How I got hooked

I recently read a bunch of blog and forum posts on how various surfers got hooked to windsurfing. Because I found these stories rather interesting to read, and because I just heard from some surfers that they read and like my blog, I figured I'd tell the story how I got started.

It happened when I was an undergrad at the University of Konstanz. Konstanz is a small city in southern Germany, at the border to Switzerland. The university had a sports department which included watersports - sailing and windsurfing. It was just a 5 minute walk from the university to "Wassersportgelaende" (water sports area) at Lake Constance (Bodensee), the third-largest lake in Europe. Now this was a very attractive place - great for swimming and sun bathing, and frequent visits by gorgeous sports students and the facts that clothing was optional did not hurt, either.

The university offered windsurfing classes for a nominal fee. It looked like a fun thing to do, so I signed up, and learned on original Windsurfers, Windgliders, and HiFly boards. We used 5 m triangle sails with 8 ft wood booms; it took a day just to learn how to stand on the boards and pull the heavy rigg out of the water. Lots of fun, though. After 3 days of classes and a test, you could rent equipment and wet suits for a couple of bucks per hour, and go practice. The wind was usually light in the summer. But every now and then, we'd get a bit more wind before a storm, and start planing until the daggerboard or a sudden turn in wind direction would through us into the water. On the lighter air days, one of the fun things to do was "skinny surfing" across the bay to the isle of Mainau, and show the shocked tourists that you don't even need speedos to windsurf. Ok, that got boring after a couple of times, so a few of us went on to light wind tricks like sailing in the boom, sail 360s, and so on.

I have to say that the recreational sports department at the university was great. In addition to windsurfing, they offered regular sailing lessons on a few small sailboats, rock climbing classes, and ski trips during the winter and spring (all fun). They had a few little races for windsurfers - I remember placing second or third in the "beginner" category in one, after falling during a tack. Better yet, they offered trips to the Lake Como in Italy to teach high-wind lessons. I remember one trip where one of the participants had brought a much-admired brand new board: it had a pin tail (instead of the square tail that all other boards had), and a dagger board that could be tilted back and completely disappeared inside the board - very exciting innovations! Well, back then even the harness was still pretty new. We used chest harnesses with a tiny hook plate, which really constricted your lungs after a while. Spreader bars and seat harnesses came a few years later...

Another fun thing from around that time were the dedicated low-wind boards that were shaped like a sail boat at the bottom - more or less completely round, which made just standing on them a major balancing act. But sailing upwind on these things in 2 Beaufort was kind of magical.

Well, gotta go now. Maybe next time I tell the story how the university helped me build my own windsurf board that I sailed for more than 10 years, and about that great day in Tarifa 28 years ago :)

Great day in Kalmus

Just came back from a great day of sailing in Kalmus. The wind was a bit weird - not gusty, but with pronounced variation over longer periods. Here's the iWindsurf.com wind graph:

We sailed from about 11:30 to 2:30, with a couple of longer breaks. It was high tide when we started, which gave some nice chop together with the 25 mph SW wind. Funny how much more difficult everything gets when conditions are different from normal - we usually sail flat water in less wind, so this definitely needed some getting used to. I was nicely powered with a 5.5 Matrix (first time on it, nice sail) and my small board (JP 96). My wife was on a 4.2 on her 116 l Screamer with a 39 cm fin. She got quite a few comments on the large sizes, since everyone else was out on small wave or freestyle boards. She did quite a few involuntary jumps, too. But when the wind calmed down later, she was often the only one planing and going upwind. If only I could loose 60 pounds, maybe I can keep up with her ...

I tried the WindMeter iPhone app today. Like the Peconic Puffin, I found it to be rather accurate. It was showing 25-26 mph when the iWindsurf reading was about the same. Had to hold it up for longer than I thought (maybe half a minute) for the reading to go up, though.

While on my small board, I played a bit with the chop, which at points was pretty close to breaking waves. Looked at the GPS tracks later, and did not see any of the turns. Perhaps it's time to check out a ShadowBox? Nice marketing thing they did with the highest backloop contest - love the videos.

Looking at my GPS results from last years technology, I noticed that I got my best speeds near the end, after switching to a 7.0 sail and a 120 l board, and sometimes having to pump to get planing. The chop had gone down quite a bit by then, which is probably why I was going faster.

It was nice to see a few windsurfers show up - there were usually 3-5 surfers on the water, plus a few kiters. Very nice to see Martin from the Cape Cod camp again. He missed the good wind, but worked on his heli tacks and other light wind stuff - because every day of sailing is a great day of sailing!

Sail size application for iPhone

Which sail should I use today - why not ask your iPhone? SailSize, a free iPhone application, lets you enter your weight and the current wind, and calculates what sail size you need to get planing.


Calculations should be accurate since they are based on James Douglass' sail size spreadsheet. Available for free at the iTunes store. (And no, this is not an April Fools Day joke!)

ABK Camp Bonaire 2010

We back from 8 days of windsurfing in Bonaire, with a 5-day ABK camp. Still trying to get the energy level back to normal after the typical post-vacation cold & sadness, this time worsened by coming back to a flooded basement...

The camp was, as usual, great. We knew about half of the 15 campers from previous camps, and it was nice to meet old friends and make new ones. The two days before the camp and the first 2 days of camp were low wind - barely planeable on large gear on Tuesday. The wind finally picked up on Wednesday, which was a missed blessing - instead of taking the afternoon off to recover, we went sailing all afternoon. I paid for it on Thursday and Friday, when my legs refused to do what I wanted.

For my wife, the camp was a great success. In addition to a few light wind tricks, she learned the Power Jibe. Her non-planing pivot jibe had been ok before the clinic, but she had tried starting a jibe planing only a few times. She got her first jibes the first day we could plane, and at the end of the week, she had a success rate near 100% on one side, and close to 50% on the other side. She did not quite plane through, but she usually kept at least some speed. All that on a 98 l or 107 l freestyle board (at home, she has sailed 116 l and 135 l boards). Very nice progress, thanks to the great teaching of Andy, Derek, and Brendon. Here's a video of one of her earlier jibes:



My own progress was less impressive. In light wind, I learned to do an upwind 360 with board steering (I had done some with sail steering in really light wind before, but sail steering did not work anymore when the wind picked up to almost planeable). When the wind picked up, we first worked on the flip jibe, which is well suited for the big sails we had to use. I almost got it, but just almost. In the next session, the wind had picked up a bit, so we tried carving 360s. Again, I almost got it, but always fell in the last part. To my defense, I was on a 105 l freestyle board for the first time - at home, I usually use a 120 l board with a big fat fin. Getting used to the freestyle board took a couple of hours, since my usual approach of pushing the fin to get going does not work with 22-26 cm freestyle fins. Once I got used to the freestyle boards, though, I loved them, and did not want to sail anything else (except for a 135 l SSX a couple of times when I needed a big board & sail to plane).

I sailed two freestyle board, a HiFly 105 l Twinstyle with 22 cm fins and a JP 2010 107 l with one 26 cm fin. The HiFly was my favorite, hands down. The shorter fins were great at low tide, where the JP sometimes scratched the ground. The twin-fin spinouts were also a lot softer and easier to correct than the single-fin spinouts. Why do they still make single-fin small boards? Seems like almost everything for waves now has 2 or more fins. But I preferred either board to all other boards there, as long as the wind was strong enough (18 knots) to let me plane on a 6.5 m sail. The freestyle boards are just ridiculously easy to sail, and jibe very nicely. Took me a few tries to tack them, but that eventually worked ok, too.

The last couple of days, I worked on chop hops and loop pre-exercises. According to Andy, I got the board about 2 feet up into the air on my not-so-good side, but that did not really feel like much at all. The other side felt quite a bit better. The loop pre-exercises were basically pivot jibes in the straps, first non-planing and then almost or barely planing. We discussed the various approaches to the loop at camp. Two or three windsurfers at camp had gotten injured trying to do the loop by crashing onto their equipment - injuries that took several months to heal. Andy pointed out that the pre-loop exercise from the Tricktionary promotes 2 bad habits that can actually increase the chances that you end up on your board: 1. moving the sail forward instead of towards the water on the windward side, and 2. jumping towards the front/leeward side.

With three booked windsurf trips in the next few months, hurting myself in a bad loop attempt would be extremely stupid, so I decided to stick with the safe, but slower, approaches that Andy and Remko have outlined. I did not get further than step 2 of the 4 steps, and did not yet connect the flat water hop with the pre-exercise. Part of it was lack of energy after too many borderline days. I'll have to pick it up again in better conditions in Cape Cod, Maui, Hood River, or Cabarete later this spring and summer.

Needless to say, I did not make any progress on trying Grubbies or Flakas vs. Vulcans. One thing that impressed me a lot was a slow-motion Flaka by one of the Danish blondes near the beach, though. She barely jumped the board, turning it perhaps 30 degrees, and pushed it around the rest of the way, at minimal speed. Not impressive for its fanciness, but very impressive as a move where you can't get hurt.

The one thing that I did try a couple of times was taking the front foot out of the footstrap at the beginning of the jibe. On the 79 cm wide JP SSX 135, which has the straps all the way to the outside, putting the foot into the middle seemed natural. However, it felt bad during the jibe, much less comfortable than in the strap. Perhaps because I've done hundreds or thousands of jibes with the front foot in the strap, and just a few with it out. I'll try a few more Spennie's way, but I think I'll probably stick to jibing with the front foot in the straps.