Tuesday, August 10, 2010

My Velouria! And Epiphytized Seagrass

Frank Black, from the late '80s band "The Pixies", is so the man. I figured it would be appropriate to have his singing in this video where I'm riding my black windsurfing board, the Exocet Warp SL 71. The sail I'm using is an Aerotech Phantom 6.8, which I like a lot because it's equally comfortable on this slalom board and on my Freestyle-Wave board. The launch site is Old Fort Park on the Indian River Lagoon in Fort Pierce, Florida and the wind is out of the southeast in the low to mid teens.

If you don't blink, you can occasionally spot another windsurfer in the video. That's my buddy Brandon, riding his Kona ONE longboard with a 9.65 msq Sailworks NX race sail that he was able to rig for the first time that day since he just got a formula boom. The mast he used was an aluminum 460 jacked up on two extensions. I couldn't believe it worked, but it totally did! Way to go, dude.

IRL Slalom Sesh 9 Aug 2010 from James Douglass on Vimeo.


The underwater part at the end of the video shows the seagrass ecosystem that I've been studying here in Florida. You can see that the blades of seagrass are covered by tufts of brownish algal fuzz. Those are "epiphytes" (plants that grow on top of other plants). When there is an excess of nutrients in the water (like from fertilizer or sewage in runoff), and there aren't enough grazing invertebrates to remove the epiphytes, they can smother the seagrass. Most of the seagrass beds in the Indian River Lagoon are holding up OK, but they are definitely under a lot of stress from the murky conditions and overgrown epiphytes, so their future is a bit uncertain. I wrote a more detailed post on seagrass a while ago. You can read it here.

4 comments:

tbuckee said...

Nice job on the video! It's one of the best I've even seen. The boom mount is the goods.

Boris T said...

Nice video, I like the mount angle.

my2fish said...

sweet video - what camera do you use? I just started using the GoPro HD Surf Hero on my Sunfish sailboat. I built a simple rudder mount, but would like to try mounting it on the boom as well.

nice tunes, too. you should check out an in-studio performance Frank Black did at WOXY a while back:http://woxy.com/media/audio/loungeact/frank_black-20061031.mp3

cheers, my2fish

Unknown said...

Hi James!

As allways, nice texts, shots and videos!
I like your gopro windsurf sessions.

Could you please give me some advice on how to mount the camera at the tail's center in order to catch both tacks well?

I recently have a Gopro wide and I have the boom mount But it let mount at the end of any side...

Best regards,

Paco