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SHARKBAIT CLEM, LOOSE JANE, CLEVER JEFF AND POOR JUSTIN
by Sam Moses, Senior Editor
According to Mark Archer, more people are killed by falling coconuts than are eaten by sharks. As our Instructional Editor, he knows these things.
So it was with this assurance that Clem Wang, a software engineer and self-proclaimed Web hacker, sailed until after dark on Thursday, practicing duck jibes on the RRD 265 TwinTip freestyle board he loves so much. He straggled up to the tiled patio beside the crystal-clear pool, where everyone was drinking beer and eating barbecued chicken, with his long black hair wet and stringy on the shoulders of his wetsuit, and his thick prescription sunglasses (don't ask, I don't know how he could see either) looking like they had just come in from a storm. He walked over and dripped on my drumstick, and smiled. I thought I heard him say, "Carpe diem. sucker." But maybe my ears were still full of salt water.
Of course, everybody on the patio had carped the diem; Clem had just carped it more tightly than the rest of us. And it was a great day to seize. The wind had shifted around to the east on Wednesday night, pushing the swells all the way to shore. Even beach-starting was like wavesailing with your feet on the ground.
The wind had also picked up a notch or two, as the previous day's squalls had scoured the atmosphere for a fresh start. One 200-pound sailor on the beach spent the whole day on his 4.5. And the sun was back. It was reflecting off the bottoms of the boards of the better sailors, as they leaped the swells on their way over the reef.
It was a challenging day, but not really a kick-ass kind of day, despite the tireless swells that were often coming from different directions and meeting with a small foamy crash, and the wind that kept changing by a sail size or two. If you chose your path through the swells carefully, they could carry you away from trouble rather than into it.
One guest tester got his first taste of wave sailing, and it was like an epiphany for him. He realized he was better at carving and leaping than he was at jibing, and he found himself whooping in the water, both coming and going. The rig had a lot to do with it. He was on the Richard Greene-shaped North Shore Maui 264 wave board that had just arrived, with a 5.0 Neil Pryde NR sail (Bjon Dunkerbeck influenced), and it might have been the sweetest setup he'd ever felt in his sailing life. Not just sweet, but SWEET.
But poor Justin Miller. Our young guest tester, a college student straight off his summer job as day camp counselor, who sails on the Gunpowder River where it flows into Chesapeake Bay, had probably been enjoying the sailing the most this week, and had been sailing extremely well. So it was especially unfair that on the best day, he would pull a shoulder muscle. Adding insult to the injury was the fact that he did it while trying to extend a stuck Fiberspar boom. But Steve Hutchinson, our resident physical therapist (except for Wednesday, when he rented a Big Dog hawg motorcycle and went cruising around the island with guest tester Bruce Boring), pulled out his bag of needles and practiced his acupuncture on Justin. "It relaxed the muscle instantly," said Justin, nonetheless eating his drumstick with his good arm that evening.
He was much better on Friday, although he had to hang off his booms a lot, slogging. The windsurfing on Friday was plentiful but uneventful. Unless you call switching rigs an event. The sun and water were gorgeous as always, but the wind was up and down all day, never once settling for very long. After a couple times chasing it, most sailors just gave up coming back to the beach, settling for a compromise sail with a floaty board for security.
Unfortunately, it was also an uneventful day for John Chao, who chartered a helicopter to take aerial photos. But you know how it goes: you take a windsurfing weekend and the wind dies on Saturday morning and comes back Monday. The chopper was in the air for the deadest hour of the day.
But Jeff Stewart, a quiet, soft-spoken Manhattan attorney, had a good day in the waves on the new 8-11 Randy French board, rigged with a 5.0 Neil Pryde Soul. He found the trick to staying upwind in the light air. He sailed downwind going out, and made it all back on the
return run, by surfing the waves in the opposite direction of the break.
It was the last full day for most of the guest testers, this first week. Instead of the usual 9:30 a.m. clinic, Mark Archer and I sat down with them for a discussion to reconcile some of the differences in their individual ratings. It's part of our pursuit of consistency in this test, not unlike throwing out the high and low scores in the judging of a diving or gymnastics competition. But we don't automatically throw them out, we just examine and troubleshoot them.
For example, we picked on Jane Parkmann (not really; she actually made a substantial contribution this week). Three sailors gave the RRD 250 wave board high ratings, but Jane flunked its performance down the line. "It was just dead for me," she said. To be fair to the board, we needed to find out why. Mark played detective, and it didn't take many questions to discover how circumstances affected her opinion.
She sailed it on the windiest day, overpowered (she was having so much fun she didn't want to take the time to change sails); on that same day, she had sailed the RRD 248 and RRD 258 wave boards, and liked them a lot. The 250 is a different design, bulkier and with thicker rails. The combination of Jane's loose and curvy sailing style, overpowering winds and the board's thickness simply added up to a personal thumbs down. That doesn't mean it's a bad board.
This is the challenge to (and problem with) attaching ratings to a board. Jane's negative opinion stands because it's valid. But a rating cannot be an absolute measure of the quality of potential performance of a board or sail, it's merely a measure of the experience a sailor had with it. With enough of those experiences, a trend-that final averaged number-will emerge, and that's what you get in the end. With enough footnotes and asterisks, it should be a fairly full picture.
PHOTOS TO FOLLOW
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