Best Post-Cold Session Food

Tuesday was 4.2/75L at Half Moon Bay. Crankin', fun, and lots of rust getting kicked off.

Post-session food is a matter of taste. Lots of folks seem to love to go for that red meat protein injection with juicy hamburger. I have another friend who likes a milkshake after a day in the water, to satisfy his sweet tooth. When I was living in DC there was an IHOP we used to visit to gorge ourselves on breakfast-for-dinner.

But here in SF after getting out of the cold water, the best thing I've found is Vietnamese Chicken Soup (pho ga). Your runny nose releases all it's fluids, you reverse the bone chill from the inside out, you get rehydrated on the savory broth. A little sriracha sauce gives you a kick of spice to accelerate this process.

It's a little bit of heaven.

What's your favorite post spock snack?

When You Mess with the Bull

... you get the horns. I broke my first mast the other day on my first ocean sailing session of the year. The wipe out wasn't particularly spectacular, the wave not particularly big, the swim not particularly harrowing. She was a good mast, lasted me two seasons. Her life probably could have been much longer had I just used her on flat water. But can you really call that living?

In any case, it was a pretty expensive day. I had a few memorable down-the-line wave rides that *almost* made it worth it. The thing that is creeping around the back of my mind is if I continue visiting the coast, how many masts could I break this season? At $500 a pop, these things are a pretty expensive speeding ticket. At what point do you take away your license?

Anyhow, here's a quick video from that day. Jacob getting worked, a couple local heroes doing their thing, and a huge dead elephant seal.

ps. yes, I know this video doesn't fit here, but I don't have the time or patience to fix that right now, so just click through to the youtube link and save your concerned email for a late rebate payment or something not punctuated properly in Windsurfing Magazine.

The California Coast Welcomes You

The nice thing about Northern California is that when windsurfing season ends, surfing season starts. Those regular prevailing westerly winds that blow 8 months of the year that we wind-folks love draw the ire of the local surfing community. But during the winter, we get into weather patterns that give a week or so without wind, then storms that bring wind, rain and snow to the Sierra Mountain range. These periods without wind are what surfers thrive on, since it takes only a little bit of wind to make waves less fun and more difficult to surf.

But there is a catch to surfing many of the spots in NorCal. It can be really, really difficult. The picture at the top of this post is a snapshot of someone getting ready to go out on a typical Double-to-Triple-Overhead-Plus (10-15 ft + waves) day at Ocean Beach, which is a few miles long, down the west side of San Francisco. The current moves extremely fast and the head high walls of whitewater batter surfers back toward the beach as they try to paddle out. No easy channels present themselves to get to the waves breaking a quarter-of-a-mile or more offshore. Often when you visit Ocean Beach on a big day, you can't even see the surfers out at the break. They are just specks on the horizon through a thick fog generated by sea foam. It's amazing that anyone even surfs these kinds of conditions.

The type of person who surfs Ocean Beach on a big day needs to be fit to get out to the breaking waves. Typically it is said that it takes 45 minutes or more of paddling and duck-diving to get out to where you can catch these giant waves. After that, it may take just as long to get back in, so you have to be ready to paddle for about an hour and a half. Just paddling, not catching waves. So in addition to being in great paddling shape, you have to be extremely confident in your ability to survive. If you get half way out and lose confidence, you're going to be in a pretty bad situation. The third attribute I would give an OB-big-wave surfer is to have a screw loose. You might catch one huge wave, get creamed by it and held down underwater for a minute before you start your paddle home. The reward was that 2-4 second drop. Two hours of paddling, one big adrenaline filled drop, then paddle back with a big smile.

These guys are crazy, and there's seemingly hundreds or thousands of them.

The good news? It's not crowded.

Best Year so Far

I moved to California a couple years ago with this idea that I would be able to windsurf a little more than the dozen or two sessions that I was getting while living on the east coast. I wasn't geographically or employmently set up to windsurf on the weekdays, and only occasionally on the weekends. The Northern Virginia area where I was living was an hour away from good potential wind and water locales (on a rare no-traffic day). I had the opportunity to move to a windy place and I pounced on it. My working hours stayed the same (Eastern Standard, that is) so I was also amazingly afforded long afternoons every day I could pull my carcass out of bed before sunrise.

After a year of settling in and tuning up, I was really ready for a season with a lot of time on the water. I learned how to make the right decisions about where to go and when to catch a lot of sessions that I otherwise might have missed. My best friends became the people who had the same obsession and ultimately my starvation for the sensation of planing was only fortified. Here I sit, a man whose thoughts are maniacally overrun with one, singular and repeatedly redundant thought:

ME WANT WINDSURF

And me windsurf indeed took place, more so than I ever imagined.

What more fitting word to describe the lusting infatuation I have for windsurfing than "a gross".

In 2010 I windsurfed 144 days.

Planing. No gear over 100L board or 5.6m sail.

An Unusual Session at Linda Mar

Yesterday was forecast to be a solid winter storm heading toward the bay area. This time of year, there are only a handful of sailable days every month. About half of the good-wind-forecast days end up panning out to be planing conditions. Usually the storm winds last about a half hour, and are strongest at sites that are an hour drive from San Francisco in Half Moon Bay. That's why people pack their gear up for the winter around here. Not because they are wind snobs, but because chasing fickle storm winds can end up being very frustrating.

By 11 AM we had gotten a "spike" on the meter. Half Moon Bay's wind meter hit 20, then immediately backed off. For all we knew, that was going to be "our storm". A couple hours went by and the meter hits 20 again, then drops 20 minutes later. We were being toyed with, it was certain. I catch up with Jacob and decide maybe we should go surfing at our favorite kiddie-pool, Linda Mar. Linda Mar is located in Pacifica, California. It has a reputation as "bozo beach" for surfing because it's one of the few places around where the waves aren't always completely and systematically humiliating to an inexperienced surfer. The downside is that it's always really crowded and catching a great wave is difficult because everyone paddles for every wave. Party wave city, forget about going down the line.

Jacob and I got there and it actually looked kinda windy. Hardly any whitecaps, but tons of spray coming off of the tops of the 3-4 foot waves. We always joke about windsurfing this spot. A couple times I've seen it be windy there after storm sailing in Half Moon Bay, but was already too cold and tired to give it a go. This time, we had arrived with the intentions of surfing but ended up rigging 5.0's and 100L boards. There were a few dozen surfers out along the half-mile long beach, much less than usual. They were working pretty hard to stay in the line up because the offshore winds were pushing them out to sea.

I heard the surfers cheering on my way out. I guess seeing someone blasting along on a windsurfer added to their self-validation of lunacy for surfing on such a stormy, ugly day. We got some strange looks, but no one seemed to be too bothered with us. The wind was super gusty. Lots of waiting for waterstarts as well as getting the back hand ripped off the boom.



The wind itself was borderline scary-off-shore. The water outside the break was butter flat. It would have been perfect for freestyle had I had any mind to not be worried about losing ground upwind.


The waves were sometimes 4 feet, maybe a little more. The stronger ones were closing out and throwing pretty hard with all the offshore wind. I didn't endure any terrible over-the-falls experiences, but when I did I was underneath my gear in very shallow water.


The following photo is either the Loch Ness Monster, or me riding a wave port tack. Odds are with the former.

The following photo was a pretty common site. Once you took a wave to the inside you were pretty much at the mercy of the wind shadow and shore break. Also, lining up a beach start is difficult when your gear is being pushed upwind. Hard to explain, but we kept getting back-winded in the impact zone.


There was a walk-of-shame to be done. The only place we could make it in was near the north end of the beach.

My girlfriend took these photos with an iPhone (some through the eyepiece of binoculars). Not too shabby! I'll definitely come back to this spot again to check out the off-shore winds. This session might have been pure luck, or maybe just nobody TRIES to sail here. It was challenging, but at this point I think sailing gusty storm wind on flat water is mainly frustrating. Sailing gusty wind with the odd chance ad a full powered wave turn, now that's fun.

This is what happens when I leave town...

I'm in an office in the middle of windless Florida. You're welcome to my bay-area comrades.

Corrections and Updates - Cabo Verde predictions

So I found out that I didn't have my bracket set up right. Although they do 4 person heats, they are scored on a 1v1 basis (if I understand properly), so my bracket is all wrong. Oh well, at least the spirit was there. Maybe next year I'll get it right.

In other news, the PWA released exactly how the world title race plays out.

For Kauli to win the title, he would need to win and
- Victor Fernandez would have to place 6th or below
- Campello needs to end up 5th or below

For Ricardo to win he'd need to win outright and
- Victor places 5th or below

For Victor to win, he just needs to place 4th or above.

There are a lot of other scenarios that involve all three of these guys not doing well. Imagine if Robby Swift won currently in 6th place. I think we would need Ricardo, Victor and Kauli to all place outside of the top 10 in order for him to win it all. Given that, my internal computer model tells me that Victor Fernandez has a 73.22001% chance of winning the title.

My forecast for the final top 10 ranking is:

1. Victor
2. Kauli
3. Ricardo
4. Swift
5. Mussolini
6. Pritchard
7. Voget
8. Koster
9. Bruch
10. Skye

Would you change anything about that list?