Another great night in the history of Poole Slalom- sunny, windy, and beers on a white sand beach.
We held three official races and one practice race, with a four reach downwind slalom course.
The first and second reaches were short enough to necessitate good gybing and acceleration, but the last two reaches were thigh burning monsters giving the speedsters a chance to fight back.
Most people were on 6.6m to 7.8m sails and flying, but in a dying and rather gusty wind by the final race the bigger sails and boards became much more dominant.
With another fantastic turn out of nearly 25 racers, we had staggered Le Mans style starts on the beach, where the sailors most to windward had to run down the beach to pick up their kit, whilst those to leeward where able to get afloat a fraction earlier- in the light winds by the beach, this evened out the starts so everyone was equal.
The races were a close fought battle throughout the fleet with the usual suspects powering ahead and a few newcomers loving and panicking at the thought of gybing in the same spot as 25 other people unsure about their skills!
The conditions were a test of everyone’s ability, fitness, early planing skills, control, speed, gybing, tactics, and tuning, so a very worthy evening’s windsurfing indeed. And as usual with the staggered starts there was no pressure on, just pure joy.
Given a stronger forecast rather than a dying evening breeze, we could of held more races and done more pursuit racing, but the evening was as usual a huge success and a challenge to all who dared come.
Some of us stayed for a BBQ on the beach and thanks to Pete the South African for finally getting the bloody thing to light around 9pm….
Hope to see many of you at Kimmeridge Bay on Saturday morning. At 11am there will be an on water photo shoot for ABBA (Access to Broad Bench Association)- campaigning to maintain watersports users free access to ‘The Bench’- the best wave in Kimmeridge Bay, that the MOD currently wish to restrict access to.
Be there by 10am to rig up and go afloat for the photo shoot with plenty of media around to support our waves- check it out- http://www.broadbench.co.uk/?q=node/22
The forecast looks like we’ll be planing on big kit so I for one will certainly be blasting around the Bay, weaving amongst the surfers and trying to knock stand up paddle boarders off. Haha, that’ll be a laugh.
Hope to see you there.
For anyone not yet a member of the UKWA, then please sign up- it’s £45 and means that if you die or get seriously injured in Poole Slalom, there is a good chance that other Poole Slalom members or co-ordingators wont go to prison, which would be nice. Or, if you crash into me, I might be able to claim as much as £3,000,000 which would be even nicer. You may as well sign up now, as by September no doubt you’ll all be joining for the Windfest event. Here’s the link- http://ukwindsurfing.com/membership/
Big up to all 118 Poole Slalom members!
I’m going to take this opportunity to ask you all-
If for example there is a great forecast for Wednesday and we announced an impromptu evening of sailing, how many of you can in theory make any evening of the week with good forecast 24 hours in advance? It just seems a shame that this week for example I know that many of us sailed on Wednesday evening in different local spots, it might of been more fun to all sail together. Just answer ‘yes’- we could do any evening, or dont answer and we’ll assume Thursday’s or weekends are your preferred choice.
Many thanks,
Guy
