Solo SideOff Seshes

Saturday. Fun South Packery session that re-reminded me that the Packery wave can be so much better than Port A. Julie took some video so I threw a quick clip together:

 

We celebrated a great day at ScuttleButts (Half price sushi and $2.75 beers) followed by cake. Cheers Brian and Laura.

4:30am Sunday morning Olivier called "There is no wind at Boca Chica. It's a waste of time driving down there". Bear in mind Olivier is the Texas windsurfing guru and he is always right. 15 minutes later we were in the truck and heading south. And guess what? No wind!! Nice waves though. I caught a few small ones up near the jetty. The good waves were a little further downwind but I couldn't get out on account of me floating around up to my waist. This was the best I got:

Windsurfing South Texas in the Early 90's

Found this on youtube recently and thought it was cool. Looks like a fun "waveslalom" session at North Beach, Corpus.

 

Icaraizinho

The traffic light turned orange and he didn't ease up. It switched to red. Oh...shoot...!!! We blasted through the red light, cars honking from all sides. I turned to look in the back seat. The kids asleep, Julie in the middle with a look of horror uttered "I have died a thousand times already".

Welcome to Brazil!

Once safely at our destination we stayed at Casa Zulu. A beautifully maintained and conceived tropical oasis with great hosts.


Casa Zulu - our digs for the week



Jack - relaxing!

Equipment was decent courtesy of Vela/ClubVentos. I settled into a daily routine:

• Adjust the footstraps so that I could fit more than my little toe in there
• Increase the harness line length at least 3 to 4 inches
• Move the front lines back so they are not a foot apart
• Then move the lines back another couple of inches!
• Slack off the outhaul at least an inch

How was the sailing? Pretty high on the fun scale actually, with just a handful of others out. The first 4 days were 5.6 but still fun with little stunt ramps, best at mid-tide. The last two days were solid 4.5/4.7. Exactly the conditions I had hoped for. Here is a mini-movie taken the last day:

I rode JP freestyle waves (101L down to 84L) most of the week, choosing the thruster set up when available. I really struggled to stay with the wave off the top turn in the small waves and blamed it on the waves not having enough power but the last day I took the JP 83 Single Thruster and what a difference! It worked great.