Is There Hope?

It seems only a short while ago that Nina did not know how to plane on a windsurf board. Ok, it's been a few years, but time flies. Since then, she has taken more than a dozen ABK camps. I'm not sure it has helped. Sometimes she can't even hold on to the sail:

At other times, she ends up on the wrong side of the boom:

I learned that your arms should be long while sailing. You cannot do that like this!

She learned Duck Jibes. Hard not to when you do more than a dozen ABK camps. But often, she seems to be confusing jibes and tacks, and ducks in the middle of a tack:

Half the time, she even looses her grip on the boom, and relies on the sail to float back up to her. She's spent lots of money this year to get two new sails that are specially trained to do that!

I get confused just watching her. She started to keep doing one of these silly things right after the other, without even having the decency to fall into the water in between. I think she does it on purpose! She wants to confuse the freestyle judges at the East Coast Windsurfing Festival Long Island this weekend so she can get 1st place again. This time, she'll even do the races. On a Cat. The one I bought so that I would have better chances at the races. Ha! She likes cats more than I do. That settles the matter.

All this together means that I may have to address her as "Her Majesty" next week. Maybe I just jinxed her. Probably not. I'll try hard to keep the tradition we started at the ECWF Cape Cod last year going: only married couples shall be crowned! But that will be hard. I am clumsy. Sometimes, I can make up for it with attitude. More often, though, I just fall. If I try Anklebiters, they bite my ankles. On a good day. Usually, it just looks like I threw my sail into the water. Onlookers guess whether I did it out of anger or because I was too tired to hold on anymore. Better freestylers let the sail float back into their hands and add more tricks.

Racing is not much better. I'll be racing a Kona Mahalo. It's not a race board. It's a tandem. But at least it has enough volume so that I don't fall off all the time. I do not own any 10+ meter sails, so I'll be competing in the 7.5 m division. That means I'll be sailing against guys who I outweigh by 50%. I need lots of luck. But whatever happens, it will be tons of fun.  Hope to see you there!