Bladder Blues

Sunday we had 8-14 knots from the SSE, which is great wind for summer in Florida. Since my formula windsurfing boom is out of commission, and the wind strength and direction were ideal for my 12 m kite, I decided to go kiteboarding for the first time since early May.

I was nervous after the hiatus, but everything came back ok. I got comfortable on the water and even tried some crappy jumps, but I still need to learn how to turn properly. At one point my buddy Scott was semi-planing on my Kona longboard with a 6.6 sail and we were going about the same speed. He probably coulda passed me if he'd known how to use the harness and his "third leg".

The lower wind threshold for good riding on the 12 m kite and big twintip board seems to be within 1 knot of the threshold for the 9.8 windsurfing sail on my formula board. The difference is that below the threshold on the formula board I can still stay upwind, whereas below the threshold on the kite I can't stay upwind and have to get back to the beach by figure-8 flying the kite.

The only bummer was that one of my wingtip strut bladders leaked. It didn't make a noticeable difference in how the kite flew, but it made that wingtip flutter a bit and I think I should get it fixed before I go out again. There definitely seems to be a price to pay for upkeep of light wind planing gear, whether it's a windsurf or a kite.

Rocket Science vs. Marine Biology

This is a picture from my seagrass predator-exclusion experiment in the upper Banana River Lagoon. It's pretty low-tech research compared to what's going on in the background!



Anyway, I'm trying to figure out if large predatory fish, which are very abundant in Kennedy Space Center because nobody is allowed to fish there, affect the smaller animals and plants in the lagoon's shallow seagrass beds. I'm hoping that by fencing out the big fish from my experimental plots, the inside of the plots will undergo the same ecosystem changes that would occur from overfishing. Those "ecosystem changes" would be a ripple effect down the food chain- an increase in the abundance of small fish, a decrease in the abundance of algae-eating shrimp, and an increase in the slimy algae that is harmful to seagrass. That type of ripple-effect is called a "trophic cascade".

I should know in another month or so if it's happening.

Boom Blues

My second honeymoon with formula windsurfing hit a speed bump yesterday when one of my aluminum boom arms broke.



I think it happened when I pumped the sail hard coming out of a jibe to pop the cams. Thankfully the boom didn't separate on the water - it just started to feel wobbly and "spongy" and I wasn't able to pump onto a plane. At first I thought maybe the tail piece was slipping, which has happened before when I didn't lock it in tight, but that wasn't the case. Back in my driveway when I got a chance to look at the broken spot I was surprised how thin the aluminum was there. You'd think they would reinforce that spot more, since there's so much stress where the boom arms meet the boom head.

I've had the boom for about two years so I think it's out of warranty. It's a shame that the whole rest of the boom will have to be tossed just because of that one break. Unless anyone has repair ideas?

Pink Sail

I bought a used 9.8 msq sail yesterday from Sandy Point Progressive Sports in Daytona Beach. SPPS posts their inventory online, so I was able to pick out the sail, a 2004 Aerotech VMG, before I went up there. It was exactly what I was looking for in terms of size, construction, vintage, and price. It wasn't until I got to the shop, though, that I realized the sail was PINK and yellow. When I mumbled some doubts about the girly colors, the salesclerk said, "Don't worry, it's not really pink, it's fuschia". That didn't make me feel much better. But then I remembered that my windsurfing hero, Robby Naish, uses pink sails, and he's cool...



So anyway, I went ahead and bought the sail, and I'm pretty stoked about it. Took it for a little morning sesh in 5-12 knots and appreciated its lightness, power, and smooth feel. My planing threshold is now around 10 knots.



I also really like the construction. As far as I know, Aerotech is the only sail company that doesn't use fragile "monofilm" plastic for the body of their race sails. Instead they use grid type materials that are less prone to cracking and tearing when they wrinkle. Also, the company is based right out of Daytona and the sail designer is the SPPS shop owner, which is cool.



PS- If anyone wants the beater 8.7 sail that the new one is replacing, they can have it for eight dollars and seventy cents.

Craft's Creatures

My fellow marine biologist, Jonathan Craft, is an enthusiastic scuba diver and photographer. He has taken a lot of underwater pictures and video from dives we've done together near Fort Pierce. Here's a gallery of some of my favorites...

This "Flying Gurnard" was resting on the bottom near the beach. He has a surprise for you at the end of the video.


The nearshore reef here is not built of coral, but rather by the sand-encrusted tubes of a special kind of polychaete worm that lives in dense aggregations. This type of worm reef only forms where there is a lot of wave action and sediment moving around. The purple thing in the center is an urchin. Jonathan takes lots of pictures of urchins because he's studying their ability to eat algae that is poisonous to other organisms.


This is a closer-up picture of an urchin that shows the flexible tube-feet in between the hard spines.


Here's a different type of urchin.


This is a spiny lobster. It's a good thing these guys reproduce rapidly, because they are heavily harvested by divers. (We haven't taken any yet, but it's tempting.)


Some of the fish that hang around the worm reef are extremely well camoflaged. The next two pictures are poisonous stone fish. Can you see them?



Other fish are more obvious, like this cute green blenny (not it's scientific name).


Or these juvenile fish. (I like how the background looks on this one.)


This young grouper is pretty big for a baby.


This is what a cowrie shell looks like when it's alive. The mantle (soft part of the animal) wraps all the way around from the aperture in the bottom of the shell to cover over the back. The head is on the right hand side of this picture. This individual was about six inches long! (Picture taken from an aquarium back at the lab.)


This is a polychaete worm tube, but of a different kind of worm than the one that builds the reef. This kind, a "Diapatra sp." lives alone.


Most places we've dived the visibility in the water has been pretty good, but sometimes we'll run into a phytoplankton bloom like the one obscuring me here.


Mixed in with the worm reef are a lot of neat algae and "sessile" (not able to move) organisms like this orange sponge...


...and this blue tunicate (colonial seasquirt).


Oh, I promised my buddy Scott I would put a cool picture of him in my blog since the last one I put in here was goofy and unflattering. So here's Scott as a super studly scuba diver. Fierce.


And here's Jonathan the photographer. Jon got a weird infection on his neck where his dive vest was rubbing him. The infection turned into a hideous, swollen abscess that had to be drained. Don't click HERE if you don't want to see the nauseating picture.


More of Jonathan's pictures later, perhaps.

The Moral Equalizer

When I was in the dry tortugas last month I read a really interesting article in a Miller McCune magazine that someone brought on the research boat. It was by this guy named Jonathan Haidt who studies people and sociology and stuff. Basically, Haidt was ranting against the way liberals (like me and like himself) tend to be self-righteous and smug, considering themselves to be intelligent and moral, and conservatives to be just a bunch of stupid jerks. He said that comes from the fact that liberals recognize only the first two of the five "pillars of morality" that underly all human societies. The pillars are (quoting):

• Harm/care. It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/reciprocity. Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-group loyalty. People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/respect. People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for
human life.
• Purity/sanctity. The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

Different cultures across the world place more or less emphasis on different parts of morality, and the analogy Haidt uses to describe this is that it's like tuning the sound levels (bass, mid-range, treble) on an audio equalizer. Of course liberals have harm / care and justice / fairness turned way up and the others turned way down. A muslim jihadist has in-group loyalty and purity / sanctity turned way up and the others turned down. Conservatives have things pretty even across the board. You can see where YOUR morals are by taking a psychology survey on the website http://www.yourmorals.org/.



Haidt explains it all better himself in this 18 minute video...



This doesn't make me think that conservativism is always the "correct" attitude, though. Yes, it does take some respect for authority, patriotism, and shared ideals to hold a society together, but it also takes some irreverent liberals to cry foul when the system becomes oppressive or corrupt.

Formula and Stuff

The last few days in Florida have actually had some decent wind from the West in the 10 - 20 mph range. The conditions have been perfect for windsurfing on a flat, blue ocean with my newly-acquired formula board and cheaply-acquired 8.7 meter squared sail. The black strap in the back center of the board is the "chicken strap". Putting your back foot there instead of in the outer strap helps tame the board when you're blasting deep downwind.



The sail has 5 different kinds of tape on it repairing rips in the monofilm. Clear packing tape, black gorilla tape, grey duct tape, opaque medical bandage tape, and West Marine spinnaker tape. I think I'm going to get a newer sail in the 9.5 range with a more durable construction.





I wouldn't have been able to kiteboard safely in these conditions because of the offshore wind direction and gustyness, so that says a little something about the advantage of windsurfing gear.

Sunday my colleagues from the Smithsonian Marine Station had a "beach day" organized by two visiting scientists from Germany (pictured on the jetski).



I set up my Kona longboard with a 3.5 sail and the Germans both windsurfed impressively.



It was a cool day.