I picked Marlon up from UH and we beat feet home - after which we beat feet to the beach. The west wind was nuking!!!! White caps abound, a rising tide, and some unexpected rather large wind swell.
I used the WWFB because I didn't want to have to struggle to get on the board. I bolted on the Kujira 980 figuring I had way more than enough power in the wind to get up on foil early and fast. And lastly I pumped up the Reedin SW 3.6 - again there was plenty of wind.
I stayed out over an hour and a half. There were plenty of waves, but most of them would start to show, but then petered out. There were some sneaker sets (way overhead) - I had two large waves that were breaking behind me for a really long distance, but most of the other rides were running along with the swell, but having the waves not break was a little odd.
From this chart, the wind was pretty much coming from the west. And from riding, the swell was bending in from the SW.
Looks like the wind broke the anemometer...
The first generation Super Wing is a back hand biased wing - to keep it powered and not backwinding when you are pulling upwind, it needs the rider to place a lot of back hand pressure input. It does drift/luff well - but I think the Super Wing 2 is a much better balanced wing that pulls upwind easier. I'm curious about the Neilpryde Fly in the smaller sizes also. I'm saying all this because I think this wing wasn't optimized for today's conditions - not sure if it is this wing starting to stretch out (look at the first picture above), or if it is the overall design (but this to me has always been a back handed wing), but things change really quick in this sport.
The 980 did the trick. I'm pretty sure if I had a smaller Kujira that would have worked today easily. Top speeds were had while racing down wave faces.
There were several other wingers out today - Marlon had spoken with them and it seemed like they were all down from Mokuleia (looking for their normal sailing tacks with the reversed winds). Marlon had several subjects to chase with the drone and he got a lot of good footage.
The forecast calls for the strong westerlies to fade - I truly consider winds like this to be a gift!!!
W:27/F:14/S:13
No comments:
Post a Comment