The forecast predicted 10 mph. Fog was rolling in from the ocean. But the arctic air that has started chilling large parts of the US is predicted to make it down to Texas in a couple of days, with lows close to freezing even on the coast - so when the wind meter readings got up to 12 mph, we just had to go foiling at Bird Island.
My GPS tracks tell the story:
Speeds are knots, except for the wind speeds which are in miles per hour. We foiled from 3:35 pm to 5 pm. I used a 6.5 m sail with a Slingshot Infinity 84 and a Fanatic Stingray 140, Nina used her 5.4 m wing, Slingshot Infinity 99 foil, and custom wing board. We both used 71 cm (28 in) foil masts.
The tracks show that I was foiling almost the entire time, which was nice. But the even nicer part was that I managed to keep speed in almost all of my jibes. Most of them included a touchdown at the end, but it usually just needed a couple of pumps to get back up flying. So easy! It seems to be twice as much fun if you don't have to start over after every turn. A couple of times, I even managed to switch the feet while still flying, and if there was a touchdown, it was very brief - maybe a second or two. On port, I did sail-first jibes, trying to remember everything Andy Brandt told me in a private a few weeks ago. The closer I staid to his advise, the better the jibes were - no surprise! But on starboard, it felt more natural to do step jibes. Before today, I'd typically loose most of my speed when flipping the sail, but today, controlling height and turn radius somehow worked much better. I also must have remembered Nina's advice, because I started pushing down on the boom when stepping, which made the foot change much less dramatic. To my surprise, I ended up foiling through one of the step jibes, which also ended up being the jibe with the highest minimum speed in the entire session.
Most likely, the near-perfect conditions today made things easy, and explain most of the progress. The water was quite deep (0.5 ft above 0), but very flat thanks to the light wind. But the polar diagram shows that I still got upwind angles of almost 45 degrees, which is perhaps 5-10 degrees better than in many sessions. That's a definite hint that (a) the wind was reasonably strong, at least in gusts, and that (b) tips that Andy Brandt gave me in the private lesson made a big difference (besides improving my jibes, he also showed me how to go upwind better). So there is some hope that, at least to some small extend, the improvements may be due to me finally improving my foil jibes.
Nina had a fantastic day winging. She's been foiling through jibes for months, but foiling through tacks had remained elusive - until today! She discovered that she had to move her arms a bit differently, and promptly foiled cleanly through a couple of tacks, without the board making any water contact. In about half a dozen more tacks, the board just touched the water very briefly. Naturally, she was super happy.
With a little luck, we'll get another session tomorrow, before temperatures start dropping all the way into the 30s over a few days. Going windsurfing or foiling in such temperatures here in Texas is just inconceivable.
