Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Perhaps there is hope

Great day at Kalmus today - wind around 20, gusting 25, sunny, warm, and a decent crowd on the water. My back has been acting up, so I decided to not mow the lawn today - too much work. I grabbed the easy freestyle board and the magic 6.5 m sail instead, and had fun. On the water, my back was mostly forgotten - I like seat harnesses!

Nina and Marty were both on the water, setting a good example with 360s, planing push tacks, donkey jibes, and flaka and duck tack tries. Chris and Drew were out on slalom and freerace gear - with my 24 cm fin, I had no chance of keeping up with them. So I imitated Nina and Marty. Of course I played it safe and mostly limited myself to duck jibes, jump jibes,  carve 360 attempts, and body drag attempts. I even threw a little bit of working on my jbes in - I need to get the "independent arms, front arm long" concept from my head into my arms. Just for good measure, I threw in a few pops, in preparation for Grubbys.

As a result, the Clew-View GoPro footage from today was a lot more interesting than usual. The pops looked better in the movies than they had felt - the fin came clearly out of the water, but the height was not too high. I slowly worked up my courage to have the nose of the board touch first. In my last try, I actually managed a proper nose landing:
That was a first. Much to my surprise, I survived! Without any injury! Sailed away without any problems. Maybe it's time to add turning the board and sliding backwards soon...

For my geek and speedsurfing friends: I used two Canmore GP-102+ today, as well as my GT-31. With the GT-31 in "normal" power mode, the tracks looked much nicer, and positional and doppler speeds were very close. Speed results in the GPSTC challenge catefories were almost identical for the 3 units, with most numbers being within 0.1 knots for all three units, and a maximum difference of 0.21 knots for the 2 second value. No surprise, but still nice! Here's a section of the speed tracks for the 3 units that is typical for the entire track:
Hard to even see that these are 3 different tracks!