Long live windsurfing

December 29th, 2011 Posted in Blog

An interesting day the 29th December 2011

Yesterday Ben Hanbury and myself went to Bigbury bay for a windsurf. We put up 5.8m sails and had quite a lot of fun zipping around gusty old Bigbury (which we love). And we talked about how its never that windy in Bigbury compared to Worthing and so on. We traveled in the same van so I took my big kit – ie 5.2m and 5.8m plus 100 liter board with a biggish fin.

Next day we thought – zero wind in Totnes so the forecast must be wrong. Let’s go to the beach anyway. No sign of wind on the way, well at least our surf boards are loaded. Still no sign of any serious wind until we came over the brow of the hill.  OMG. Force XXXX and once on the beach everyone had rigged 4.0m or 3.7m. Great. So with a combined windsurfing experience of 50 years and most of that in the trade we had two 5.0m’s or in my case a 5.25m, sheer brilliance. I am not a slim as I would like to be of course, I like beer far too much for that and the word slimming to me means ‘Becks Vier’, but I needed some extra pounds then and there.

What to do. Ah go for it. Shake rattle and roll. I tail walked all over the bay, had an amazing work out and fun time. Got so flattened by the power of the wind as the guys came over and said, Jesus John we can’t hold onto our 4.0m! 50 years experience, doh doh doh. Ben and I lasted a couple of hours but when I could not simply hold onto the sail in the water it occurred to me that Bigbury was having its revenge for the words uttered on its shoreline yesterday.

What was really brilliant was that 22 windsurfers were hopping, looping, jumpin’ and having great fun. Long live windsurfing there was just so much fun to be had.

Tomorrow I will be taking all my kit.