ABK Clinic Cape Cod, Day 1

The ABK Clinic in Hyannis started yesterday, and we had a fantastic day. The camp was sold out more than a week in advance; at least 5 windsurfers had to be turned away. We have 20 students and 4 teachers (Andy, Brendon, Tom and Ed); several of the student had never windsurfer before, and decided to start with an ABK camp. Definitely the right decision - in the video review at the end of the day, they all looked fantastic sailing.

The weather was wonderful, with sun all day and temperatures in the 70s. The wind was light in the morning; only two guys on huge sails planed some of the time, everyone else was on small sails. I sailed my new WindSUP 10 for the first time, and it is an excellent board for light wind sailing and freestyle. When the wind picked up to 15 mph in the afternoon, it planed up quite easily with a 6.5 m sail. Andy took it for a brief spin and seemed positively surprised that he could catch the little wind waves easily. I had some fun with it, but then switched to my Skate 110 so I'd practice tricks instead of just mowing the lawn. The Skate 110 does plane early, but not nearly as early as the WindSUP - I had to work harder to get it going, and sometimes had to wait out the lulls.

I did not work on anything new yesterday, but rather tried to reproduce stuff I had done before. The duck jibe came easy, but the 360 took 20 tries or so. I fooled around with the jump jibe, and early slow tries were fine. When I decided to do it with speed, I had a few more problems that got worse when Andy gave me pointers - but I know know what to do, and I just love the move.

Video review was funny, as usual, and I re-learned a few basic things. Then, Martin, Graham, and Jonathan followed me to our new house, where we ordered pizza and warmed up in the jacuzzi - nice. Dani stopped by for a visit later. It was really nice to have a bunch of windsurfing friends over to talk about windsurfing and drink beer the whole evening :-)