April Cometh

March can be a good month for windsurfing on Cape Cod. March 2015 was not. Lack of wind and "warm" weather left me plenty of time to look for signs of hope in my session database. I vaguely remembered that April can be a fantastic month. Indeed, in 2013, I scored 6 sessions in the first week, and another 6 sessions in the next two weeks. Water temperatures reached 50ºF (10ºC) in the middle of April - compared to our current temperatures in the 30s, that seems incredibly warm.

We may have to wait a bit longer for 50º water this year, but the wind has started to arrive. Yesterday morning had a few hours with wind near 20 mph at Kalmus. The forecast had promised the wind would stay until the afternoon. Foolishly, we believed the forecast, and waited for the tide to drop. When we arrived at 1 pm, the wind had left. But our friend Martin came, so we retired to the Hobbit Hole (aka as "Common Ground Cafe") to catch up. By the time we had finished our Chais and Hot Nots, the wind returned! We got to enjoy a session where the wind went from "no way you can plane" to "I can barely hold on anymore", and then back down, all in 90 minutes. But it was nice to get out.

There was absolutely no wind in the forecast for today. But while making plans for sailing tomorrow morning, we noticed that the wind readings were near 20! Wind and sun - if you know us, you also know we were at the beach 30 minutes later. Lots of whitecaps! Not fully trusting the wind, we rigged 6.0 and 4.7, and took the big boards (Skate 100 and 110) out. The GPS tracks show what happened next:

We got 90 minutes of perfect wind before it dropped. Nina (green tracks) did her usual freestyle thing. It was her second session of the year on Cape Cod, but she was very happy to be in familiar waters again, and threw down a few beautiful duck tacks. She also started working on Flakas again, and was happy to get the board out of the water, something that she had problems with in Texas. She ended the session with an ear-to-ear smile.

I thought about freestyle, but only very briefly. The sun had retreated behind clouds, and I had a bit a hard time keeping my fingers comfortable. Unlike Nina, who was able to take her fingers out of her open-palm mittens for most of the session and did not even have the tubes in her Ianovated suit, I was using my hand warming tubes a lot. Stupid Raynaud's! So I figured I did not need any extra crashes from trying new stuff, and mowed the lawn instead. I had another good excuse - today is the last day of the month, and we had not yet posted a valid session on the GPS Team Challenge. The goal was to not end up in last place on the monthly overall ranking, and we managed to get there, placing 51st out of 53 teams. But April starts tomorrow - and that's the month where the real speedsurfers on our team get back onto the water.