3 categories

Wild day. Got there pretty early and saw ado tacking upwind. It was howling. Rigged the 5.8m SP44 and CL24A for some Pt Walter underwater fun. Stupidly gusty/squally. Very hard to waterstart a lot of the time- either sub 10kts or 35kt bullets. The wind angle swung 15-25 degrees on every run making it tough going. I got slammed by big smoking gusts a few times. The first half of the sandbar was angled at (average)140 degrees to the wind, with swell wrapping around the upwind side and creating heinous following chop. Then the last 100m exposed was a good angle, but the bushes that have grown on the top of the sandbar completely kill the wind. So it was "hope for a bullet to make it past the grass without dropping to 15kts". I got some nice squalls and some good last second bearaways. It was very peaky sailing with a *very* short run into the chop- all of my best speeds (8 runs peaking over 41kts) were well past the end of the sandbar due to the availability of wind over 15 knots lasting more than 100milliseconds. There was PLENTY of wind there a lot of the time. Plenty of gusts with spray drift. The storm surge started to drop with the wind, so unfortunately when the water state got better and better the wind died out. At the end I thought I'd do a few runs on the SP53 with a CL28 slalom fin. Wow it was smoking. I hooked 2 good gusts to get a 41 and then a 42.6 on the dial! About half way back to the jetty... Stoked with the stability of this board. Quite a few people showed up later just as the wind hit the off switch. Stribo had a classic crash. At one stage his board was completely backwards and was planing on the nose. Super gusty day for Pt Walter. Yeah it always is, but this one seemed particularly difficult.

1 categories

stringers mystery kit at stringers mystery spot

Simply got smashed on a very windly day. Koncept 5.0, Manta 59, Falcon 28.

5 categories

Wow!

My first sail since Lake Preston a month ago - at least in the Swan River you don't feel like you might dissolve when you fall in!

Unbelievably windy! Started out from Melville Beach on the Manta 49 with 5.0 Koncept and made my way up to Pt Walter in WSW that was fairly solid around 25, and gusting higher. The chop in the middle was waist high and at Pt Walter the bar was a metre under water, with just a bit of grass sitting out of the water on the end providing a short speed strip.

The wind kept building and even Slowy looked well powered on his 5.8 - but he kept going quick - I swear that bloke must have three balls.

After a few runs it was time to head back downwind to Melville and get to work - and that was when the fun started! By this stage there were big clouds of spray blowing continuously across the water and I could not even get close to sheeting in on the 5.0, even for a second. Getting back downwind was impossible! In the end it took me 1hr 15 min to sail back a mere 4km direct downwind. At one stage I had even considered giving up and getting a ride back - how ironic would that be getting a ride back downwind because it was too windy?