New sail - 6.5 Ezzy Legacy + Hot Water

Now that I'm a responsible, married, middle-aged adult I'm pretty frugal about my watersports equipment purchases. So I used my ~2015 6.8 Aerotech Phantom sail hard for about a decade, including through at least one professional repair, before finally getting something new yesterday. The new sail is a 6.5 meter squared Ezzy Legacy. I also considered a 6.7 Ezzy Cross, a newer Ezzy freeride sail which Roy at Ace Performer had in stock. But I decided against the Cross for two reasons. 1) It was more expensive than the Legacy. 2) I was nervous about the extremely long "foot" length of the Cross, in which the bottom batten extends beyond the clew of the boom. I thought it might be in the way in wave riding and jibing and stuff.

Anyway, I was gonna try the 6.5 Legacy yesterday right after I bought it, but while idling my rustbucket no-AC minivan at Bonita Beach access #10, waiting for a nice young couple to leave the only available beach parking spot in Robert E. Lee County where only the aristocracy and landed gentry are deemed worthy of beach access, steam started billowing out from my hood and I had to flee to a shady spot to add coolant. I still salvaged a nice SUP session in the tree shade of the Imperial River and only hit one barely-submerged cypress stump at full speed causing one board-deck breaking knee impact and swan dive deep into the black water.

Today, with a full coolant reservoir and the van only making a few worrisome new noises, I headed back to Bonita Beach and had the good fortune to find an open spot at access #1. It didn't look windy enough to foil, but the water was a pretty color and the sun was shining so I figured the seabreeze might strengthen enough to foil while I was out there. The new sail rigged up easy and it looks good. The draft is really deep and close to the mast so the sail's center of effort is way forward. That tends to make sails powerful and light feeling- you don't feel as much "back hand" pull on the boom.

One the water it was definitely non-foiling conditions, but the wind very gradually built. I got up briefly in an isolated gust, and that gave me the gambler's hope of getting some more. Eventually there were some bigger patches of wind and I was able to fly for longer stretches, and even do some foiling jibes. The sail feels nice and stable at speed. I think the built-in shape that it has is better for foiling than the wind-induced shape of the Aerotech Phantom was. We'll see how it is for shortboard sailing once there's some more wind.

One more thing I wanted to say: The water here in South Florida is HOT. It's disturbing and in fact not normal. Doing fieldwork in the Caloosahatchee Estuary last week the thermometer on the fishfinder was saying 92 F - that's 33.4 Celsius - in the water. It would be neat if that heat would kill the germs from the 450,000 gallon (1,703 metric ton) sewage spill in the Caloosahatchee a few weeks ago, but germs like it hot.

The Florida Keys are also experiencing coral bleaching again - the worst since the terrible 2023 bleaching event that killed almost all of the endangered Acropora corals remaining on the reef. There are a lot of graphs and stuff on the NOAA Coral Reef Watch page where you can see the temperature and risk levels for various parts of the planet. I think one of the most telling figures is this "time series graph" which shows the cumulative heat exposure that the corals have had. It's still July but we're at a level now that we didn't get to last year until late August.

Proposed Solutions:

1. We stop CO2 pollution by switching to 100% renewable energy ASAP, and meanwhile we conserve energy by not doing energy-wasting things like building massive dystopian AI datacenters.
2. We plant lots of TREES and stop cutting down the ones we have. It was SO much cooler under the tree canopy of the Imperial River. Typical Florida developers are building for rich snowbirds who aren't here in the summer and have no appreciation for the value of trees, it seems.
3. We implement high tax rates on the richest Lee County residents and property owners, who can afford it, and use the money to buy much more public access along our beaches. Nothing fancy, just dirt/grass parking with tree shade.
4. We improve bike lanes and public transportation and stuff so it's more feasible to get to the beaches without a car at all.
5. We change the name of the county to something better, once we've earned it.