Windsurfing at last – Some records broken!

The wind this year has been terrible so I’ve hardly been windsurfing. I nearly managed a session on Thursday night but the wind dropped so I blamed the lack of wind on the “curse of the new kit“.

Since then I’ve had a little more luck.

On Friday I managed an nice late afternoon windsurf session thanks to the sea breeze. I’d been for a cycle and a run before but the wind picked up so after the frustrations of the day before I just had to have a sail. I ended up Nicely powered with a 6.7m sail and my S-Type 104 – The biggest kit I have. The wind did drop after about half an hour on the water, but after the year we’ve had so far, half an hours windsurfing felt good.

Saturday was much better. There still wasn’t loads of wind but the sun was shining and a nice NW was blowing. At first it was only just enough for my big kit again so I went out on that, but the wind gradually filled in the whole time I was out there so that by the end I could easily have changed down to smaller kit. I didn’t, as I had to get off the water at 1pm in order to take Morgan to a birthday party, but I managed a good sail.

The sea was quite choppy and I wasn’t on my speed kit, but there weren’t any waves so blasting back and forth as fast as possible was the order of the day.

I’d noticed on one of the sites that I upload my windsurf GPS tracks to (SportstrackLive) that I was getting close to some of the records for the longer distance speeds. My top speeds are nowehere near the records, but my average speed over 1 nautical mile or more is good. This is probably because most people using these sites upload data from pure speed attempts and then have to get back upwind before doing another pure speed run. Their trip back upwind is slow, giving them a slow average speed.

In contrast if I keep blasting back and forth on long runs and don’t fall off then I can get a good average speed. So, that’s what I was going for and I managed to beat quite a few of my Personal bests. Here they are:

1 Nautical Mile: 21.61kts / 2m 46s
3 Nautical Miles: 19.80kts / 9m 5s
5 Nautical Miles: 19.58kts / 15m 19s
10 Nautical Miles: 18.63kts / 32m 11s
20 Nautical Miles: 15.27kts / 1h 18m 33s

Admitted it’s not the 40 knots top speed that I’m after, but that was never on the cards whilst sailing such big kit on the sea.

You can see the GPS track and results at Sporttrack Live here.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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