10 Reasons to learn the Grubby

It's the coldest time of the year - lots of snow, but not much opportunity to windsurf. So the mind games start... even more so since the annual trip to the warm Caribbean waters is coming up. Nina says this is the year that we need to learn new school freestyle - pop, slide and spin instead of just back and forth. Perhaps I agree with her. Or maybe I'll remain in my old mental state - the  "lawn-mowing chicken".

I don't want to remain a chicken. I need motivation. Here's the move I'm thinking about:


It's the Grubby. I need motivation to try it. So here are 10 reasons to try the Grubby:

1. The Grubby is one of the easiest new school moves.
2. You don't need to switch hands or feet.
3. It looks cool.
4. It can be planed through.
5. You can do it when you're just barely planing (as Danielle and Maxime show).
6. Crashes hurt less than Loop or Vulcan crashes, because you're always holding on to the sail.
7. You can add a jibe at the end for a really cool, fully planing turn.
8. Fellow blogger Fish has been doing Grubbies for 10 years.
9. When Andy Brandt tried to do Grubbies, he ended up looping. That's a perfectly acceptable outcome.
10. I blogged about it again - time to do it!

I like steps to measure progress. The Vulcan makes this difficult, since you need to pop, turn, and flip the sail, all within less than one second. To complicated for my simple mind. Here are steps for the Grubby:

1. Pop the board, fin nicely out of the water.
2. Push the nose down to create a rotation point.
3. Turn the board 90º downwind. Try doing that by sheeting in at take off. 
4. Turn the board 180º.
5. Keep the weight forward so that the board slides backwards.
6. Push out with the sail hand, let the mast hand come in, to complete the rotation.
7. Sail away dry.
8. Plane through.
9. Add a jibe, sail duck, or downwind 360 at the end.

The only part I've done before was step 1, but it's been a while (chop hops are different!). I'll be quite happy if I make it to step 5. Maybe I'll spend some time on step 3, trying to get a feeling for different ways of turning the board. I think that some new school moves primarily use sail steering, while others rely more on twisting and unwinding the body to rotate the board while in the air. Playing around a bit with this may be worth the effort. For all those crashes, Tobago has a definitive advantage over Bonaire: much less sand in the board shorts afterwards, since the water is deeper! But it will be just as warm and sunny :-).