Today, I discovered the cause: lack of cold weather windsurfing! The last windsurfing session 9 days ago - too long a break! But today, we had a lovely little east wind in the low-to-mid 20 mph range come in, so I just had to go windsurfing at East Bay in Osterville - a tiny little bay that allows only 500-600 m long runs, but very flat water for jibes at both ends. Sure, it rained, but that's not a reason to stay home (except for Nina). It was also warm - 55ºF (13ºC).
Considering the temperatures, I overdressed: 4.5 mm semidry, long polypropylene shirt underneath, impact west on top, 5 mm booties, neoprene hood, and Ianovated open-palm mittens. Late fall is speed time, which also means that I rarely fall, so I started to overheat after just a few minutes on the water. Fun! That gave me an excuse to sometimes crash "on purpose", and at other times to just stop and get off the board, supposedly to check the speed for the last run on my GPS. Feeling hot, hot, hot...
When the wind picked up a bit, I took a little break and rigged down from a 7.5 m freeride sail to a 7.0 m race sail. Usually, that's a pretty safe recipe to stop me from planing out of jibes, but that failed today - it was just too flat, and the wind was too steady, since the "super moon" high tide made the windward sand spit almost disappear. Going into a jibe at full speed in perfectly flat water is one of the best feelings in windsurfing, and thanks to the short runs, I got to do that a lot. Fun! But eventually, the rain picked up to a level where it got really hard to see anything on the water, so I kept the session short. It's been a few hours by now, and I'm still warm! Playing out in the cold makes warm. Cool.
Here are today's GPS tracks:
