We love our Parasailor. It’s been a fantastic downwind sail for us crossing oceans and in the trade winds.

Golden Glow’s Parasailor

US ISTEC

That said, we did have a headache with our US salesperson that soured us a bit on ISTEC, the company he represented. The sail delivery process wasn’t the smoothest – we didn’t get the color sail we expected or exactly the hardware or lines we needed and paid handsomely for. But we put that in our rearview mirror once we received the sail, sourced the add-ons we needed, and sailed off into the sunset with a sail that is and has been a champion performer for us.

To our surprise, almost a year after we received our sail, when we were far away in the Mediterranean, this same not-to-be-named salesperson wrote us telling us he had sent us someone else’s 156m sail, and insisted that we send our sail back to him. We told him multiple times that our sail was a 105m sail, but he refused to believe us, writing that he “never had a 105 of our sail’s color in stock” and demanded that we pay him an extra $5,000 USD if we wanted to keep the sail.

It took us sending him a photo of our sail showing ISTEC’s own marking of 105m to get him to back off. But not surprisingly, the experience with him left us with a bad taste for ISTEC.

And then along came the wonderful Jorg Nigg in Germany to ISTEC’s rescue.

European ISTEC (Germany)

This fall, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean, we noticed a very tiny speck of light coming through on one of the parasailor’s panels up high. When we doused the sail and took a closer look we saw a microscopic tear in the black panel just to the right of the orange section in the open panel of our sail. I went to the ISTEC website and put a request in to purchase 1/2 yard of replacement parasailor fabric because it is a special material that is lighter and more durable than spinnaker or other available fabric.

ISTEC has an office in Germany and Jorg Nigg replied to my request and not only sent us the fabric we needed, he wouldn’t let us pay for the fabric or even shipping from Germany to Grenada.

Credit where credit is due – and much gratitude to you, Jorg. You are a wonderful representative of ISTEC and the company owes you big-time for rescuing their reputation!

If anyone needs anything from ISTEC ever, we recommend going through