{"id":5824,"date":"2010-09-06T09:09:29","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T08:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=5824"},"modified":"2010-09-06T06:26:16","modified_gmt":"2010-09-06T05:26:16","slug":"breaking-the-curse-of-the-speed-kit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/09\/breaking-the-curse-of-the-speed-kit\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking the Curse of the Speed Kit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since buying my windsurf speed kit<\/a> back in April as part of my ‘Life begins at 40 knots<\/a>‘ quest, there just hasn’t been any wind in the right direction. I’ve had a couple of false starts where I’ve rigged the kit only for the wind to drop but I’d been unable to use it. I was thinking that the kit was cursed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This continued yesterday. The wind was SE but just about swinging into the estuary to give a gusty E-NE wind. I headed to the estuary, rigged my 6.3m North Warp sail which took quite a bit of pfaffing and effort to do and by the time I had, the tide had dropped further than I’d expected.<\/p>\n

We were just coming off neap tides and I had hopped that there would be enough water in the estuary at low tide, but the channels have filled in a bit and there wasn’t enough. It wasn’t low tide yet either so I now had the choice of sitting there for two hours waiting for enough water or de-rigging, heading home and trying again later. I opted for the latter and once again the curse of the Speed Kit had kept me from trying out my new toys.<\/p>\n

I headed back down later and now there was enough water, but stood on the beach my anemometer was reading a pathetic 8-16 knots. However, Neil was out on the water with an 8m kite and going OK, so once again I rigged my 6.3m North Warp along with my 80ltr Mistral SL Red Dot and got out there.<\/p>\n

\"Estuary<\/a>

Estuary Windsurf Session<\/p><\/div>\n

There was nowhere near enough wind to start with but as I headed out through the channel and over towards Aberdovey it picked up. With the wind against the tide out there I had a few extra knots too and managed to have a nice little sail. The wind seemed to fill in and swing back towards ENE rather than SE after a while so I headed back into the estuary where the water was now filling up. Conditions were choppy and not really ideal for speed sailing as the wind direction was wrong for the speed strip. I did manage to hit 30.42 knots which isn’t great. If you look at the image to the right my fastest 100m is marked and as you can see, it is on a ridiculously broad, almost dead downwind run – Do I really need to bear off that much to reach top speed?<\/p>\n

A little later as the sandbars covered up and there was no speed strip left I packed up, but before doing so had a quick few runs on my Fanatic Falcon Speed board. Considering its small size it felt pretty easy to sail, and even gybing it was fine. I can’t wait to try it out in earnest on a proper speed run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since buying my windsurf speed kit back in April as part of my ‘Life begins at 40 knots‘ quest, there just hasn’t been any wind in the right direction. I’ve had a couple of false starts where I’ve rigged the kit only for the wind to drop but I’d been unable to use it. I...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1312,"featured_media":5825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,12],"tags":[626,315,32],"class_list":["post-5824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weather","category-windsurfing","tag-life-begins-at-40-knots","tag-speed-sailing","tag-windsurf"],"yoast_head":"\nBreaking the Curse of the Speed Kit - A Simple Life of Luxury<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/09\/breaking-the-curse-of-the-speed-kit\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Breaking the Curse of the Speed Kit - A Simple Life of Luxury\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Since buying my windsurf speed kit back in April as part of my ‘Life begins at 40 knots‘ quest, there just hasn’t been any wind in the right direction. 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