March Wrap Up: A Charmed Life.

I'm stealing a page from some of the other windsurfing bloggers abroad and trying to get a little better about gathering season/session data. My dream has always been to sail 100 days a year, and I'm not sure if I've ever done it. Last season, I found myself trying to find balance between work, life and windsurf. This year, I've got a bit of a renewed spark for windsurfing. I'm looking for that perfect imbalance of windsurfing, then everything else I have to deal with. It's not that I'm unhappy with the other parts of my life. Everything is going pretty dang well. I'm just at a stage where I can see a next level and a path to it, I just need to focus on it to get there.

Anyway, here is how my month of March went:

13 windsurfing sessions in which I achieved planing in the footstraps.
-2 sessions where I planed on 3 or less reaches.
5 days LOB Surfing (Lay On Belly).
3 days of snowboarding in Utah.

So all in all, I was doing some kind of boardsport on 21 of 31 days. Not too shabby.

A few sessions of significance were:

Sunday, March 8th: 5.3/97L, overpowered. Felt like the real season opener at Candlestick Park, and more than 20 sailors were on the water. The excitement was palpable and no one seemed to want to go home when it was over. I feel so fortunate to have so many windsurfing buddies to whoop and holler at, and share in post-windsurfing brag sessions.

Tuesday, March 9th: 4.2/86L. Coyote Point (the wind hath cometh day). A very chilly (by bay standards) day where the wind and water conditions were so good. Ramp after ramp stretched out across the bay as far as one could see. Sofy and Juan from the east bay showed up to freeze with us. Sergey took some video and caught this cool still frame of me getting a little chop hop.

If you go to his site and watch the video you'll see just how minor a jump it actually was. The other awesome thing about this session is that I got this year's loop monkey off my back. I went for about 10, but couldn't get a clean landing. There is still a lot of work to be done between "did loop" and "am a looper".

Saturday, March 13th: Brighton Ski Resort, Utah. I'm not huge into Snowboarding, but this was by far my best day ever. Snowed 1.5 feet throughout the day, and I rode from 9am until 8pm since they had slopes open for night skiing. It was the perfect kind of day to make some progress with riding powder, since it just got deeper and deeper as the day went on. The crowd seemed extremely light compared to my normal Tahoe fare.

Monday, March 22nd: 5.7/5.3 and 97L. 3 hour session of freestyle practice at Candlestick. Not frequently do I get a session this long. The hunger to make a Vulcan grew more and more this day.

Saturday, March 27th: Pacifica, CA Probably my best day ever of LOB surfing. The coast of Northern California often isn't beginner friendly, but this was the perfect kind of day. I probably caught more than 10 waves and my paddling rhythm and endurance really started feeling like it was coming together.

So there's my March wrap up. Lately it's really been setting in that I am an extremely lucky individual. Just a couple years ago this was me. March 2nd, 2008. The only thing that is the same is the wetsuit. This season I hope to harness that very same gung-ho attitude in my sailing and blogging.