Windsurfing Magazine

jdouglass
2010-06-01 08:59:09 | 794 views | 4 Comments

Since being left in the dust earlier this month at a local slalom race, I’ve been putting together some faster windsurfing gear. I’m not planning to actually race a lot, but I want stuff that will take me as fast as I care to go (or faster) when I’m in the mood to blast. I also enjoy the “fiddling around with technical stuff” aspect of windsurfing, and I know race gear provides lots of fiddling opportunities, so there’s that.

The first thing I got was a lightly-used all-black carbon fiber slalom board, which was cheap at Maui Malone’s. It’s a Warp slalom 71 from Exocet, which has 118 liters of volume and is supposed to work for sails from 6.2 to 9.0. The board didn’t come with a fin, but I picked up a 44 cm Techtonics slalom fin for it on Maui Malone’s recommendation.

The first two times I tried the board were with my 6.8 Aerotech Phantom wave sail in marginal conditions around 12 knots. In that wind strength, I had to pump the sail and fish for gusts to get planing, but once planing, it was like the board had afterburners. It could go upwind and coast through lulls like magic.

Deciding what bigger sail to get for the board was tough. I had heard that around 7.5 was its sweet spot, and that 9.0 was a little too big to be comfortable with the board’s narrowish tail. 7.5 would have been too close to my 6.8, though, so I was shooting for something around 8.0. Maui Malone came to the rescue again with a cheap, lightly-used Maui Sails TR4 8.4 with a 490 mast that would rig on the formula boom I already owned. The clincher was that the sail was red and black — perfect!

Yesterday I went down to the Stuart Causeway to buy the rig and had the good fortune to encounter a nice 10-15 knot southeast seabreeze to test it in.

The first run out I planed up right away, but forgot about the strong tidal current and had to do some shlogging tacks to avoid getting sucked under the causeway. The next run I adjusted my harness lines a bit. Then I lowered the boom a bit. Then I tightened the footstraps a lot and moved them slightly more forward, finally getting that “dialed” feeling. It was just in time, too, since by then the wind had picked up to a good 15 knots and I was totally lit. For the first time in a while, I got to do one of my favorite things — zoom past other windsurfers. Heh heh heh.

All I need now are some red-and-black board shorts to match the gear.