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CONFESSIONS OF A WAVESAILING ROOKIE
by Sam Moses, Senior Editor
If you count Monday as the first official day for our second group of testers, they hit the water planing. Or flying. Or bicycling. Or face-first.
The wind came in early, and for the first couple of hours it was survival time. Spoiled by tradewinds, and not accustomed to good old Gorge-like winds, most of these wusses thought it was too flukey and gusty to deal with, so they waited until things levelled out. Maybe they just wanted to postpone until later in the week the blowing out of their ankles or knees.
By 2:30 the wind had proved its point, that it can exasperate windsurfers any time it wants to, so it went on to prove another point: it also has the power to deliver ecstasy any time it wants to. It locked in at 5.0. I scored one of the best rigs on the beach for the conditions, the coveted 94-liter RRD 266 Freeride with a Neil Pryde Soul 5.0. The sail seems to be aptly named. It had the power to pull my 186 pounds out of a fast waterstart with waves bearing down, and responded to my sometimes shaky input with kindness, as if it were having as much fun as I was, and didn't want to spoil things.
The challenge this day was getting through the break. At any one time there are usually about six or eight waves spilling over the reef, growing in size and cleanliness as you get farther out. Success is always dependent upon skill, of course, but given the average hit-and-miss wave-sailing abilities we have here, and judging from the fact there are always one or two sailors down in the breakers, it would be fair to say that success depends largely on luck. Sometimes your timing is simply on the downside of the draw, and there's nothing you can do about it: you get creamed.
The first couple of waves present a curb of foam speeding at you like a shin-high cable trying to knock you teacups. Like with a waterstart, the nose of the board must be bearing off at just the right angle. If it's straight into the foam, you'll bury it and end up with your face planted in the trough. If you bear off too much, the side of the fin will be exposed to the foam and you'll spin out.
The middle third of the break is where you can really bear off and build up speed. The water is shallow, and the waves are sharp little suckers that come at you in twos and threes. They're great for leaping, but like with a motocrosser over the whoop-de-doos, you need to be prepared to leap the swell you can't see, just beyond the one you can. If you come down on top of the second one, you'd better be unhooked from your harness. Colorful human windmills, complete with sound effects ("Yikes!" comes right before the messy splash) are common.
If you've made it this far, the real fun begins. You look up, because that's where your next challenge will be coming from. (It might be from the windsurfers sliding down the waves at you, but that's not what I mean.) You hope you've been able to maintain or increase your speed, because if you're
poking along in the water when a steep six-footer appears, there's little chance you'll see its backside, except maybe if you look down when your body is flying skyward, chasing your board as it shoots like a stiletto toward those gorgeous Hawaiian clouds. The words in the cries just before takeoff
are few, and unprintable.
The fine points of wave sailing are beyond my present grasp of the shallow end, but I sure look forward to the on-the-job training. When I see a big one now, all I do is go as fast as I can, unhook, and take it diagonally, not straight up the face. Try to pull the board under you in the air, and hope for the best.
Tuesday was more of the same, only gnarlier. The waves were bigger, more plentiful, and they flowed all the way to the beach. The knees and ankles all survived, but three masts were broken when their tips hit the rocky bottom of the reef.
On Wednesday the wind mostly died. People still managed to sail, and found the waves actually bigger than Tuesday, but it was work to keep up with them. Thursday it died some more, but again, a few guys got good time in the water, by finding wind in the open ocean with 6.0 meter sails. Mark Archer managed to disappear on a 5.8 for more than two hours, and came back with tales of great wavesailing, far downwind.
He got back just in time to help unload nine new Starboards out of the van and off the roof of our Rent-a-Wreck wagon, and rig a quiver of Tushingham sails. The stuff keeps coming.
"Red sky at night, sailors' delight," is the saying, and it must be true. It's Thursday evening as I write this, and my curtains are billowing into the room again, as I look through the sliding glass door at pink streaks over the horizon. My neighbor has just launched from his grass, and he's
already ripping.
Friday will be a good day, I think.
News you may not have gotten from the PWA World Cup in Sylt, Germany, near the Danish border. In icy rain and winds gusting to 50 knots, Bjorn Dunkerbeck of TeamPryde won six of seven course races to clinch his 12th consecutive overall World Championship. He also won the Wave event, and leads in the standings as the pros come to Maui for the final event at Hookipa next month. For more, check www.neilpryde.com.
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