New Angle on the Mistral Equipe Longboard

It was grey and gloomy yesterday, but there was some breeze after work so I went for a windsurfing session on my newly acquired Mistral Equipe XR longboard. I tried a new mount for my GoPro camera- stuck to the nose of the board and looking back at me. I think it came out ok. You can see me sailing both daggerboard-down style with the mast-track forward and the board canted to leeward, and planing style with the daggerboard up and the mast-track back. Don't ask me why I was wearing a helmet. The song in the video is "Hanging Tree" by Queens of the Stone Age.

Seagrass, Shaving Cream, Victory

Boston has had a nice stretch of Southern-style hot weather this week. It was hot enough in my un-air-conditioned bathroom to cause an aerosol can of shaving gel to spontaneously rupture, giving birth to a delightful, cologne-scented blue blob monster.



The warm weather was also perfect for the underwater fieldwork I had to do, too, snorkeling in an eelgrass bed on the West side of Nahant with several helpful colleagues. The eelgrass here is the same species (Zostera marina) that I studied in graduate school in Virginia, but it's morphology and habitat are different. It lives in deeper water here in New England, and it grows taller with broader, beefier shoots.

The eelgrass experiment is part of my former PhD advisor J. Emmett Duffy's "ZEN" project. ZEN stands for "Zostera Experimental Network". The ZEN experiment is a relatively simple manipulation of nutrient levels and herbivore abundance, but it's being replicated in the many different parts of the world that have eelgrass beds, in order to determine the relative importance of nutrient pollution versus food chain alteration on a global scale.

This is what the experiment site looks like from the shore.


This is what it looks like underwater.


I used my Mistral Equipe longboard as a utliity raft to carry the PVC poles that we had to pound into the sand to mark the seagrass plots.


Among other aspects of the eelgrass bed that we examined, we swept a large dip net to assess the abundance of small fish and invertebrates.




After work I've jumped on a few good windsurfing opportunities. Thursday there was enough breeze for me to demo Josh Angulo's 90 liter Quad-fin / Twin-fin "Victory" waveboard with my 5.5 sail. The waves that day were virtually nonexistent, but I could still tell that it was a sweet board.

Rare Summer Northeast Wind Session

A little cool front came through New England last night, providing some Northeast wind and waves this morning. The weatherman said the wind was going to fade in the afternoon, so I got up early for a before-work windsurfing session. I reckon it was worth it.



Afterwards, since I was still wearing my wetsuit, I snorkled at a spot on the other side of Nahant where I'll be setting up an eelgrass experiment next week. The eelgrass here is the same species that I studied in grad school in Virginia, but up here it grows a lot bigger and it grows in deeper water. The deep water part is going to make setting up the experiment a big pain in the butt.

Longboard Session in Maine

I'm doing seaweed research this week up at the University of Maine's Darling Marine Center near Damariscotta. The work involves getting up early to catch the low tide, weeding and surveying frantically for four hours, then taking it relatively easy in the afternoon. In the evenings we've had some time to hike, jog, play cards, swim, browse around the town, etc. Yesterday I even managed to get a windsurfing session in the Damariscotta River, which is more of a saltwater fjord than a river. It was oddly reminiscent of Eld Inlet in Washington State where my dad first taught me how to windsurf. The fact that I was riding an old-school longboard like the one I learned on made it even more of a deja-vu moment. (The board was the Mistral Equipe longboard that I picked up for free the other day in New Hampshire.) I made a video of the session with my GoPro camera, but the humid weather and cold water caused some serious lens fogging problems. Oh, well. The song is by David Bowie.

4th of July Fun in Nahant, Work Fun in Maine

I know the 4th of July is the United States' birthday, and that's great. The USA is a dang good country to live in. But what I really love about the 4th is not so much the patriotic aspect, but how the day elevates the glory of summertime leisure. This year we elevated it hard in Nahant with barbecues, buddies, sweethearts and waterplay.

One of the highlights was jumping off "Castle Rock" near the Northeastern Marine Science Center. My roommate's friend Laura got some cool pictures of that.





Laura also documented a sunset standup-paddleboard session that I took with my doppelganger Luke. The water was smooth and clear; so clear that one could look down and admire the kelp-covered boulders, lobster pots, and fishes passing along.



This hermit crab was hanging out on the beach near the Tides restaurant.



I'm back to work now that the weekend is over, but it's fun fieldwork near the Darling Marine Center in Maine. The next set of pictures were taken from the dock here on the Damariscotta River, which is actually more like a saltwater fjord than a river.







This is recent Stanford grad Michael Hutson checking out some sessile invertebrates (sea squirts, hydroids, and anemones) on a settling plate hanging under the dock.





The next mission is to try to windsurf in the Damariscotta River.