The Egg Island Slingshot adventure

My lovely wife had recently posted a link to a description of the "Slingshot" manouvre in the Windsurfer International Magazine, and we were dying to try it out today. After hearing about how flat the water at Egg Island in Lewis Bay can be, we decided to imitate the freestylers who often sail to there from Kalmus. We were on the water just before low tide, where the chops is small and regular, so Nina decided to sail the F2 Missile. She had tried it only once before, with limited success, but her sailing has improved a lot since then, and she has been on small (72 and 77 l) boards quite often. So this time, she did just great.

The water behind the sand bar at Egg Island was beautifully flat. The wind was a tad more gusty, especially at the approach to the sand bar, but nevertheless, these were almost ideal speed conditions, with wind averages around 30 knots. Nina quickly broke her old personal bests, reaching almost 50 kmh. Dean got his best speed outside of Hatteras, with more than 34 knots. Your's truly sailed while listening to the GPS Speed Talker, and it quite often spoke of 30 and 31 knots. At the end of the day, my 2 sec top speed was 31.4 knots (58 kmh), and I even broke the 30 knot barrier in the 5 x 10 second average. Being on my 5.8 KA Koncept certainly helped - but Egg Island at low tide sure is a great speed spot. Now why again did I never sail there before in SW winds?

Here are my GPS tracks for the day:

 It was nice to see Nina work on speed for once, and she found sailing the Missile "very interesting" (in a good way). After I short break, I borrowed the 4.5 m wave sail that she had sailed all day for some bump and jump fun.  Graham and Martin were still out, and they both worked on loops. I saw some very nice tries, and at the end of the day, Graham actually made it around and water started out of a loop attempt - congrats! The pain on the back will eventually go away :)