing on the APP World Tour. “Windsurf races felt like local, community events, but with SUP I was meeting people from all over the world and traveling,” he says. “I felt like I was part of a movement.”
In 2018, he tried wing foiling for the first time. He jokes that Robby Naish warned him it would never be as cool as windsurfing and would never go as fast, but then Naish started to tinker. “Foiling ignited his imagination,” says Roediger, who now teaches wing foiling. When he joined the SUP world tour, windsurfers accused him of quitting windsurfing. He recently picked up some foils and the shop owner, a windsurfing loyalist, warned him: “Don’t like them too much, we watched you go down the SUP path and thought we lost you.”
To any doubters, he assures them, “My religion is sailing,” he says. “That’s how I was indoctrinated. When you grow up as a windsurfer in a windsurfing community of diehards, it becomes more than a sport.”
Chasing His Wanderlust
Being a waterman was never about being a Swiss Army knife of ocean sports for Roediger. “Different disciplines provided me with multiple bridges to other people in other communities around the world,” he shares. In many ways, his family move to Maui was his first taste of traveling for wind and waves. “We were exploring,” he says. By age nine, his father was taking him on annual windsurfing trips to places like Punta San Carlos in Baja, Mexico and Dakhla, Morocco. “Back then, my interpretation of a surf trip was staying in a tent on the beach in the wind,” he jokes.
These early trips introduced Roediger to a variety of windsurfing conditions, but what truly made them formative was seeing people like Brian Talma, creator of the Beach Culture World Tour in Barbados, and Kevin Trejo, owner of now shuttered Solo Sports camp in Baja, living by their own rules. “I was fascinated by these people,” he says. “There are so many unique people on Maui, but it’s a small island and everyone feeds off each other and follows a certain model for success or model for what a waterman looks like. Travel opened my eyes to the different ways you could devote your life to the water and make it work.”
Seeking Success on His Own Terms
When Roediger started competing in windsurfing in 2011, the sport felt like it was on the brink of extinction. The avenue to be a world champion was to move to Europe. “That sounded awful,” he says. “It foreclosed on a lot of traditional benchmarks of success in the sport.” Over the years, Roediger has learned to measure success on a personal level by fusing his training with poetry, writing (including pieces for this magazine), and meditation. “Every warrior caste throughout time has had this relationship between martial discipline and training and an appreciation of or participation in the arts,” he says. “A samurai would compose poems. That really inspired me and is the direction I want to take.”
From an early age, Roediger viewed competition as a means to explore different mental states. He says he inadvertently discovered meditation at age thirteen while competing in SUP. “The waves felt good, but I would get anxious at a competition and struggle mentally,” he recalls. His dad had learned to channel his breath during his time in the military and took Roediger through his first guided breathing meditation. “I have used every competition as an opportunity to expand that practice,” he says. “How I feel when I’m competing means a lot more to me than the result.”
Roediger points to the late Mark Angulo as his greatest inspiration for windsurfing in the purest surf-style sense. One of the most stylish windsurfers of the 1980s and 1990s, he’s credited with inventing the goiter, the wave 360, and the twisted aerial. “He developed almost every move we do by himself,” says Roediger. “His sailing was genius level. Growing up around him, he was a constant source of bewilderment. As I get to the age of being an uncle, that’s what I want to do… things people don’t understand and appreciate, hoping someone will take it to the next level.”
Maui-based pro windsurfer Kevin Prichard observes that Roediger doesn’t follow competition style. “He’s competitive, but his sailing is more outside the box,” says Pritchard. Creativity and expression will always come first, even at the cost of a win. It’s an ethos that can make it a struggle if you want to make a career windsurfing, admits Roediger. “Some people call me self-destructive and scratch their heads at my professional decisions,” he says. He points to the homogenization of professional surfing and feels lucky windsurfing remains niche. “I wouldn’t keep it together in a high-intensity competition environment,” he says. “I’m thankful that the windsurfing world is a place that gives me freedom to express myself as an individual. My place in the sport is almost like a freak. I’m becoming my mentor, Mark. People call me idiosyncratic. I take that as a compliment.”
