Funny windsurf porn

Porn movies and windsurf movies face the same problem: the audience wants to see the action, but the film makers have to present some kind of story around it. I have to admit that a windsurf movie without a good story leaves me slightly unsatisfied. Right now, though, there is a big grin on my face - I just watched a windsurf movie that's more story than action. Yes, the story is cheesy, even more so since the subtitles are a less-than-perfect translation. But funny it is! If you have 40 minutes to spare, grab a beer and prepare to laugh.



While we are talking about wet dreams - here is what ABK's Brendon has to say about this:

Thanks to bericw for posting the links on the iWindsurf forum.

Hardie at Hardings

Hardings Beach today

Addicted I am. Not a problem as long as I get my wind fix a couple of times every week. This year has been good - 132 sessions so far.

But it's been 13 days since my last session. Too much! So when Hardie ask about going to Hardings today, it was a no-brainer. Who cares about the little bit of snow on the ground? Temperatures were above freezing! And it was sunny. The wind scared us for a few minutes when it dropped down to 15 just when we talked on the phone. But it recovered 10 minutes later. So grab a tube suit, jump into the van, and drive to Chatham.

Good to see Hardie again after a long time. He'll be here for 2 months! Nice to have someone to sail with in the winter. I have yet to get a "no" from Hardie if it's windy. He'll do 2 sessions at different spots on Cape Cod in the middle of winter just for fun.

We chat briefly, but we know the wind can be fickle, so we rig quickly - 5.8 and 6.5. As I try to put on my suit, I discover what I meant with "no-brainer": I brought Nina's Ianovated suit instead of mine. She is a lot smaller than I am. Perhaps I could manage to squeeze into her suit, but it's highly unlikely that I would be able to move without busting some seams. My suits are a 90 minute round-trip drive away, and days are short. Bummer! I slip into a depressive phase. I thought my hair was turning grey, but apparently, it is turning blonde.

I stick around a bit and take a few pictures of Hardie:

Hardie going out alone

Taking off

Yes, that's snow on the beach

It was warm enough to sail, but too cold to stand around on the beach and take pictures for too long, so I headed back home. When I got home, wind meter readings in Kalmus were around 20 mph, so I grabbed my suit and went for a session. I could not hear much in my big hood; not feel much in by fat winter boots and mitts; and not see much, since the wind was coming from the west, where the sun was going down. The bits I saw did not indicate a whole lot of wind, but I was planing the whole time. At times, the sail felt too big - had I rigged it wrong? I went to switch to a smaller board, but the wind used my brief absence to drop to non-planing levels.

When I got home and looked at the wind meter readings, things became a bit clearer. The graphs showed a brief spike with 27 mph averages and 31 mph gusts - a bit too much for my beloved 6.5 m  sail. Then it dropped to 14 in less than an hour. Funny how you miss things when you don't see, hear, or feel much!

So perhaps this was not the greatest day, but every day of sailing is a great day of sailing. Withdrawal symptoms are gone, and so are any remnants of hesitation to sail in 33ºF air temperatures - I was warm or hot the entire time. Maybe it was just all the blood rushing to my head for feeling so stupid...

Thanks, Iain

It's Thanksgiving, and there are many people and things that I am thankful about. But I'll dedicate this to the man who made the picture above possible: Iain Smith, the inventor of the Ianovated wetsuit.

That's me in the picture above, getting ready to windsurf in Wellfleet Harbor earlier today. It was a lovely and sunny day, but air temperatures had dropped from mid-50s yesterday to 34ºF (1ºC) today. Wind meter readings were around 30 mph WNW - too good to not go windsurfing! Even last year, I probably would have stayed at home. Yes, I have sailed in similar temperatures before, but it's usually a gradual process - as it gets later in the year, we slowly get used to the lower temperatures.

Enter Iain. He is a dedicated British windsurfer who did not want to stop sailing in the winter, when the best winds come. Like many of us, Iain experimented with all kinds of gloves and mittens to keep his hands warm. He experienced the usual trade-offs: if gloves are warm enough to keep your hands comfortable, they will make your forearms very tired very quickly, cutting sessions short. But unlike most other cold-weather windsurfers, Iain has a "cold weather handicap" - Raynaud's disease. Wikipedia describes this as "excessively reduced blood flow in response to cold" - in other words, your hands get much colder, much faster.

But Iain did not give up. He experimented until he found a solution that works: a system to blow warm air onto your hands while you are windsurfing. In hindsight, it seems simple enough: blow into tubes through a snorkel mouthpiece; run the tubes through the inside of the suit to keep the air warm; and finally have the tubes emerge into mittens. After proving the concept, Iain then formed a company to manufacture and market the suit.

As many great inventions, the suit was met with a lot of skepticism and ridicule. On every windsurf forum where Iain posted about the suit, the vast majority of responses explained in lots of detail why such a system could never ever work (I have seen such posts on British, German, Polish, and US forums). But on each forum, there would also be a few windsurfers who tried it out, and reported back that the "tube suit" worked not just well, but amazingly well. I got one of the Ianovated suits last winter, and it kept amazing me  for many sessions in a row, even after I knew that it worked well. My lovely wife, who had no intentions of buying a new wetsuit, tried the Ianovated suit once, and bought it right away. We sailed through the winter using open-palm mitts, even when the water temperature was close to freezing (we did, however, only sailed on days where the air temperature was above, or at least close to, the freezing point).

Many of my windsurfing friends have told me that they stop sailing because their hands get too cold. So after trying and loving the Ianovated suit, I hoped that I might be able to get some of my friends to try it, and also enjoy some of the best windsurfing of the year - cold weather windsurfing. Yesterday, I was very happy to see two friends try their new Ianovated suits for the first time. Not surprisingly, they (a) were surprised how well the hand warming system works, and (b) loved the suit.  Today, my suit gave me the confidence to go out after a 22-degree temperature drop in 24 hours. As expected, it kept me nice and warm the entire time, and I had a blast windsurfing on a beautiful sunny, if chilly, day. So once again: thank you, Iain!

Below are a couple of pictures that my lovely wife took, and a short video from one of the runs today.

Plenty of wind

We got plenty of wind today - averages up to 42 mph, with gusts just below 50. We also got a lot of rain, but the wind was too good to not go windsurfing. After a few days with temperatures below freezing, today was outright warm, with air temperatures around 55ºF (13ºC).

With winds this strong, my first thought is to go for speed. The timing and wind direction were not quite right for Sandy Point, so I thought - why not try speedsurfing on Bass River, just behind West Dennis? Well, the GPS tracks show that this did not quite work out as planned:

The hoped-for speed track is the top right of the image. Dean, who started sailing just as we arrived, quickly reported that the wind there was way too gusty - "0 to 50 mph in a couple of seconds". That seemed hard to believe - we had checked out the spot the day before, and the obstructions (some small trees and shrubs) had seemed too far away to have a big effect. So I rigged my 5.0 m speed sail, grabbed my 90 l slalom board, and went to confirm Dean's findings. Bummer- he was right! Close to shore, were we had hoped to sail, the water was flat, but gusts were extreme. I never saw Dean fight for control so hard - and we are talking about a guy who'll sail a 6.2 m slalom sail in 30+ mph winds and big chop for hours. He's a much better slalom sailor than I am, so you can imagine how far away I was from any kind of control. Here's a picture that illustrates this:

Note that I was on perfectly flat water, simply trying to go straight - but the board is out of the water as if I was going for a new school freestyle trick. It was just a big gust hitting me...

I quickly decided that this was not a speed day for me, and walked back to rig a smaller sail and get my "comfort" board, the 3S 96. That took a while, but I eventually made it out and sailed in front of the parking lot, where Jerry was having a blast, throwing plenty duck jibes and speed loops. He inspired Nina to also go for duck jibes in the 40 mph winds - and she got at least one after just a few tries.

I had rigged down to a 4.5 m wave sail, which turned out to be a bit too big for my taste. Funny, though - Jerry, who weight about 40 pounds less than I do, was perfectly fine on a 4.2 the entire time! I added some downhaul, which made life a bit easier, but the real fun started when Nina called it a day, and I got to use the 3.7 she had rigged. Full power on 3.7 - that's something I see maybe twice a year!

Our friend Jonathen had picked today as his first day of cold weather windsurfing. While the air felt warm to us, it probably was 10 degrees warmer when he sailed the last time, several weeks ago. The water had definitely cooled off; the Nantucket sound buoy still gave readings around 45ºF, but it felt a few degrees colder than that. But Jon did not want to miss a 40 mph day, and he had his new Ianovated suit to try! So out he went, in what probably was the strongest wind, and definitely the coldest water temperature, he has ever windsurfed on. When he tried the tubes to warm his hands, a look of amazement came onto his face - "It really works". Nevertheless, the first few falls into the cold water came a bit as a shock to him. His session ended up being on the short side - but he stayed perfectly warm the entire time. He even sat around for quite a while in his suit to chat with Nina at the end of his session.

Just as everyone was getting ready to call it a day, Gary pulled into the parking lot. I decided to keep him company on the water for a while, and switched harness lines while he rigged. That involved de-rigging my 4.5 m sail, and taking two booms apart, so it kept me busy for a while. By the time we both were ready, the wind had dropped, and the 3.7s ended up a bit too small, so I called it a day after a few runs. Unlike Jonathen, Gary had sailed in cold weather a number of times before; but just like Jonathen, this was the first time he used an Ianovated suit. And just like Jon, he was amazed to discover how well the tubes work for warming your hands. It is pretty amusing to see these expressions of amazement. Even if have heard great things about the tube suit, and your mind believes that it will work, it is still astonishing when you feel it the first time. For me, this astonishment lasted for an entire winter season... but I am a slow learner :-)

In the end, it was a great day to be windsurfing, even though my hopes for a new speed strip did not pan out. It was nice to see a sizable group of windsurfers on the water on a rainy day at the end of November. I love sailing with windsurfers that sail better than I do, and today, there were two guys and one gal out there in this category. I also love that in our group of 6 windsurfers, a full two-thirds showed up in Ianovated suits. There's a lot more fun cold weather windsurfing ahead of us!