The perfect training ground

Fogland Beach in Tiverton, Rhode Island, is one of our favorite places to windsurf in the spring and summer. So when we got two warm, sunny, and windy days last week, Fogland was were we went. With the rising temperatures, we were joined by other windsurfers both days: Tom on Wednesday, out for his first session of the year and looking good; and Jeff, Graham, and Chris on Thursday.

The northern bay in Fogland is only knee to hip deep and about 500 m wide - perfect for working on jibes and freestyle. There was plenty of ducking, popping, and sliding to be seen on Thursday - here are a few pictures (thanks to Corey for taken them!):

Nina and Chris

Graham

Chris

My lovely wife did not want me to show any pictures of her, because she felt that compared to Chris and Graham, she only did "boring" stuff. Well, she did use the two days to work on her jibes and duck jibes, and made a lot of progress in gusty conditions. GPS tracks are great to get an objective assessment of how good jibes were - and she did her best jibe ever that day. Here's the GPS track:

Her minimum speed of 10.6 knots in the jibe is very good; but even better is that she kept at least 67% of her entry speed during the entire jibe (usually, keeping 50% is pretty darn good). I filmed her a bit from the shore while I was taking a break:


Here's some GoPro HD footage, filmed with a Clew-View mount:


I just love the way she drops down and re-accelerates with a straight front leg. Her jibes are definitely better than mine now. On Wednesday, I still managed a couple of jibes with a faster minimum speed than Nina had, but only because I was going into the jibes with a lot more speed (being on a speed-oriented board with a cambered race sail, instead of a freestyle board with a waves sail as she was). But on Thursday, she easily beat my minimum speed several times. To add insult to injury, one of her fastest jibes was a cleanly planed-through duck jibe - her first. I can duck jibe, but I have yet to plane cleanly out of one...

It is pretty amazing to see the quite dramatic improvements in Nina's jibing in two days at Fogland. But one reason for these improvements is that Fogland Bay is simply a perfect training ground for jibing and freestyle. The water stayed flat, even when the wind gusted into the high 30 and low 40 mph ranges; runs are short, forcing you to jibe or try something else every minute or so; and the shallow water means you don't have to waste energy on waterstarts, or worry much about getting cold from falling often. It's also easier to come in and take breaks than at many other placing, since the distance from the shore to your car is about 20 feet.

So much for the interesting part of these two days. I was much more boring than anyone else, mostly going back and forth and trying to go fast. The one bright thing was that I got to try out my new Delta Freeride fin from Maui Ultra Fins. This fin has a radically different shape from most other fins:

It is only 18.9 cm long, and replaces a 29 cm regular weed fin, or a 32-34 cm standard fin. Here are my first impressions after 2 days of sailing it:

• Easy to sail. Given the radically different shape, I had expected that some things would be quite different, but I did not have any noticable problems.
• Fast. I got my second-best ever speed (30.38 knots) on this fin on the first day, and similar speeds the second day. That was despite less-than-perfect conditions: the water was so shallow that I had to sail in considerable chop, and the usual downwind speed strip on the tip of the island did not get enough wind to be fast.
• Great to jibe. I planed through my second jibe, and might have planed through the first one if I had not jibed in a lull. On the 95 l board that I used, I'm pretty happy about every jibe I plane through, and I had a bunch of those on Wednesday, and a few on Thursday.
• Gentle spinouts. Whenever I sail a fin first, I try to spin it out in different conditions (starting, full speed, jibing) to get a feel how much pressure the fin can take. Once planing, the Delta took about as much pressure as a 29-32 cm weed fin to spin out, which is quite good for the short depth. Spin outs were gentle, similar to weed fins, and recovery was pretty easy - much easier than with a 32 cm slalom fin.
• No problems in chop. I have sailed a few fins that worked perfectly in flat water, but were uncontrollable in chop. The short length of the fin had me worried, so I did not venture out onto the river until the second day - but there was no need to worry. Spinouts were no problem whatsoever - the fin showed the forgiving characteristics of a much longer weed fin. But please read the update at the end of this post!

So the first impression of the fin is simply very good. With just minor adjustments to the board trim and my sailing style, it was easy to sail and fast. It seemed to be going upwind better than a large normal weed fin, but that's a guess, since I was fully powered most of the time, and did not do a head-to-head comparison. I do have a second MUF Delta fin to try, a Delta Slalom 212 (21 cm deep) for my 105 and 118 l slalom boards; I'll post here what I think about that one when I get to try it (maybe tomorrow :). But without any doubt, the Deltas from Maui Ultra Fins would be perfect for a shallow water place like Bonaire, since they can be about 30-50% shorter than other fins.
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Update October 1, 2012: A few people have contacted me about the MUF Delta fin, so I need to add some more information. I did take both fins with me to a 3-week long trip to Hatteras (Avon) in the spring. I did have a lot of spinout problems with the fins in Hatteras chop, with both the 19 cm fin on my 95 l Hawk and with the 21 cm fin on my 105 l slalom board. I ended up not using the fins again after a couple of hours, since I had a lot more fun with regular weed fins. Perhaps the difference to my first test is that the chop on the river in Fogland tends to be much more orderly - it's really more swell than chop on most days. At least for me, the fin does seem to become problematic when the chop gets to big or chaotic.

A few good finds

I stumbled upon a couple of things on the web recently that I really liked. One is a guide to basic tuning of your gear from Eric Loots, based on recommendations by Kean Rogers. It is intended for speed gear, but I think a lot of the steps make sense for freeride and other windsurf gear, too. The one thing I found most interesting is step 10, which Eric explained in a separate picture:

The point here is that the harness lines should be in the middle between the footstraps to get a balance setup which will make the board loose and fast. This position should allow even pressure on both legs, which is ideal. Having the harness line further towards the back strap means more pressure on the back leg, which can (a) be tiring and (b) lead to more spinouts from excessive back foot pressure. It might also lead to leaving the sail a bit more forward and not closing the gap, which will also be slower.

One thing that is interesting about this advice is that it somewhat contradicts another piece of advice that I have heard often: "mast foot back for more speed, forward for more control". The idea is that moving the mast foot back will reduce the wetter surface of the board and thereby make you go faster. There may be some truth to that, but I think that control is more important - top speeds require full control. So in my next few sessions, I'll ignore this rule, and instead adjust mast foot position (and boom height) to center the harness lines between the footstraps.

The other interesting tidbit I found was an instructional video for the Vulcan from the folks at getwindsurfing.com. Here it is:

What I like most about it is that it is simple. I have heard a few Vulcan lectures, read about it, and watch other instructional videos, but they all made the move look terribly complicated. For example, the Tricktionary states that at or right after the takeoff, three things have to happen at the same time. I'm sorry, but when learning a new move, I only can concentrate at one thing at a time. If I need to do three things, tell me what to concentrate on first, then the next one, and finally the third one. After I mastered the first one, I'll probably mess it up again when I concentrate on the second one - but eventually, I'll get the first two, and then can go on to the second one. Here is how I get the successive steps from the above video:

1. Learn to pop the board. They have a nice separate video for this step. Two things to learn hear are (a) to get the body over the board at take off, and (b) to pull up the back leg so the tail comes up.
2. Before take off, move the front hand to the mast and the back hand back.
3. When taking off, look down at your back leg. This will turn your body and initiate the board rotation.
4. At the same time, pull you back foot up into your butt. Ok, this sounds like two things at the same time, but it's actually what we learned to do in step 1. The difference is that we don't extend it for the landing, but instead wait for the nose to hit the water. With a bit of rotation from step 3, we should now turn the board 45-90 degrees before falling backwards into the water.
5. Now add the sail handling: at takeoff, move the mast forward and quickly pull in with your back hand, before letting the boom snap out of your back hand (like you'd do in a fast tack). This will help to get the nose rotating downwind more.
6. In the air, pull the front hand across you, leaving the arm quite extended and pushing down on your front hand. Grab the boom on the other side with your new hand.
7. As you are landing, extend the back leg, and keep the weight forward over the bent front leg.
8. Sliding backwards now, put your back hand on the boom, and move the front handback. Keep the arms extended so that the weight of the rig is towards the nose to help the slide.
9. When you slow down, sheet in slowly to reverse direction. Switch your feet when the board stops or after gaining some speed again.

All this happens in the space of about 3 seconds, so each individual step will have to be automated so it happens without thinking. I'm guessing I'll need 20-50 tries for each step, plus some more to go back when concentrating on the next step messes up an earlier one. So it will still be several hundred tries in total, but with a Clew-View mounted GoPro, I should be able to monitor progress along the steps above. So, many thanks to Phil and Danielle from getwindsurfing.com for their video - it's the first Vulcan video that really made me want to learn the Vulcan.

Flat and flatter

We went windsurfing in Fogland yesterday and had a blast. We love Fogland because the little bay is protected by a sandbar and shallow, so you get nice flat water. Runs are only about 500 m (1/4 mile) long, but that's plenty for freestyle, which Nina did yesterday. I like Fogland to try new gear, and took my newest board out for the first time: Little Black Beauty, an Exocet SL66, 105 l, that I recently bought used. Here is a short boom cam video:


After spending most of my time recently on freestyle boards, it will take a couple of sessions to get used to the outboard foot straps, and to get everything dialed in. Still, the board was a lot of fun to sail, and made it really easy to plane through jibes. If you look closely at the video, you'll see plenty of things I do wrong (e.g. bending the front arm); but the board just ignored the driver mistakes and stayed fast. I planed through my second jibe, which I found quite amazing; I might have planed through the first one, except that the wind was a bit too holey on the other shore.

One reason I am posting the video is to compare how flat the water is in Fogland to how flat it is in one of the best long distance speed sailing spots, Lake George in Australia. In the past couple of months, several GPS Team Challenge teams from Australia reported 40-45 knot runs by multiple team members from this location, and many nautical mile averages in the high 30s to low 40s. That's just amazing - until you watch a video that shows just how flat the water there can be:

Well worth a long drive - it's not unusual for the Australian speed surfers to drive there 6 hours, sail for 5 hours, and drive back 6 hours. But really dedicated speed sailors like Spotty even drive 39 hours and 2560 km (1600 miles) for a few sessions!

Gusty Pleasure Bay

Yesterday, we sailed for the first time in Pleasure Bay in South Boston. It was a rather interesting day. For the second time in two months, I rigged my 5.8 KA Koncept while winds were around 30 mph, only to be greeted by 58 mph gusts as soon as I hit the water. 58 mph is a 10 on the Beaufort scale, described as "storm" or "whole gale". There's no chance that I could control a 5.8 m sail in that much wind!

A big part of the problem was that the wind was westerly, coming from the land across South Boston. That made it very gusty - within a few minutes, both Nina and I experienced being totally underpowered and totally overpowered. Here's a wind graph:

I think the wind sensor is at a pretty exposed location. Were we started, we definitely had some wind shadow from nearly buildings, and the lulls were definitely lower than the 20 mph the graph shows for 12 pm. But I'm pretty sure we got the full force of the gusts - at some point, I had a hard time even walking upwind, with the board getting blown out of the (rather flat) water several times.

After derigging my 5.8, I went for a run on Nina's 3.7. I was nicely powered on the way out, but had to schlog the entire way back - not exactly my idea of fun when air and water temperatures are just above 40 F (6 C). I saw quite a few other good windsurfers have problems, too. Scott was totally overpowered on a 4.7, and Martin ended up falling in several jibes - something I had rarely seen him do before. But shortly before we left, Gary went out and seemed to be doing fine; so did Jay, who went out again, after a very short initial set of runs.

What I saw did not really make sense to me - good windsurfers sailing without problems, while better sailors like Martin had a hard time. So I went and looked a bit more closely at the wind data. The graph below shows how gusty is was while we were there (measured as the increase in wind strength in the strongest gust, relative to the lowest lull, in a 30-minute period):

Nina and I sailed between 12 and 1 pm. During that time, the wind speed in gusts increased by about 200%. I am reasonably efficient, and not too bad at holding an overpowered sail; for example, I can stay planing on my favorite 7.0 in 17 mph winds, and keep it in control until about 35 mph. That a 2-fold range, or a 100% increase in wind speed in the gusts. With the actual increases of up to 250%, no sail would have worked...

Martin sailed until at least 1:30, during the time of the lowest lulls (15 mph) and the strongest gusts (58.5 mph). No surprise he had a few problems! By the time Gary went out, the wind had become a bit steadier - one could say it was only half as gusty as a bit earlier. I guess we just went out too early once again.

For comparison, the graph above includes the data for Point Judith in Rhode Island. Point Judith has a much better fetch in WSW-W winds, so the wind is a lot steadier. With increases mostly below 100%, planing the entire time with a single sail would have been possible. The only issue is that the averages were above 40 mph most of the time. We have sailed in 40+ mph gusts a number of times, but never in 40 mph averages. If it had been a bit warmer, we might have given it a try... perhaps we should have, anyway, since we still got the gusts in the high 50s, and the lower averages only made things harder.

Gary, about to go out.

Where's the wind?

Ah, there it is!

Jay & Gary

Jay showing us how to jibe

Nina, Jay, and Martin. No whitecaps in sight.