Saturday, June 27, 2020

Different Toys

It's raining today, and I'm glad to get a day off the water. We've been playing for 4 days in a row now, so I need a little break! Part of the reason is that I finally dragged the slalom gear onto the water again yesterday. After mostly foiling in the last few weeks, the 7 m race sail felt sooooo heavy! The rig probably is about twice as heavy as the 5.0 m freestyle sail I use most of the time .. until the huge luff sleeve fill with water, and it gains an extra 50+ pounds. The wind was mostly around 17 knots, and my 99 l board felt a bit small in the lulls, but the gusts were fun. Eddie took a few pictures:
Nina was on the wing - her sixth session in high winds:


I was foiling the three days before that day. The wind was light when we came to the beach on Thursday, so I wanted to use my bigger Infinity 84 front wing. However, that wing does not work well in my old slalom board anymore: the fuselage with the extra hole for a "D" position broke into two pieces recently while foiling. So I used my old Fanatic Skate 110, to which I had added tracks. It was quite surprising how much more concentration the foiling on the Skate needed - 5 cm less widths and ~10 liters less volume make a surprising difference. On the Skate, I had to move my feet as far to the outside rails as possible to keep things under control, something I never have to do on the Warp. Upwind angles also were a bit worse than on the slalom board with the Infinity 76 front wing. But since the wind increased and I was well powered to slightly overpowered, tracking upwind towards the Hyannis Port Harbor entrance was not big deal. 

The day that I was on the i84, Nina also started windfoiling on the large foil, with a 5.2 m sail. When the wind picked up, she was overpowered, and did not like it one little bit. But on the bright side, that meant she had enough wind to go winging, which she did. I stayed on shore to take some pictures and videos of her (unfortunately with a rather small zoom lens) - here is one: