Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Cat Bay onshore jump session

Yesterday we had a fun jumping session at Phillip Island. The forecast wasn't great with very border line swell predicted, so most decided it wasn't worth the 1.5+ hour drive and just stayed on the bay battling rain and fluky winds.

Although the swell was small and the wind very cross on it ended up being pretty fun when the sun came out and the wind cranked upwards of 25 knots until early evening.

Jono cheese roll.


Backie


Pushy


Backside riding

Friday, November 25, 2011

Gunnamatta

Yesterday we had all the elements combine to sail Gunnamatta which doesn't happen all that often. Warm, sunny and a solid SE seabreeze pattern.

The tide was ridiculously low so all of the banks where totally out of the water - I have never seen it like that before. This meant that there was a lot of water moving around and there was no cleanly defined rips and banks so it was pretty tricky sailing especially with the swirly, gusting wind. Still was fun, wish we had conditions like that more regularly.




This section was brutal if you got caught out!




Jono testing out SHQ's demo Icon 5.0

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

SHQ Sandy Point Cup Weekend Video!

The event video from SHQ's Sandy Point Melbourne Cup event is online - check it out here. Make sure you watch in HD.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Competitions

We have had two competitions in the past couple of weeks - the first was Round 2 of the Victorian Wavesailing Series, held at Point Impossible, Torquay.

Possos is one of my least favourite spots to sail, seeing it is so fickle. On a good day it is super fun, just scoring that good day is very hard - I've had it twice. Ever.
On a small swell the wave is very shifty and sometimes doesn't even break as the tide gets high. The forecast was calling for a swell building to 4-6ft during the day, unfortunately it was less than half that size. Small possos, with a very gusty wind doesn't do it for me. I hate competing in small waves - especially on starboard tack!
Needless to say the comp didn't go great for me, getting knocked out in the semis.
Once the comp was over the conditions actually improved for an hour with some bigger sets starting to appear...

As big as they were getting during the competition.


Jono on a solid one at the end of the day.


The latest comp was the SHQ Sandy Point Melbourne Cup weekend, where amongst other events we had the VWS Round 3 at Waratah Bay. The conditions were shocking, horrible, terrible, crap etc. We probably wouldn't have run a wavesailing round if it wasn't part of an already fixed event. Small wind slop, light and gusty cross to cross on winds and again, starboard tack - this combination is my competition nightmare!! I was on my biggest gear, drifting downwind for the majority of the heats. A few lucky gusts here and there were enough to get me to the final, but still... When your competitors are on 5.7s and 100L waveboards you don't have much chance on a 68! It was a bit disappointing seeing the rest of the event was awesome. We had some good conditions just before the event started, a shame that they didn't turn up when we needed them.

Forward during the heats.



Before the event started, 25 knots cross off and some fun waves - arrrgghh





Man it would be nice to always have decent waves like this for comps...