Power + Speed + Lucky Gust = Speed

 We drove four days to get to Lake George, including one stretch where we drove 27 hours straight through because all the "road houses" near the Nullabor were fully booked). Getting to the launch requires driving several miles on a dirt road and sand, and crossing a little stream. At the launch, you are greeted by a very special smell that makes you question why in hell you wanted to go here. To start sailing, you first have to walk through a stretch of mud. When you get off the board, more often than not you are in knee-deep mud that wants to keep you, or at least suck your booties off your feet. When you finally manage to get your feet onto the board, they are covered in mud and/or weed that is so thick that your feet won't fit into the foot straps. The same question pops up again and again: why???

But despite all this, there are dozens of windsurfers from all over Australia who come to Lake George every year. A picture from our last trip gives a clue why:

That's Nina sailing Lake George in February 2019. The water level was almost a foot higher than this year, and many speedsurfers were complaining how choppy it was. We really did not understand what they were talking about - it looked plenty flat to us! 

This year, though, the lower water level means there are very large stretches where the water is glassy, even in 30 knot gusts. I thought that the super-flat water, together with some strong wind, is all it takes to break the magic 40 knot barrier that separates wannabe speedsurfers from "real" speedsurfers, and got quite frustrated when that was not the case. I ranted about my frustration in my last post, and fortunately, the post was read by Boro, who decided to give me a bunch of tips on how to go faster. Boro has done more than 40 knots many times in the US at much less ideal locations, and went on to get a top speed above 50 knot at the speed channel in Luderitz. 

Some of the things he suggested were similar to things I had heard many times before, and already tried to do, like going very deep downwind. But he made one suggestion that went against what I had heard from multiple sources before: to move the mast base far forward in the mast track. The common advice I had in my head was "mast track back for speed". On my borrowed Mistral 95 speed board, I had so far put the mast base in the middle of the track, and only moved it a couple of centimeters back and forward, without seeing a big difference.

 

Boro and I had a longer discussion about this (and his other tips) via Messenger, and he explained his rationale in detail. He summarized what it boiled down to a simple formula:

Power + Control = Speed

My two recent "fail" session, where many others went faster than 40 knots but I was stuck in the mid-30s, helped me really understand this. In the first session in Albany, I had plenty of control, but no power: I had rigged a 5.5 m sail, added a bit too much downhaul, and never released the outhaul to bag the sail out. I was perfectly in control in speed runs, but could not get the board to reach the speed I had gotten the day before, in several knots less wind. 

In my second "fail" session here at Lake George, I had plenty of power with my 6.2 m sail, but I was constantly fighting for control. I was holding back the entire time, doing just 25 knots when I should have done more than 30 on beam reaches. So when I did a few deep downwind speed runs in gusts, I started out too slow to reach top speeds, and was still too freaked out.

Interestingly, with our slalom boards at home, I generally had the mast base all the way forward. We had enough sessions in Texas over the last few years that I knew that this was the position that gave me the best control, and the most speed. But compared to here, Corpus Christi is quite choppy, and I am using a very different board, so I never had even tried the mast base all the way to the front.

Fortunately, it got windy the same day that Boro and I had the enlightening speed discussion. The forecast had only predicted 18-20 knots, but averages were closer to 25, with some stronger gusts. I pinched my way up from the Cockies launch to the glassy water near 5 Mile, and then further upwind towards Packing Point to the start of the speed run. I had headphones on that were connected to a phone running GPSLogit and announced my speed every 2 seconds. On the very first speed run, I heard the magic "40" announced three times in a row, and started woohooing out of the top of my lungs. When I got of at the end of the run, there was a small disappointment, though: the ESP GPS loggers showed a 2 second top speed of only 39.96 and 39.97 - so close! But that was already more than a knot faster than my previous PB, I was still fresh, and the wind was supposed to increase.

On the second speed run, I only got 37 knots: I had jibed at the end of the upwind leg, and forgotten to release the outhaul for the speed run. So just having the outhaul pulled in for going upwind made about 3 knots difference!

On the third speed run, with the outhaul released, I got lucky. I was in glassy water in the middle of the speed run, hearing "38" announcements, when a nice gust hit. Thanks to the forward position of the mast foot, I was in control, and the board accelerated until I heard "41" on the headphones. I finally had broken 40 knots! I was so happy that I momentarily forgot I was still going fast and let my attention slip, so the board did a huge wheelie, with the nose pointing up at a 45 degree angle and only the fin in the water. The head phone was still announcing "41", so a crash might have hurt, but I was too happy to be scared. Fortunately, I got things back under control without crashing. When checking the GPS units, both showed a top speed of 41.4 knots - I had smashed the 40 knot barrier!

I stayed on the water for another hour or two to get some more runs to improve my 5x10 second result, and ended up with 38.5 knots - almost exactly the same speed as my previous 2 second best. What a great day! I also played around a bit with the mast foot position, and concluded that about 3 cm from the front of the track seemed to work better than all the way in front. Nina also set two PBs for 2 and 5x10 seconds that day, but was a tad disappointed that she was several knots slower than I had been. When we later checked what speeds the other sailors had posted, there were a total of 51 postings from Lake George on the GPSTC site. Only a small number of sailors had posted 40 knot speeds for the day, and Nina had beaten quite a few of the other speeds. My speed ended up within about one knot of the top speed for the day, and only four speedsurfers posted speeds faster than mine - quite an amazing result, considering that a lot of guys here have previously done 44 to 49 knot top speeds! But despite the lucky gust I got, which must have been at least 30 knots, it was a "lighter" wind day compared to what a lot of these guys are used to. I also had just one run with 2 second averages above 40 knots (although a few others were very close), so I must have gotten a lucky gust. So we'll have to modify Boro's formula:

Power + Control + Lucky Gust = Speed

Here are my GPS tracks for the day:

The entire region in the bottom left where the tracks are green, which indicates a speed above 30 knots, was glassy even in the 30+ knot gusts - a stretch about 600 m long. In the approach, the "chop" was somewhere between a couple of centimeters and at most 10 cm high.

Besides moving the mast foot, a few other tips and lessons also helped getting faster. That includes using the adjustable outhaul to really bag out the sail on speed runs. But perhaps the next most useful thing for me was to use ear plugs to tune out the noise of the wind. In the past, I had used in-ear earphones that did that, but all of these "waterproof" earphone died of corrosion sooner or later. Now, I am using bone conduction earphones that have held up very well, but leave me exposed to wind noise. Several people, including Peter "waricle", said that ear plugs helped, so I tried them for this session, and they made a big difference. The "the wind is really loud so it must be crazy windy" factor fell away, and so did one reasons to "be careful" (read: slow). I am generally quite sensitive to noise, and very easily distracted by it, so maybe the earplugs worked better on me than they would for others - but whatever it is, I'll take it.

Yesterday, I was a bit tired, partly from the previous day's effort and partly from fighting a cold, so I decided to take it easy. It looked quite windy at the lake, but only a few 40s were to be had yesterday, with the top speed requiring a 7.0 m sail and 63 cm board. I used a 5.5 m, which had me comfortably powered. Since the sail was easy to jibe, and the speed strip was quite crowded, I decided to go for an hour. I was inspired by Kato, who has done a 29.2 hour the day before. Not that I can compare myself to him, he sails in a different league, but at least I could copy his approach. Here's what my tracks for the hour looked liked:

The tracks show that I made a bunch of mistakes. I had a wet jibe near the beginning, where it took me almost a minute to shake of the weeds and get started again. I also started going upwind again too early, thinking I had sailed long enough. Next time, I'll need to set up the GPS to track the hour! In the best 45 minutes of the run, my average speed was 26.5 knots. With my mistakes, the hour came out at 25.66 knots - a 0.6 knot improvement over my previous PB. Not bad for an easy day!

Compared to Kato's hour tracks, several things pop out. His average speeds were about 2 knots faster than mine, and more consistent. He also did fewer jibes, even though he sailed more than 3 miles further, since he got closer to the lake edges in many runs. But the biggest difference is the quality of his jibes. His jibes are more consistent, and his minimum speed is several knots higher. Even if we consider that he used a GT31 which records filtered data at 1 Hz while I used a u-blox based logger that records at 5 Hz with a lot less filtering, his minimum speeds were a couple of knots faster. So before trying another hour, I will definitely need to work on my jibes! Thanks to discussions with Mike (Decrepit), I already have a plan on what to do. I'll leave you with another 4 year old picture, jibing on Lake George:

 

Lake George

One of the things that had drawn me to Australia were windsurfing videos from Lake George in South Australia. In a good year, you can windsurf Lake George on glassy water in 25 knots, without any chop. So we ended our trip with a couple of weeks at Lake George.

But things did not seem to work out quite as planned. Before we even got there, we saw multiple reports that the water levels were much higher than ideal. In good years, the chop-killing weed reaches the surface; but in February 2019, the weed was covered with about 2 feet of water.

The trip from the Perth region in Western Australia to Beachport in South Australia took us a few days (partly because we did not drive at night, when there is a high chance that you hit a kangaroo). When we arrived in the afternoon, we drove to the launch light away, and it looked beautiful - very flat, with about 20 mph of wind. Unfortunately, we did not get to sail that day. The next day was quite windy - but cold! Temperatures dropped to about 14 C (57 F), and it rained a bit at times. Our summer wetsuits proved to be a bit too light for the wind, which also was very gusty. We started to question how smart is was to leave Western Australia for that. The last spot we had visited, Albany, had been fantastic, and rewarded us with several personal bests each; but we only managed low 30-knot numbers this day. Frustration again, similar to the first really day at Fangy Land: the better windsurfers got speeds in the high 30s, and one or two even got 40-knot top speeds.

It got a bit warmer the next couple of days, but the wind remained light. We got to meet a number of Australian speedsurfers in the local pub and on the beach, including the holder of the official 24-hour world record, "Kato". Kato saved me from rigging in dying winds one day by letting me use his gear in the last few gusts, and let me use his Mistral IMCO longboard another day where the wind again was light and gusty. In many parts of the lake, the weed was too close to the surface to fully extend the daggerboard, but I still had a blast, even though I had to use the 6.3 m sail, since Nina was using the 7.0 on the big slalom board. But another advantage of the light wind was that I was able to get some drone footage, without having to worry about the drone getting blown away. Here's some footage of Nina on the 7.0/112 l combo:

Unfortunately, our friends Mike and Dot had to leave a few days later, and the three "Teletubby Brokeback Speedsurfers" from Mandurah who shared the cabin next to ours also left when the wind forecast was very poor for several days in a row. That meant that we lost some of the gear we had used (or hoped to use) in very light or very strong winds: Mike's 4.4 m sail and 39 cm speed board for Nina, and the 112 l slalom board (a loaner from Jonski - thanks again!). On the bright side, it prompted us to switch to a lovely AirBnb place with lots of space, a super-friendly host, free loaner bicycles, and frequent sightings of kangaroos right next to our place - nice!

The wind finally returned for the last two days of our stay. Here is a GoPro short video that I took at the beginning of the first day:

This was in about 5 knots more wind than in the first video above, about 18 knots. At almost all windsurf spots, 5 knots more wind would have also created more chop - but not so here! The heavy weed limits how big the chop gets, and the water was very smooth. The wind picked up during the day, probably reaching averages near 25 knots before I stopped sailing, but the chop never seemed to get any bigger. Sweet! Well, I should be more specific: the chop did not get noticeably bigger in the middle lake, which is shallow and weedy. We actually ended up sailing a bit in the big lake, which is deeper at parts, and has substantially less weed; in the deeper parts, the chop is more comparable to the Hatteras Sound (think of the area near Avon, in the middle of the long distance race).

Here are my GPS tracks for the day (click on the image to see a larger version):

We started at the bottom-left corner, from a launch known as "5 Miles". The mast mount video above was taken right in front of the launch. We then sailed up to "The Spit" - a sand spit that separates the middle lake from the big lake above it. The sand bar is just perhaps 10 meters wide, and a meter tall, so the water behind it is perfect for speed sailing. I spent most of the day on the Falcon 89, and got a top speed of 34.8 knots on it - the fastest I had ever been on a slalom board. After a couple of hours, when Nina took a break, I got six runs on the Isonic W54 speedboard in. Three of the runs were above 35 knots, and the fastest had a 2-second top speed of 37.09 knots (68.7 km/h) - that's the second-fastest I have ever sailed, and only the second time I have sailed faster than 35 knots.

After hearing about my speeds, Nina wanted a few more runs on the Isonic. I ended up getting quite cold waiting for her, so I started to sail back to the launch, which was about 1.5 miles upwind. Since the wind kept picking up, getting back was reasonably easy and quick. I later looked at the GPS tracks of Hardie, who did more than 40 knots that day, and they confirmed that the wind picked up a few knots during and after our trip back. However, we were quite tired by the time we sailed back, and not quite sure how easy it would be to sail back upwind. I was definitely happy to have a few reserved left to manage the 7.0 m sail in gusts that must have been above 30 knots!

For the next day, the wind forecast had predicted a few more knots of wind, so we decided to drive out to the spit. It's just a 5 kilometer (3 mile) drive from the 5 Mile launch - but the road is "very interesting", with sand, huge potholes, and rocky areas. It took us 30 minutes to drive the last 3 miles!  But at least we now had the option to change gear whenever we felt like it.

I went out first on the 7.0/89 combo, and quickly got a top speed of 34.5 knots. The wind seemed to be picking up, and both local expertise and the forecast predicted an increase, to I quickly rigged down to the 6.3. Unfortunately, the wind had other plans, and stayed perhaps 5 knots weaker than the day before, so I had a hard time even getting 34 knots again. But the water in front of the speed (below in the image above) was just a few inches above the weeds - tons of fun to go back and forth in! I tried to improve my 1 hour personal best, but had a few problems jibing, so ended up 0.8 knots short of my PB. Nevertheless, these three hours of going fast for a couple of kilometers each run in "chop" than ranged from about 1 inch to maybe 3-4 inches were some of the best hours I even spend on a windsurf board. The SSE-SE wind was a lot steadier than the gusty SW-WSW wind we had on our first day of sailing at Lake George! Even Nina, who usually gets bored going in a straight line after a minute or two, sailed back and forth with a big grin on her face for hours, and ended up improving her 1 hour PB without really trying. After these two days, we both understood why windsurfers from all over Australia come to Lake George!