Cynthia “Cynbad” Brown

Before anyone sold a purpose-built parawing, Cynthia “Cynbad” Brown was already running downwinders under rescue parachutes on Maui. The multi-sport waterwoman later collaborated with Ozone on the CynSack stash-bag concept, and her one widely-circulated line, about throwing up a parawing at Paia Bay instead of paddling out, remains one of the cleanest descriptions of what this sport actually changes.

Who is Cynbad Brown?

Most of the riders shaping this sport arrived from wingfoil or kite racing. Brown came from the other direction. A Maui trailblazer, she was experimenting with rescue-parachute downwinders (an improvised canopy pulling a foiler downwind) before there was a product to buy.

For timeline context, the Kite HI guide has it this way: “The sport was pioneered on Maui by Sam Reynolds of Five O in 2023… A year and half later Greg Drexler of BRM took this concept to a user friendly level by adding a vertical control bar.” Drexler’s Maliko V1, billed as the first upwind-capable parawing, launched on August 21, 2024 (Boardriding Maui). Brown’s parachute experiments belong to that same pre-Maliko Maui moment. She didn’t invent the parawing. She was one of the people proving the idea on the water while the gear was still being figured out.

The CynSack collaboration

Brown worked with Ozone on the CynSack stash-bag concept. A stash bag attacks the sport’s central problem: after you deploy, climb on foil and want your hands free, the canopy has to go somewhere it won’t tangle and will redeploy cleanly. That a Maui pioneer’s name ended up on an Ozone stash solution tells you where the packing know-how in this sport came from.

One limit worth stating plainly: beyond the collaboration itself, no specs, sizes or release details for the CynSack appear in the sources behind this profile, so none are listed.

Paia Bay and the access argument

Brown’s line about Paia Bay, from Foiling Magazine’s “New Sensation” feature on the birth of the parawing: she’d “never paddle out… now [I] throw up a parawing, foil out, and pick when I want to turn downwind.”

The whole case for the sport, compressed. Paia sits on Maui’s north shore near the classic Maliko run, roughly 9 miles from Maliko Gulch to Kanaha, the course where Paddle Imua ran the first-ever parawing race division on July 13, 2025. A paddle-out that isn’t worth the effort becomes a short upwind leg: deploy, foil out, stash, pick your own line back down. Greg Drexler makes the same logistics point from the driving side: “I haven’t had a pump in my car in… I don’t even remember when.”

The hazards stay put. Maui downwinders mean real drift distances, and a stashed canopy can’t be pumped back up in dying wind. Read the discipline overview at The Inertia before treating any parawing as a self-rescue plan.

What we don’t know

The public record on Brown is thin, and this profile won’t pad it. Her board, foil and personal wing quiver aren’t published in the sources we cite; she has no results in the 2026 SFT parawing rankings we track; and her Instagram is the only channel of her own we could verify, so it’s the only one listed. If you have primary sources (an original interview, footage, CynSack details), they’d close real gaps here.