Lightning is the only thing that gets windsurfers off the water. But sometimes, Lightning may be the only thing that gets windsurfers
on the water. Obviously, I'm talking about two different things.
The thing that got me on the water today is shown in this picture:
It's an F2 Lightning from 1987. I got it a few months back for $100. What a steal! Of course, it needed some work - a few little holes needed patching; the footstraps were falling apart and needed to be taken off; the mast track needed an hour of my attention before I figured out how to make it work again; and the daggerboard gasket needed to be replaced (with a few layers of sail repair tape for now). The picture above is from its brief maiden voyage at Fogland last week. Since then, I started to work on putting some footstraps on, and got the mast track working again, so I was dying to test it. When the Chapin wind meter showed averages around 14 mph today, with gusts to 17, I just had to go! The GPS tracks tell the story:
For comparison, here are tracks from an earlier session on a 117 l slalom board with the same sail:
The slalom session had quite a bit more wind (gusts up to 24 mph), but the tracks are more the typical back-and-forth session (I had to use a weed fin, which did not help). In comparison, going upwind on the F2 Lightning was not only 10 times easier, it also was a lot more fun - the longboard railed up very nicely! I played around with the upwind stance Andy Brandt had shown me last year - front foot sideways on the daggerboard knob, with the lower leg lying on the board, and the body far out over the water - that worked amazingly well! The top speed on the Lightning also was quite good - almost 24 mph, compared to 28 mph on the slalom board - but again, gusts were 7 mph on the slalom day! It really helped that going upwind on the longboard was so wicked easy; that made long, deep downwind runs easy, too. But the biggest difference was when the wind dropped down to 12 mph during the last third of the session. On the slalom board, that would have meant boredom and pain - there's simply no fun to be had on slalom gear unless it's planing. The Lightning, in contrast, was still fun, slowing down proportionally to the wind strength, instead of dropping suddenly from 20 mph to 6 mph as the slalom board would have done. The $100 I spent for the F2 Lightning were the best $100 I ever spent on windsurf gear!
Some of the readers with excellent memory may remember the title of this post, and wonder why I called Barnstable Harbor "my harbor". Well, that's simple: I had it all for myself! There were a couple of fishing boats out - maybe one every few of square miles. But otherwise, the harbor was all mine - as it is most of the time when I windsurf there. Not that I'd mind sharing - it's big enough, and one of my all-time favorite windsurfing places!
