The Death of Windsurfing (Magazine)

This is old news now, but apparently Windsurfing Magazine has published it's last issue, ever. There is a long discussion about this sad ending in the iwindsurf forum. For my part, I'm bummed. I had enjoyed reading and learning from the mag since getting seriously hooked on the sport in 2003. It was more or less the only thing I looked forward to finding in my mailbox. I especially liked the magazine's technical advice and gear tests. I was such a glutton for windsurfing info that I actually read through a two-foot-high stack of back-issues just to see what I'd missed before I started subscribing! One can still find plenty of windsurfing information and entertainment on the Internet, but it's widely scattered among blogs, manufacturers' websites, and opinion forums, and it's just not the same as what you'd get in the magazine.

"Eh, sonny, I remember back when windsurfing had a magazine, made out of PAPER, back when we still had TREES! cough cough..."


Besides the loss of the magazine itself being a bummer, there's a concern that the event might be associated in some way with a serious decline in the sport of windsurfing. It's well known that windsurfing went through an enormous drop in popularity after it's 1980's heyday, but the general wisdom is that the number of windsurfers has since stabilized at a lower level. We can't blame kiteboarding, either, because the big corporate parent of Windsurfing Magazine just cancelled Kiteboarding Magazine, as well. The best explanation I've heard so far is that magazine readership in general is down, so the big publishers are getting rid of all their small market mags to economize. Dang. A decline in windsurfing might not have caused the loss of the mag, but worryingly, the reverse might happen now that there's not a regular magazine keeping coffee tables warm and sailors stoked. More than ever our sport is going to depend on grass-roots community kind of stuff to keep it alive. Here's what I'm going to do:

1. Keep a steadily unsteady flow of windsurfing-related material coming out at James' Blog.
2. Start subscribing to the "other" North American windsurfing magazine: Canada's "Windsport"
3. Appreciate the tiny "New England Windsurfing Journal" a lot more
4. Ask and answer windsurfing questions on the iwindsurf forums
5. Teach at least one new person to windsurf this year
6. Let folks know that even though windsurfing isn't as popular as it was in the 1980s, it's just as addictively fun as it's ever been.

What are you going to do?

Merry Christmas from Frozen Maine

Marine biologists have to work around the tides. The plus side of that is that we rarely have to be in the field for more than about 4 hours at a stretch. The minus side is that we often have to be in the field really early in the morning or late in the evening, or over weekends or holidays. This year the late fall offered no opportunities to access our seaweed experiment in Lubec, Maine... except for December 22nd - 24th. If we missed the chance, we wouldn't have another one for months, and the whole huge, multi-year experiment would be ruined. So I rescheduled Christmas with my family for later, and rallied a Jewish colleague (Michael Hutson) to help me do the seaweed stuff. It turned out to be a pretty fantastic adventure. We were successful in our scientific objectives, and being in an unusual place at an unusual time we witnessed some special things, documented in Michael's photos.

Frosted seaweeds.


Frozen mist and waterspouts over the Bay of Fundy,


Enjoying the view.


Ready to rock, in our "Mustang" survival suits.


Slideshow and link to the full set of photos.

Daisy Hasselhoof?

I went windsurfing with my GoPro camera this afternoon, but apparently I didn't mash mash the shutter button hard enough with my gloves, because I filmed exactly nothing. D'oh! Actually, that may be a good thing for you blog readers, because I'll take the opportunity to post a video more entertaining than any I might have produced myself. From the windsurfing magazine website, here is a speedsailing session on the English seashore:

MOOsters of speed from k4 fins on Vimeo.

This is the first time I have ever:

A) Seen a windsurfer do chop-hops, jibes, and freestyle on a speedboard.
B) Seen a cow windsurf.

The sailing venue looks cool, too, with that uber-flat water. But I wonder if the speedsters ever mess up and smack into the rock retaining wall. Yikes!

Was my last session my last session?

When it gets into November in New England you'd better treasure your each and every windsurfing session. You never know which one is going to be your last for the season. I might have had mine about a week ago. It had been blowing hard from the SW all day, but had slowed down a bit by the time I got out of work and got to Josh Angulo's garage to pick up a board. On his recommendation I took an Angulo Magnum 84 slalom board with a 50 cm fin, and I rigged up my camless 8.0 Aerotech FreeSpeed sail. That was just the ticket for a well-powered blast across the flat water along the Nahant Causeway. It was a short sesh, ended by dusk around the same time it would have been ended anyway by my cramping gloved forearms. I'll be OK if it was my last session for 2011, but dang, it would sure be great to get just one more. Here's a video not from the session I just described, but from one a few weeks earlier that I never got around to posting. Nothing too extreme, but I think it fits pretty well with the music and stuff. Enjoy.

Hanger On

Part of my job is to do quarterly surveys of 450 seaweed plots, from the Boston area up to Northern Maine. The fall survey has taken a long time, because my usual grad student helpers have been very busy with other things, like TA'ing, studying, and working on their own labor intensive projects. As it gets later in the season it gets harder and harder to work, with shorter day lengths less likely to coincide with the low tides we need for the seaweed plots to be exposed. By some miracle, though, the cold of winter has been holding off. Last week near Pemaquid, Maine, we saw a wild rose still with green leaves and a bloom.



There are only 50 more plots to survey, but they're all on a very low-lying ledge at our Northermost site in Lubec, Maine, and it looks like the only tide that will be low enough for us to get to them will be on Christmas. Fortunately, I'm not very religious, my folks are amenable to a rescheduled holiday, and we have a Jewish lab technician who may be able to help. It will be a weird Christmas.

Does this look like anything to you?

Apparently I have inherited my father's gift for finding messages from supernatural beings in my cast-off undergarments. Dad was recently blessed with an image of The Virgin Mary in his briefs, and this morning I encountered the sinister visage of Satan in my undershirt. Evil is afoot!

View From the Office

Some days it's pretty nice to be a marine biologist, especially mild sunny fall days spent working in the rocky intertidal zone.