It was really nice yesterday not having to rush to get on the water due to fading light. The wind was blowing gusts up to 30knots, but it was forecast to drop. I rigged my 6.3 Simmer SCRace sail, this needs to be totally overpowered to work, but when it does it is really fast. I put this on the Mistral Salom board and had aobut 10 runs in the low tide chop. I made one run of 30knots and several other close to it. I am happy with this as the board is difficult in chop and the sail is very powerful and hard to control.
After a good 45minutes I started to sturuggle getting moving on this combination, it was clear the wind had dropped 5 knots. I went in and got out a bigger board and rigged my friends kit (he arrived when I first got out, and always takes a long time rigging). Back on the water it was fine again with the extra float.
I decided to do a mile run, out over the chop in the middle ending about 110-120degrees off the wind to get a long enough run without hitting the rocks. I have tried this in this direction with the same board and fin many times, every time spinning the fin out in the chop after about 1500m so missing out on the nautical mile. This time I was fine, I found that the speed dropped a lot near the end due to the angle off the wind and the nature of the wind on the harbour at the mainland end in a south westerly - it drops off a lot there. For the rest of the session I hoped that I had beaten my average of 23knots done in the easterly last year, and I did with an average of 23.9knots. I now know I can easily beat this with a 7m sail on my slalom board.
Great session, muscles have woken up again, I just hope there is not such a long time before the next. 15nmi done today, 97nmi in total now.
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