Each morning started with scuba. On Saturday we had a great dive at Kimberly Bergalis Park, near my house. Here's my dive buddy Scott suiting up.
And here's my other dive buddy Jonathan cooling off in the water. Check out the total lack of wind and waves on the Atlantic. Jonathan took some underwater pictures and videos of our marine life encounters - hopefully he'll post them online so I can embed them in another post.
Saturday afternoon I taught some friends from out-of-town how to stand-up paddleboard on my Kona longboard. I think SUP is a good share-with-friends sport that isn't too hard the first time around. It might be a good back door into learning windsurfing for less gung-ho people, because it lets them figure out their board balance before adding the complication of sailing. Hmm...
The paddle I'm using for SUP is a cheapskate home-made affair. It's the head of a kayak paddle shimmed with duct tape, fitted into the aluminum rod from a pool skimming net, then duct taped some more around the outside of the joint. The handle knob (not pictured) is also duct tape. It's not pretty, but the price is right, and I was able to make two with one kayak paddle so Scott can go, too. If you're thinking about making your own SUP paddle, remember the length from the end of the blade to the top of the handle should be equal to your height plus about ten inches. Since I'm 5'10", my paddle is 6'8".
Red Green would be proud...
Later Saturday afternoon my jetski-owning neighbor Bill invited some people out for wakeboarding. Bill has never wakeboarded (he has a bad back) but he likes to tow people because he's a sadistic bastard... uh, I mean a generous gentleman. I found wakeboarding to be an intense mixture of scary, thrilling, exhausting, and painful. Kinda cool but not exactly my cup of tea. I'm more of the "ease into it at my own pace" kind of person than the "charge into it rough and tumble" kind of person.
The pinnacle of the weekend was finally getting enough wind for a planing windsurfing session on Saturday evening. A month ago I might not have hassled with rigging the 8.7 sail and the big yellow shortboard, but this time I was more than grateful for the opportunity. Awesome. :)
There wasn't any wind Sunday, but a dive session at Bathtub Beach in Stuart and another round of masochism behind Bill's jetski were enough to thoroughly satisfy my watersports quota.
Today I was responsible and worked until 6:30, but still got out for an amazing sunset SUP session at Fort Pierce inlet. I crossed the inlet to the North Jetty side, where the water was crystal clear and I could look down 15 feet to see snook, jacks, barracuda, and other big gamefish stalking around the rocks of the jetty. I even had a sweet, blue-planet style encounter with a giant manatee. He came RIGHT UP under the board and sniffed around it for about five minutes. I was crouching down on the deck, so we were like, face to face at water level. COOL! Actually, I think there were multiple manatees, because the close-encounter one had a series of prop scars on his back and the one I saw paddling back from the beach didn't. Next scuba dive will definitely have to be from the state park at North Jetty.
8 comments:
If you're still thinking of learning to kite, James, the time on the wakeboard will help immensely. Better yet: go to the cable park in Orlando or Fort Lauderdale (ski rixen).
Yeah, you're probably right. Most of the time I was just trying not to get bounced off my feet, but I did manage to do the heel side sliding transition from one tack to another a couple times. I haven't tried that with the kite yet. I also need to get more comfortable with toe-side edging. It's been a long time since I've kited so I'm worried I'll have forgotten a lot.
These are good days for you to have fun with lightwind freestyle...rig a 5.2 and get on your SUP or teaching board (am I telling you what you already know?) I truly enjoy the lightwind stuff as long as good practice water is available.
Hey could have used you last week...saw my first shark. I'm told that in Florida you guys see them all the time...it was a new (and alarming) experience for me. My buddy said afterwards that I should have paid attention to the fin morphology and so forth. I was paying attention to keeping out of the thing's mouth.
Puffy- Well, maybe I can rig up for a lesson and then do some pre- and post-lesson freestyle practice. It wouldn't hurt to build some muscle memory for my port tack duck jibes. I recently took the footstraps off my Kona and added a longboard leash, so there's more sup waveriding in my future, too. Plus I picked up an older exocet formula board for $200, so if there's enough to plane with an 8.7 on that, that's probably what I'll be doing. Nice to have some choices...
Oh, about the shark- you are lucky to have seen one because they are really getting rare on account of overfishing. Next time see if you can get a better look and ID the species. ;)
SUPing is getting much bigger than I would have ever thought. There was a huge photo and article in the Daily Olympian (Olympia, WA) on this new rage today.
Dad- Well, you should give it another try on your superlight and see what all the stink is about. All that floundering and falling would be good elder excercise and balance building. If worse comes to worse you can always cheat and sit or kneel to get back to the beach.
James,
SUPing is a great sport. It's perfect for no-wind days on the Hudson.
BTW, I “borrowed” a picture from your blog, giving you full credit, of course. I'm writing an editorial in defense of the lowly daggerboard and needed a good pic. Yours was the best I could find. Let me know if it's a problem.
-Ian
www.hudsonwindsurfer.blogspot.com
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