James' Blog

The Death of Windsurfing (Magazine)

2012-01-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

This is old news now, but apparently Windsurfing Magazine has published it's last issue, ever. There is a long discussion about this sad ending in the iwindsurf forum. For my part, I'm bummed. I had enjoyed reading and learning from the mag since getting seriously hooked on the sport in 2003. It was more or less the only thing I looked forward to finding in my mailbox. I especially liked the magazine's technical advice and gear tests. I was such a glutton for windsurfing info that I actually read through a two-foot-high stack of back-issues just to see what I'd missed before I started subscribing! One can still find plenty of windsurfing information and entertainment on the Internet, but it's widely scattered among blogs, manufacturers' websites, and opinion forums, and it's just not the same as what you'd get in the magazine.

"Eh, sonny, I remember back when windsurfing had a magazine, made out of PAPER, back when we still had TREES! cough cough..."

Besides the loss of the magazine itself being a bummer, there's a concern that the event might be associated in some way with a serious decline in the sport of windsurfing. It's well known that windsurfing went through an enormous drop in popularity after it's 1980's heyday, but the general wisdom is that the number of windsurfers has since stabilized at a lower level. We can't blame kiteboarding, either, because the big corporate parent of Windsurfing Magazine just cancelled Kiteboarding Magazine, as well. The best explanation I've heard so far is that magazine readership in general is down, so the big publishers are getting rid of all their small market mags to economize. Dang. A decline in windsurfing might not have caused the loss of the mag, but worryingly, the reverse might happen now that there's not a regular magazine keeping coffee tables warm and sailors stoked. More than ever our sport is going to depend on grass-roots community kind of stuff to keep it alive. Here's what I'm going to do:

1. Keep a steadily unsteady flow of windsurfing-related material coming out at James' Blog.
2. Start subscribing to the "other" North American windsurfing magazine: Canada's "Windsport"
3. Appreciate the tiny "New England Windsurfing Journal" a lot more
4. Ask and answer windsurfing questions on the iwindsurf forums
5. Teach at least one new person to windsurf this year
6. Let folks know that even though windsurfing isn't as popular as it was in the 1980s, it's just as addictively fun as it's ever been.

What are you going to do?

Merry Christmas from Frozen Maine

2011-12-24T19:08:00.000-08:00

Marine biologists have to work around the tides. The plus side of that is that we rarely have to be in the field for more than about 4 hours at a stretch. The minus side is that we often have to be in the field really early in the morning or late in the evening, or over weekends or holidays. This year the late fall offered no opportunities to access our seaweed experiment in Lubec, Maine... except for December 22nd - 24th. If we missed the chance, we wouldn't have another one for months, and the whole huge, multi-year experiment would be ruined. So I rescheduled Christmas with my family for later, and rallied a Jewish colleague (Michael Hutson) to help me do the seaweed stuff. It turned out to be a pretty fantastic adventure. We were successful in our scientific objectives, and being in an unusual place at an unusual time we witnessed some special things, documented in Michael's photos.

Frosted seaweeds.

Frozen mist and waterspouts over the Bay of Fundy,

Enjoying the view.

Ready to rock, in our "Mustang" survival suits.

Slideshow and link to the full set of photos.

Daisy Hasselhoof?

2011-12-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

I went windsurfing with my GoPro camera this afternoon, but apparently I didn't mash mash the shutter button hard enough with my gloves, because I filmed exactly nothing. D'oh! Actually, that may be a good thing for you blog readers, because I'll take the opportunity to post a video more entertaining than any I might have produced myself. From the windsurfing magazine website, here is a speedsailing session on the English seashore:

MOOsters of speed from k4 fins on Vimeo.

This is the first time I have ever:

A) Seen a windsurfer do chop-hops, jibes, and freestyle on a speedboard.
B) Seen a cow windsurf.

The sailing venue looks cool, too, with that uber-flat water. But I wonder if the speedsters ever mess up and smack into the rock retaining wall. Yikes!

Was my last session my last session?

2011-12-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

When it gets into November in New England you'd better treasure your each and every windsurfing session. You never know which one is going to be your last for the season. I might have had mine about a week ago. It had been blowing hard from the SW all day, but had slowed down a bit by the time I got out of work and got to Josh Angulo's garage to pick up a board. On his recommendation I took an Angulo Magnum 84 slalom board with a 50 cm fin, and I rigged up my camless 8.0 Aerotech FreeSpeed sail. That was just the ticket for a well-powered blast across the flat water along the Nahant Causeway. It was a short sesh, ended by dusk around the same time it would have been ended anyway by my cramping gloved forearms. I'll be OK if it was my last session for 2011, but dang, it would sure be great to get just one more. Here's a video not from the session I just described, but from one a few weeks earlier that I never got around to posting. Nothing too extreme, but I think it fits pretty well with the music and stuff. Enjoy.

Hanger On

2011-11-28T09:25:00.000-08:00

Part of my job is to do quarterly surveys of 450 seaweed plots, from the Boston area up to Northern Maine. The fall survey has taken a long time, because my usual grad student helpers have been very busy with other things, like TA'ing, studying, and working on their own labor intensive projects. As it gets later in the season it gets harder and harder to work, with shorter day lengths less likely to coincide with the low tides we need for the seaweed plots to be exposed. By some miracle, though, the cold of winter has been holding off. Last week near Pemaquid, Maine, we saw a wild rose still with green leaves and a bloom.

There are only 50 more plots to survey, but they're all on a very low-lying ledge at our Northermost site in Lubec, Maine, and it looks like the only tide that will be low enough for us to get to them will be on Christmas. Fortunately, I'm not very religious, my folks are amenable to a rescheduled holiday, and we have a Jewish lab technician who may be able to help. It will be a weird Christmas.

Does this look like anything to you?

2011-11-16T18:58:00.000-08:00

Apparently I have inherited my father's gift for finding messages from supernatural beings in my cast-off undergarments. Dad was recently blessed with an image of The Virgin Mary in his briefs, and this morning I encountered the sinister visage of Satan in my undershirt. Evil is afoot!

View From the Office

2011-11-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Some days it's pretty nice to be a marine biologist, especially mild sunny fall days spent working in the rocky intertidal zone.

Uncloseted Video Game Geekiness

2011-11-13T09:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve had an off-again on-again romance with video games. As a little kid I was scared of them, so I missed the classic ‘80s era. But as an adolescent in the early ‘90s I followed my friends Erik and Erik to the dark side. My first “system” was a Super Nintendo. I remember playing all sorts of different games on it, from Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country to Super Metroid and SimCity, but the games I got most hooked on were RPGs (role-playing games) like The Legend of Zelda, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI. I played some games on my folks’ computer, too, the most notable being a 3D first-person perspective shooter called “Doom,” which my parents and sister hated.

I can't imagine why they hated it.

I didn’t play a whole lot of video games after Doom, because highschool homework and stuff kept me too busy, and because the rapid advance of game technology had outpaced our old family computer. (It was a 33 Mhz 486.) In college I hardly played at all, except for one major relapse for the RPG “Final Fantasy 7.” (I had recently broken up with a long-distance sweetheart, and obsessing over the immersive quest of the game was a much-needed distraction from obsessing over the breakup.) Grad school was mostly gameless for me, other than a few goofy social games like Guitar Hero. The exception was a cheesy vintage RPG called “Phantasy Star IV” that I discovered on a disk of old Sega games that came with my then-girlfriend’s console system. I got instantly addicted to that one, and could concentrate on little else until I finished it, much to then-girlfriend’s chagrin. When I lived in Florida after grad school I played zero video games because I couldn’t fit them in with my busy windsurfing schedule.

The upshot is that, despite a promising start, my video gaming career has floundered. I’ve basically missed the last 15 years of video game evolution. It’s a bummer, because during those years video games have become much more sophisticated and “gaming” has earned more widespread respect and inclusion in popular culture. On the spectrum of coolness, gamers are now closer to rock and roll heroes than they are to stamp collectors. Though I’ve never succeeded at coolness, and I care about it less now than ever, I’ve secretly wanted to try some of the new games to see what all the fuss is about. So I was delighted to find out that my girlfriend is, in addition to being gorgeous, intelligent and athletic, a video game expert. And she has been willing to hold my hand as I attempt to apply my primitive and rusty 1990s skills to her overwhelming and complex 2010s games.

The first new game that I tried at her house was “Borderlands” on the Xbox 360 console system. It’s a first-person shooter like Doom, combined with addictive role-playing game elements like quests and experience points that “Level Up” your character. (Leveling Up increases your digital persona’s strength and abilities in the same way that working out, studying, or practicing a sport increases your real-life abilities, except that Leveling Up occurs faster with less effort and the gains that your character makes will never atrophy [although your body and social life may atrophy if you do too much virtual Leveling Up and not enough real life Leveling Up].) I had a hard time figuring out Borderlands initially because the controls are much more complicated than in Doom. You have to aim your gun with one toggle button while moving your body with another toggle button, and there are a bunch of other buttons that you need to duck, jump, strafe, open boxes, pick up items, reload your gun, switch guns, talk to swarthy merchants, etc. I have a tendency to panic when attacked and shoot my feet while stumbling in circle, but I’m slowly figuring things out. The most fun I’ve had so far in Borderlands has been playing the game in two-person mode, teaming up with my sweetheart. She saves my life a lot, and every once in a while I return the favor by blasting an alien beast that’s sneaking up behind her.

Soloing Borderlands

The other modern game I’ve been messing with is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) called World of Warcraft. That’s the one that I think I would get dangerously addicted to if I had a computer powerful enough to play it at my own house. (Thank goodness I don’t.) Like the name implies, W.O.W. is a whole 3D virtual world of castles, magic and dragons, and it’s populated by thousands of internet-connected players as well as computer-controlled monsters and NPCs (“Non Player Characters” like townspeople and guards). Actually, since there are millions of people who play the game, there are numerous copies of the virtual world on different servers so that no one world gets overpopulated. The players on one server won’t meet those on another server, so if you want to play with your friends you have to make sure you create your characters on the same server, or pay real money to the video game company to move your existing characters.

Whew. Ok. To start playing W.O.W. you have to design and name your player character, picking from eight cool “races” like human, elf, goblin, troll, etc., and several “classes” like warrior or shaman that dictate what kind of abilities you will have. You also pick the character’s sex, skin and eye color, hairdo, and various other physical features that you may or may not be able to pick for yourself in real life. You can’t pick your character’s body type, though. You have to be either big and buff if you’re a male, or slim and busty if you’re a female. My character, Jimbonereus, is from the “Tauren” race of buffalo people who live in teepees and have totem poles. His class is “hunter,” which means that he can shoot bad guys from a distance and sic his vicious pet on them, but he’s not so good in a close-up fight and he can’t cast good spells or use beefy shields and armor.

Click Jimbonereus to see his "profile" on the WOW website. It will change occasionally as he goes on new quests and finds cute new outfits and stuff.

My sweetheart recommended that I be a hunter because it’s an easy class for casual “P.V.E.” playing. PVE stands for player-versus-environment, which is where you’re tromping around the wilderness going on little quests and killing the computer-controlled monsters. The other kind of play is PVP, where you battle other human-controlled characters, and you get your butt kicked if you’re not a serious gamer. I’ve never done any PVP, but I have done some five-person cooperative PVE adventures with other human-controlled characters. (The game has some repeatable dungeon adventures that are specially-designed for five people at a time, so you queue up to do a certain dungeon and are grouped with four strangers who have requested to do the same dungeon.) The first time I tried a tough dungeon, the four other people in my group voted to kick me out because I kept falling in the water and getting behind. But I practiced my jumping and made it through OK the next time around. I even got some special loot for my contributions that time. There are many little rewards like that in the game to keep you addicted. No matter what cool stuff your character does or gets, there’s always another quest or another power item that you NEED, so you keep playing.

As a scientist and an introspective-type person, I’m fascinated by how strongly these kinds of games can capture our focus. It’s like there’s some hard-wired circuitry in our brains that gives us a sense of excitement and fulfillment when we pursue a gratifying quest and amass some kind of wealth, experience, or power. And RPG videogames are designed to tickle that circuitry to the maximum extent. If only real life could instill the same desire for obsessive pursuit of advancement. Perhaps it can?

Cold Hands

2011-11-07T15:25:00.000-08:00

The toughest things for me about windsurfing in cold weather are: 1) keeping my hands warm, which requires thick gloves, and 2) keeping my forearms from cramping, which requires thin or no gloves. Friday evening it was sunny and about 47 degrees in Nahant, so I decided to go with no gloves. My hands got quite cold and numb, but not past the point of working. The nasty part was after the session when I was walking my gear back to the van and the blood started returning to my hands. That part always hurts a lot. It was a mellow side-shore wavesailing session with buddies, though, so it was worth it. Here's the video.

John "Badass" Coelho

2011-11-01T12:13:00.001-07:00

Shortly after I moved to Massachusetts last year I met a couple of really good wavesailors who were "dialed" at Nahant, my local launch. One of the dudes was named John Coelho. At first I didn't know his last name, so I just put him in my phone as "John Badass." Last weekend he proved that he deserved the name when he was one of only two windsurfers to successfully challenge the humongous waves and icy temperatures left in the wake of our freak October snowstorm. (The other victor was pro sailor Josh Angulo, though, truth be told, Angulo didn't get out there until the afternoon when things had mellowed out.) Here are some shots of Mr. Badass. I think they were taken by Jay Turcot, but I'm not sure.

Note the snow on the grass in the background.

Well done, John. Maybe next time I'll join you... Or maybe not. :)

Dishonorable Intentions: The Best Romance I've Ever Read

2011-10-25T20:24:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted a poll to determine the extent to which readers of this blog were also readers of romance novels. Of those who answered the poll, 100% of the women and 24% of the men had read at least one romance. I was among the 76% of unenlightened men... until now.

Indeed, I just finished reading "Dishonorable Intentions," by Katherine Ivy, aka Lady Notorious, aka my charming, talented girlfriend, Rhonda. It wasn't the first time I had read her stuff- I had also seen her short story, "Love's Consequence" in the anthology "Modern Magic: Tales of Fantasy & Horror," and I had read the not-yet-published fantasy novel that she wrote for her master's thesis. Both of those blew me away, so I had high expectations for the romance novel. Rhonda tried to lower those expectations by explaining that "Dishonorable Intentions" was a different genre, and that it had been her first effort at writing, completed as a just-to-see-if-she-could-do-it "practice novel" while she was an undergraduate geology major. It turned out that Rhonda's warnings were unnecessary, because I found Dishonorable Intentions to have the same fast-pace, ingeniously-constructed plot, and badass-yet-realistically-characterized heroes that drew me into her other writings.

Dishonorable Intentions takes place in England during the "Regency" period of the early 19th century. The Regency was a rich and ritzy time for the nobility, and it was less uptight than the subsequent Victorian period, so it was the perfect setting for juicy romances. The romance of Dishonorable Intentions is made juicier still by intertwining with a crime mystery; the perilous hunt to recover a lost fortune in the form of a giant sapphire called "The Eye of the Storm." Intense drama develops as gorgeous, intelligent, great-spirited young Arabella battles to save her family and preserve her independence while winning the love and healing the heart of the handsome and virtuous but cynical and much-maligned noble Gabriel.

I must admit that before reading the book I doubted that I would be able to sympathize with characters from the upper crust of English society. I figured the nobles of "le bon ton" would just be tiptoeing around from mansion to carriage to ballroom, snootily obsessing over superficial concerns. In fact, some of the background characters in Dishonorable Intentions WERE a lot like my fluffy stereotypes, but the heroes Arabella and Gabriel had personal strengths and values that ripped right through the bullshit parts of their world. Those qualities made them very appealing, both to each other and to me as a 21st century reader.

I shouldn't give away too much of the story. If you want to read the book yourself you can download it from Amazon at this link. It's only like $5, so you really can't lose. If you don't have an e-reader device like a Kindle then you can do like I did and download Adobe Digital Editions (for free) so you can read it on your computer.

PS- Here's the novelist paddleboarding at Nahant last week. (Swoon!)

Some Pictures from Horseneck

2011-10-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

Dang, I missed a good windsurfing opportunity today in a last-minute rush to finish a grant application. Oh, well. I'm still stoked from the memories of Sunday at Horseneck Beach. Below are a few of Lady Notorious' pictures of the event. I've divided them into three sections. The first section is "getting out." These pictures show the drama and danger of getting from the shore to the relative safety beyond the breaking waves. The second section is "riding waves." These pictures show people doing cool, playful turns while riding a wave back towards the beach. The third section is "being a badass." It is mostly dedicated to Josh Angulo, who as a world champion wavesailor is in a whole 'nuther league from the rest of us.

GETTING OUT

This is me with my dorky helmet, watching Matt Allen battle his way through the whitewater and wondering if I'll have better or worse luck than him.

Here, Eric Doremus ventures into the surf for the first time in his life. I admire the man's bravery for trying it on a rough day like this. My own first samplings of ocean waves were in much more benign conditions. Eric made it out successfully on at least one of several tries, though he ended up breaking a mast later in the day. He'll be back.

It's a pileup of sailors heading in and out at the same time. That's me in the upper left with the red and clear sail.

Two young teenage guys, Graham and Manish, both managed to get out. These kids are really good at doing "freestyle" tricks in flatter water, so I reckon it's just a matter of time before they're doing equally impressive tricks in the waves.

One of the toughest things about getting out is that you have to do it all over again after every time you catch and ride a wave towards the beach. Here a veteran sailor makes an effortless looking jibe in the whitewater zone and points his board once more into the onslaught of waves.

Here's the way Josh Angulo gets out through the waves. He does it with POWER.

RIDING WAVES

It's tricky to pick "the right wave" to ride, but I think I got a good one in this picture.

You can't see my board in this one, but you can see my spray. I'm trying to do a bottom turn to head downwind and back up into the wave face.

This is more of a top turn, where I've hit the upper part of the wave and I'm coming back down.

Here i'm not doing anything, but the guy in the foreground is doing a "backside" wave ride. That means his back is to the wave and he is heading upwind. When the wind is blowing roughly parallel to shore like it was this day you can do either frontside (downwind) or backside (upwind) moves on the wave. I illustrate the different terms in this post.

Here I've just turned on a small wave and I'm going backside.

In this one I'm awkwardly going frontside on the wave, and Angulo is looking at me and cringing, probably.

BEING A BADASS

One of the more advanced waveriding moves is "hitting the lip." You build up speed doing a frontside waveride, then at just the right moment you do a sharp S turn into the breaking section of the wave. Angulo had a ton of awesome hits this day, but he probably has ton of awesome hits every day he sails in the waves.

Here's my turn to try to be cool. The first of these pictures is a normal jump, but in the second one I'm trying to do a backloop. I need to try harder because I only got about 2/3 of the way around on this one.

Horseneck Huck Report

2011-10-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

Sunday I drove down to Horseneck Beach, on the border of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, for a wavesailing jam session organized by local hotshot windsurfers via the iwindsurf forum. The conditions were very challenging, at least for me, but the stoke level was high. Below are some videos from the event. The first ones were shot by a nice guy named Claudio, who was sitting on top of a ladder next to the water. In them you can see Josh Angulo kicking butt with his pink and teal sail, and you can see me playing it safe with my red sail and helmet. (The best shot of me is at 2:35 in Claudio's first video.) The last video was shot by me with my helmet camera. Also, Lady Notorious took a ton of great pictures, so I'll add a few of those later when they're edited. Woo hoo!

Claudio's Videos:

My Video:

Windsurfing the Angulo Surfa 10'4" SUP

2011-10-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

Neither the waves nor the wind were remarkable today, but the combination of both was good enough to tempt me onto the water for a standup paddleboard windsurfing session. My paddleboard is an Angulo Surfa 10'4". I'm still getting acquainted with it. Windsurfing a board with a "surf" rocker is different from windsurfing a board with a "planing" rocker because the surf rockered board wants to stay more attached to the wave and wants to turn more from the center of the board than from the tail. Anyway, here's the video:

GPS + Camera + Windsurf + Mac = Epic Nerdery

2011-10-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

A girl in the back of the van suggested that we stop at the L.L. Bean outlet in Freeport. I barely suppressed a groan. It was Friday afternoon, and after a long week of up-before-dawn marine biology fieldwork in Lubec, Maine, I just wanted to get home and crash. Of course we stopped, anyway. It turned out all right, though. The store had a neat aquarium full of Eastern US salmonid fishes (picture) and a huge section of interesting outdoor-related gadgets.

I was unable to resist a major purchase: a Garmin eTrex Venture HC hand-held GPS unit, which I thought would be fun to play with on my windsurf. It wasn't the first time I'd bought a GPS for windsurfing. Back in the day when I lived in Virginia I went through a couple of similar eTrex units. (They are not nearly as waterproof as advertised.) This time I'm keeping the thing in an Aquapac to be on the safe side.

Some of my motivation to get back into sailing with a GPS came from reading Peter Richterich's blog, "The Windsurf Loop." Peter is savvy about analyzing his speeds and tracks on the computer, using a program called "GPS Action Replay." Looking at the nerdy gloriousness of that program, I knew I had to try it. Today there was a good side-offshore breeze and the waves were very small, so I got my gadgets together to do a GPS-recorded speed session. I used a 106 liter freestyle-wave board and a 6.8 meter squared wavesail, which is not a particularly fast setup, but whatever. Here's a screenshot from the gspar program with an analysis of part of my track.

The program said my max speed was 23.4 knots (26.9 mph), which is a little lower than what the GPS itself said was my max speed (27.9 mph). I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy, but it might be that there are too few "bread crumbs" in the track file saved in the GPS and uploaded to the computer for analysis. I think I can change the GPS settings so it records at a higher frequency, and that might help.

Another cool stat that gspar can calculate is your minimum speed in jibes. My maximum minimum speed was 9.8 knots (11.3 mph). I'd say that's planing, but barely.

Heh. As if the GPS data logging wasn't obsessive enough, I also filmed the session with my GoPro camera and made it into the video below, set to a song by The Brother Kite.

Gusty and Rusty

2011-10-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

We got some "real" wind today in New England for the first time in a while. It blew 20+ mph out of the NNW, and there was a decent swell coming in from the East, which is an ideal setup for side-off wavesailing from the Nahant causeway. The only fly in the ointment was that the wind was very gusty. We're talking over-powered in 30 mph one minute, and shlogging your sinky board in 10 mph the next minute. Quite a few determined and talented sailors were out there making it look good, though, including Mr. Josh Angulo, who I witnessed doing back loops from my apartment window just before I went out to sail myself. Woo hoo! My own performance was decidedly "meh," but there were one or two times that I hit the lip during a wave ride in what felt like a pretty cool way. The video is below, set to an oldies rock song by Unit 4 + 2.

Flooring-It on a Beginner Windsurfing Board

2011-09-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

One of the best antidotes to windsurfing-gear-snobbery is learning to make good with less-fancy-than-your-own equipment while on vacation. I had a wonderful opportunity to do just that recently at my folks' beach house in Edisto Island, South Carolina. The gear that my dad keeps under the porch there consists of a 220 liter Fanatic Viper (85 cm wide beginner board with rubber-coated deck), an ancient 5.7 dacron sail, and a fairly modern 7.8 Aerotech Air-X that I left there a few years ago. I had used the stuff a few times before, but never in more than marginal-planing conditions. Monday, 19 September 2011, had 15 - 20 knots; definitely more than marginal-planing conditions.

Nevertheless, I opted to go for the bigger sail, since it's a better sail all-around, and since I figured the rather-heavy board would benefit from extra horsepower.

I also moved the board's footstraps from their inboard and forward positions to outboard and back positions more suited to well-powered blasting. I didn't move them ALL the way out and back, though, because I didn't think the 44 cm fin on the board would have enough lift to support a fully-outboard stance.

I put the u-joint fairly close to the back of the mast track because the water was rough and I wanted to be sure the nose was riding high enough not to stuff in the waves.

Things felt pretty good on my first run out- plenty of power, but the board was behaving well. A big double concave in the nose smooths out the ride. The footstraps felt like they were out and back enough to get good leverage over the rig and accelerate the board to full speed, but they weren't so far out and back as to cause problems with control in chop or spinning out the fin. The only tuning change I had to make was moving the harness lines back a bit to get the sail fully sheeted. Jibing was awkward compared to the shortboards I'm used to, but the board got around ok once I learned to be a little more patient with it.

I can't wait for the next South Carolina trip so I can ride it again!

PS- I should thank the photographer, Lady Notorious. It was her first trip to the South, not counting Disney World.

PPS- I should also mention some of the other fun parts of the trip. Such as getting to hang out with my Douglasses.

And such as getting up close and personal with South Carolina wildlife like these Littoraria irrorata marsh snails...

...these Uca pugnax fiddler crabs...

...and this Sciaenops ocellatus red drum...

...which I caught mostly by accident (and released) while trying to lure blue crabs to a piece of ham on a fish hook.

Whale Sharks Feeding Like Goldfish

2011-09-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

Now and then I get solicited by strangers to blog about something that they want me to blog about. Usually it seems like a ruse for them to get free publicity, but occasionally they have something that I am actually excited to share. E.g., this photo from National Geographic, taken by photographer Michael Aw:

These are whale sharks looking for handouts from fishermen in Indonesia. It's funny to me to see these big, slow, cold-blooded animals, which I have always considered to be lazy, plankton-straining feeders, actively snapping at food from the surface like giant versions the goldfish in a pond. Cute.

Nat Geo's caption for the picture is: Vying for position under a bagan, male whale sharks—two of about twenty that visit this spot—scramble for a snack. Typically an adult shark might cruise night and day at a sedate one to three miles an hour, sucking in enough seawater to feed itself. This group likely spends a lot of time in Papua's Cenderawasih Bay, making it one of a few places where the species gathers year-round. Scientists hope to cooperate with locals to launch studies of the giants.

If you want to see the rest in this photo series, you can go to http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/whale-sharks/aw-photography

A Good PSA for Deep Sea Conservation

2011-09-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

In recent years there have been tons of cool discoveries from the deep sea, including bizarre new species, new biochemicals for drug development, and most interesting to me, entirely new types of diverse, reef ecosystems where we had previously assumed there were only plains of mud. The tragic irony of these discoveries is that they have been accompanied by a gold-rush kind of effort to harvest the new stocks of fish and crustaceans that we have found down there. Harvesting deep sea life is a terrible idea, for two reasons.

Reason #1- The method of harvesting, which is dragging a trawl net across the bottom, totally destroys the slow-growing corals and other non-motile organisms that form the structure of the deep sea ecosystems. It can take thousands of years for them to regrow, and in the meantime the fishes and other critters that depend on them have no place to live.

Reason #2- Deep sea organisms are sometimes abundant, but unlike shallow water organisms, they are very slow-growing and slow to reproduce. The Chilean Sea-Bass (aka Patagonian Toothfish, aka Dissostichus eleginoides) and Orange Roughy (aka Slimehead, aka Hoplostethus atlanticus) that you buy in the grocery store could be 50 and 150 years old, respectively! They simply cannot be harvested sustainably.

This nice video from the Pew Ocean Trust shows this all in a much more interesting way than I can describe...

Childhood Phobias – Licked?

2011-09-11T20:09:00.000-07:00

**12 Sept UPDATE: Just added #0- Pain / Doctor Phobia**

I had a good childhood, full of more happy memories than I could ever begin to count. My parents were wonderful, I got along with my little sister, I had cool hobbies and interests that I shared with best friends, and I was generally praised by adults for being smart, creative, and well behaved. Yet, from kindergarten age until after high school I was a champion worrier, handicapped by some major phobias. I’m actually happier now as an adult than I was as a kid, due in no small part to the process of getting (mostly) over those phobias.

For my own sake, and because it may interest a few readers, I’ve decided to make a partial list of the phobias and to say a little bit about each one. The phobias range from completely silly to somewhat serious, but are in no particular order. Also, I had a little bit of trouble with the list, because certain phobias were sort-of offshoots or amalgams of other phobias. Anyway…

Phobia #0- Pain / Doctor Phobia.

When I was a kid I had to get frequent allergy shots, which I hated. It was a long drive out to the Doctor’s office and a long time in the waiting room, which gave me ample time to worry and obsess, anticipating the coming shot. The shots themselves weren’t that bad- I just couldn’t relax when I knew that there would be pain in my future. As my capacity to anticipate and worry grew, I started to dread all the blood tests, immunizations, suffocating-feeling orthodontic plaster impressions, etc. that I knew awaited me when I turned certain ages. I felt like a kid in one of those tribes where every boy knew that on his 13th birthday they would tie vines around his feet and hang him upside down from a bamboo tower while they circumcised him with a stone knife. Perhaps even more worrisome were the things that I knew MIGHT happen to me at any time, like getting a cavity or needing a tonsillectomy. I remember asking my dad one time when we were driving in the car whether I would ever need my tonsils out. He said that I probably wouldn’t need them taken out, but I wanted him to PROMISE me that it would never happen, and I was extremely distressed that he couldn’t guarantee it. From my perspective it was like being told that there probably wasn’t a werewolf in my closet, but there might be, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Getting over the pain / doctor phobia was gradual, but at some point I realized that it was fruitless to worry about things that I couldn’t prevent, and instead I should view those things as positive opportunities to develop and display my stoicism and toughness. So now I’m happy to give blood or get shots, or whatever, and I didn’t even flinch (much) when, as a 21 year old, two burly nurses had to shove a fiber-optic camera up my wee wee to prospect for bladder stones. I would say my pain / doctor phobia is licked.

Phobia #1- Bee Phobia.

I had a normal fear of bees as a young kid, getting maybe one sting a summer. But then I stepped on yellowjackets’ nests two years in a row and got lots of terrifying and painful stings that swelled up badly, especially the second year. So for a while anything that buzzed would send me sprinting in the opposite direction, and I was deathly afraid of picnics and bbqs where sweet sodas and sauces would attract the sugar-hungry yellowjackets. Anyway, there was no special insight or bolt of maturity that got me over that phobia- it just kind of faded as I realized bees wouldn’t usually sting unprovoked, and even if they did it wasn’t any worse pain than I could handle. I got stung in Florida when I was packing up my kiteboarding gear about a year and a half ago and it was no biggie.

Phobia #2- Sports Phobia.

I was as active and playful as a normal kid, and I don’t think I was out of shape, uncoordinated or small for my age. Yet, I absolutely dreaded sports. (As I dreaded most other kinds of competition and evaluation.) Instead of seeing sports as play, enhanced by fun challenges and exciting opportunities for personal improvement, I saw sports like a slave in Rome would see the gladiator arena; as a miserable trial leading to inevitable doom. So I just tried to avoid the arena at all costs. When I couldn’t avoid it (my well-meaning parents always signed me up for soccer and basketball camps and little league and stuff) I slinked around half-heartedly, doing the bare minimum needed to avoid shame and quitter’s guilt, but always focused more on escape than on personal development or victory. I was extremely aware of the negative external pressures and stresses of competition and comparison, and extremely out-of-touch with the positive internal drivers that make sports fun and gratifying for most people. That is, until windsurfing.

Of course, my INITIAL reaction to windsurfing, at age eight, was the same as it was to all other sports- terror, crying, and praying to God that my dad wouldn’t make me try it again. But each summer I did try it a few more times, and it got a little less intimidating each time. It helped a lot that there were no coaches and there was no peer pressure or audience other than my family. As I got bigger I realized that I could lift the small “grown up” sail, which was satisfying, and I had opportunities to go windsurfing just by myself or with my friend Erik who was at the same level as me. By the time I was in junior high I could rig my own sail and go scooting around Puget Sound whenever I wanted, which gave me a big ego boost and feeling of independence. Around the same time, my parents backed away from their attempts to get me to do regular sports, in exchange for my pledge to do biking and jogging and stuff for fitness. In high school I started working out at the fitness club my mom went to, and I was stoked to see how much progress I made being able to lift more weights, develop cool-looking muscles, and run faster, longer. At some point it dawned on me that I was actually a perfectly capable athlete. Though I still felt no urge to join a sports team or anything, I could give a good, albeit unskilled, hustle in a pickup game of soccer, softball, badminton, or whatever, and maybe even have a little bit of fun at it. (The most recent time I played kickball I got on base a few times with line drives and surprise bunts, and I even caught some pop flies, which I’d never had the go-for-it attitude to do back in little league. The go-for-it attitude seems to be a really huge part of sports, and life.) In windsurfing when I do regattas my results are all over the place, depending on who I’m sailing against and how dialed I am, but I always have a good time, and I find that a bit of the competitive element now increases rather than decreases my stoke for the sport. So I’d say that my sports phobia is mostly licked.

Phobia #3- Girl Phobia. I used to be real shy around girls. Except for some family friends who lived an hour away, most of my friends were other boys, so I was slow to realize the whole, “girls are people, too” thing. For a long time I was stuck with the notion that the only way a girl would want to talk to you would be if you did something really cool or impressive, like kicking ass in sports, which seemed out of the question for me, or rescuing her from a dragon, which seemed a little more realistic.

Here, international soccer star David Beckham fights a dragon to impress Princess Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty.

I can’t put my finger on exactly how or when it happened, but at some point I realized that my energy was much better spent casually chatting with the girls, building familiarity and confidence, than it was hoping to dramatically impress them. I had some nice sweethearts as an adult, and now I have the best girlfriend in the world, so I’d say my girl phobia is licked.

Phobia #4- School Phobia. I never totally hated school, except maybe for a little while in the 6th grade, but it definitely gave me a lot of stress and anxiety. It took me a long time to develop the, “I’m here because I want to learn” attitude enough to replace my earlier, “I’m here because my only route to eventual, non-disgraced freedom is to suffer through round after round of increasingly painful challenges” attitude.

It's a long road.

Fortunately, it all gelled together around my senior year in college. By then I had realized that I wasn’t a genius or anything, but that I was smart enough to be able to learn even the real hard intimidating stuff if I worked at it and didn’t let a few little failures discourage me. That confidence allowed me to actually enjoy the heck out of grad school without getting too uptight about the pressures of dissertation writing and stuff. I would say that my school phobia is totally licked, although I may need to remind myself of some of the lessons I’ve learned as I go through real world career challenges.

Phobia #5- Center-of-Attention Phobia. I used to be shy, and used to prefer for others to take the lead in any group. But getting more confident in my various abilities, seeing that other leaders didn’t necessarily do any better than I could do, and (most importantly) getting de-sensitized to embarrassment after frequent embarrassments, has allowed me to become more extroverted and in-charge. This phobia is definitely licked, and I may have even gone too far in the opposite direction, what with this self-named blog and everything.

Discussion Questions: Were you happier as a kid or are you happier now that you’re an adult? Did you have any childhood phobias that you’re now proud to have licked? If you knew me when I was a kid, can you think of any phobias that I might have forgotten to write about, or that I might still have?

Intertidal Insects, Etcetera

2011-09-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

I'm up at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, Maine doing some seaweed ecology work. Today we took readings from our wave force dynamometers, which were quite "sprung," indicating the recent passage of Hurricane Irene. The waves were big today, too, from Katia.

Higher in the intertidal zone there were unusually high numbers of one of the weirdest little critters that we encounter in the field.

They are Anurida maritima springtails, one of the very few species of insects that can live in a saltwater environment. Their tiny blue bodies are covered with water-repellent hairs that allow them to trap air and float on the surface of quiet tide pools. When the tide comes in they hide in cracks and under seaweed.

For a gross close-up picture of one, click here.

My New Stand-up Paddleboard

2011-09-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

I bit the bullet last week and bought myself a S.U.P. It's an Angulo 'Surfa,' 315 cm long x 80 cm wide, 170 liters volume, thruster fin setup, 2/3 deck pad, with a full mast track for windsurfing. It has a lot of tail rocker for maneuverability on the waves, so it's not going to plane with a sail in flat water, but it should be able to wavesail well. So far I've had it out a couple times with the paddle in small to medium waves, and it's really great. I can tell that there is a lot of performance potential in the board that I'll be able to unlock as my surfing skills develop, so I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time on the water with it. Here's a video from Saturday at "Short Beach" in Nahant...

The board is also wide and stable enough to accommodate new-paddlers and windsurfers. It even floated my sweetheart's 66 pound English Bulldog "Buri," who, despite not being able to swim, seemed to take naturally to SUP. We had one doggy SUP session at the flatwater "Dog Beach" in Nahant, and then another doggy SUP "photoshoot" at the pool at Rhonda's mom's house.

Do I Miss Kiteboarding?

2011-08-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

**Background: I quit kiteboarding and sold all my gear late last fall.**

**Begin Post**

One of my favorite things about blogging is that I sometimes get interesting questions from readers. Today was special because two different people separately asked me the same question.

Person #1- Hi James, Do you ever think about returning to kiting? Do you miss it at all? Just wondering. [Person#1]

Person #2- James, do you miss kiting at all?

Here's an excerpt from what I wrote back:

Hi [Person #1],
Yeah, I think about it sometimes. There are some conditions where it's easier to get powered and have fun with a kite, and it almost always looks more impressive than windsurfing to the people on the beach. But I feel that I've satisfied my curiosity about what kiting is like, and proven that I have the ability to do it pretty well. So the only question I ask myself now is, "Is the added joy, compared to just windsurfing, enough to justify the added trouble, expense and danger?" And my answer to that, at least for now, is a fairly clear, "No." Windsurfing gives me basically all the same thrills, challenge, and exercise I got from kiting.
...
-James

Person #2 asked an interesting follow-up question...

Hey James,
I asked because I saw something you posted on the iWindsurf forum saying that you would look into the [brand x] kite if you would kite again.
In this area there are very few windsurfers left, everyone seems to have switched to kiting. I envy their camaraderie, if not their sport.
I love it that I can windsurf in offshore winds or go out in a really light breeze for a leisurely cruise. I just wish there would be more of us.
Thanks,
[Person #2]

...to which I replied:

Well, in Florida, peer pressure was one of the main reasons I tried kiting. My local spot was very popular with kites, but I would usually be the only windsurfer. There's no reason you can't hang out with kiters as a windsurfer, but trying kiting did give me a little head start with the camaraderie there.
If I had tons of money I might pick up a 13-15 meter kite and a big twintip for the sub-15 knot seabreeze days where there's no waves to SUP and I just want to plane without working hard.
-James

So there you have it. I don't miss it much, but if I had all the time and money in the world I would still do it when conditions were good.

Just to put something multi-media in this post, here is the video from my last kiteboarding session EVER, November 30th 2010 in Nahant. (This doesn't count once or twice on buddies' gear when I visited Florida over the winter.)

Not Windsurfing Hurricane Irene

2011-08-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

I did not windsurf in Hurricane Irene on Sunday. No regrets- I stayed cozy away from the beach. The storm does seems to have been sailable, though, and several of my buddies made it out in Nahant. Josh Angulo wrote a little blurb about his Nahant adventures with local badasses John, Fred, and Matt. Next time there's a storm I'll make sure to get my GoPro camera on the big man's rig to document his glory and maybe analyze it to improve my sailing.

Whether a hurricane is "sailable" or not is kind of a vague measure, because where you are, where the center of the storm is, and what point the storm is at in its life cycle all make a difference. At some point it's simply not possible to stay upright on the board or make forward progress, but bad things can happen well before that point is reached. Needless to say, the windier and wavier it is, the more likely you are to injure yourself, get too exhausted to hold the sail, break a piece of equipment, or get separated from your gear and not be able to catch up with it. Also, whenever you're dealing with a hurricane, there's the potential for the winds to change rapidly from sailable to unsailable while you're still on the water. Being a good windsurfer doesn't necessarily help you in a serious emergency, and a rescue is also less likely to come because the conditions make it dangerous for the rescuers. Anyway, what I'm leading up to is a very sad part of the Irene story: An experienced Long Island, NY windsurfer named Joe Rocco was killed sailing the hurricane in East Islip on Sunday. I believe it was at the same site where Angulo and I attended the East Coast Windsurfing Festival, and if I'm not mistaken Joe was one of the many nice windsurfing folks we met there. :( My condolences go out to his family and friends and to the whole Long Island windsurfing community.

*UPDATE- You can read Long Island windsurfing blogger Michael Alex's reflections on Joe's passing, and what actually happened, at The Peconic Puffin*

Curse my Dumb, Dumb, Dumb Male Ego

2011-08-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

The male ego is a terrible thing. It sets one up with the ludicrous and impossible expectation of being better at all "important" skills than anyone else in the entire universe. Especially better than the girls. Especially better than the girl you're dating.

The only thing that saves us men from self-destruction is our sneaky ability to excuse ourselves from having to be better at certain things. We do this by rationalizing that the things we AREN'T better at are somehow less "important" or less indicative of our true personal greatness. It would be smartest to do that for everything; to get past the need to obsess and compare by saying, "Nothing you could test or measure really defines my greatness; I just feel that I AM great." But we don't typically go that far. We usually keep our pride staked in a few arenas where we feel relatively assured of rule, and that can get us in trouble.

That brings me to my story. The other day something caught me off guard and made me really scramble to protect my ego. It was finding out that my girlfriend is an expert in the martial art of Taekwondo. She is not just a "dancing around and kicking the air" kind of expert, either. She is an "able to break two triple stacks of boards at one time using downward blows of her palm heels, which none of the men at her level could even do," kind of expert. WOW.

The proper reaction for me, the one I want to have, is to simply be proud and impressed, and to feel lucky to be dating such a badass. That IS how I feel about the other things she's good at, even the other athletic things, like being a successful college volleyball player. For whatever reason I've never been a real sporty guy (windsurfing doesn't count), and I therefore haven't prided myself on traditional sports ability.

Strength, though, is different, because I haven't been smart enough not to pin a chunk of my male pride on it. So for my girlfriend to be so good at something that seems like the ultimate test of strength makes me feel awkward and unsettled, like I either need to go out and try to match the feat, which would be dumb, or I need to make a difficult change to my expectations of what I think I should be better at.

For her part, my girlfriend thinks I'm totally ridiculous to let any of this bother me. She points out that I am obviously "stronger," in terms of how big my muscles are, how I can lift heavier things, etc. And she points out that Taekwondo breaks, like golf drives or a softball pitches, are much less a matter of pure strength than they are a matter of learning and practicing a specific technique, then being able to focus and execute it with max speed and perfect form. Which means that, even with some strength advantage, I would have to get very good at Taekwondo to do the kind of stuff that she does. It would be tough and time-consuming, and there would be no guarantee of success given some of the un-trainable kinds of quickness and natural athletic coordination that seem to be involved.

Discussion Question: What do you readers think? Should I make a ridiculous, clumsy attempt to preserve a primitive version of my male ego? Or should I just try to evolve mentally to where it doesn't bug me? What would you do or have you done in similar situations?

Wrong Weekend to Camp on Long Island?

2011-08-23T07:58:00.001-07:00

*26 Aug 2011- UPDATE. Saturday PM and Sunday ferry service was cancelled, which means if I went to the wedding I'd be stuck in a tent, on an island, in a hurricane, until Monday. So I have to cancel. SIGH. Sorry Catherine and Andrew! You'll just have to stay married for a while so I can toast your blissful union another time.**

My friends Catherine and Andrew are getting married this Saturday in Greenport, NY, on the North Fork of Long Island. Being a cheapskate I opted to reserve a campsite instead of a hotel room there for my date and myself. Now it's looking like that may not have been the best idea, on account of Hurricane Irene. You know it's a real threat when you start to see magenta and fuschia on the iWindsurf forecast...

I can't imagine our ferry back across Long Island Sound will run if it's blowing 60+ mph.

First session of "Rocktober"? + Bday Shout-Outs

2011-08-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

New England windsurfers call the fall season "Rocktober" because it's frequent Nor'Easter storms and blasting frontal systems make for epic riding conditions. August 15th, which also happens to be my awesome little sister's birthday, may have been the first day of Rocktober 2011. At first it just seemed like a dreary, drizzly washout, but as the East wind steadily ramped up into the 20+ knot range it started to look like paradise to wind-starved sailors like myself. I got on it at the Nahant causeway at about 5:45 pm, joining John Coelho and Fred on their 5.2 and 5.8 Ezzy sails. I rigged a 5.5 Aerotech for myself, and initially put it on my 106 liter Exocet Cross. That was a powerful combo for getting planing quickly, and blasting out though the crumbly waves. I was on the verge of overpowered, though, so I later switched to a smaller board- an 83 liter Starboard Evo. Good times.

PS- Happy Birthday Anna! (15 August 1982)

PPS- Happy Birthday Mom! (17 August 1947)

A Quick Vid

2011-08-14T18:50:00.000-07:00

I got a decent little shortboard windsurfing session at Nahant last Thursday after work. It was tricky with a straight offshore wind angle, but I managed to snag a few waves before the breeze got too light to catch them anymore. Video is below. Sorry about the camera fogging problems. PS- I crash pretty bad at the end.

Recent Windsurfing "Best Ofs"

2011-08-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

The other day while I was taking a little coffee break or something, I thought about how I've been slacking off from my usual obsessive pace of windsurfing and blogging. I could attribute it to a combination of summer fieldwork, scheduled weekend activities, exciting new romance, and lack of wind. But I'd rather not substitute excuses for action, so I'll try to get back on my game, following the James' Blog philosophy of "100% Science, 100% Windsurfing, 100% What-have-you." To begin with, I'll do a little review of some of the "bests" of the Summer 2011 windsurfing season.

Best Jibe = Josh Angulo's high-wind slalom jibe at the recent PWA contest at Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, captured in this photo by John Carter. Look at how aggressively he's laying down the sail and digging in the rail. It's like a hardcore wave bottom-turn applied on the slalom course. Badass. You can see a bunch more photos and videos like this on the PWA website, which seems to get better every year.

Best New Competition = The American Windsurfing Tour. This year kicked off the "AWT", which is a series of expert-to-amateur-level wave windsurfing events in North America, the likes of which has not been seen since windsurfing's heyday in the '80s and early '90s. They've already had successful events in Santa Cruz, California, Pistol River, Oregon, and San Carlos, Baja, Mexico. The next one coming up is in September in Hatteras, North Carolina, and the final is in November in Maui, Hawaii. The competitors in these events are an interesting mix of up-and-coming youths, wave-savvy women, semi-retired professional legends, and local wind gurus taking it to the next level by competing. All in all I think it's a good indication that hard-core windsurfing is still alive in this country. (Photo is from Pistol River, Oregon. I'm not sure who the photographer was...)

Most Utopian Windsurfing Racing Class = The "Kona" one-design class. The Kona ONE longboard has been around for a few years now. It's a nice board to sail, and it has become the basis of a very successful racing class in some parts of the world, especially Scandinavia. It's successful because it's easy to use, it's pretty fast in both light and strong winds, and because the class rules allocate different size sails to different sailor weight classes to insure fair competition from spry and petite girls all the way up to hulking burly men.

Most Lust-Worthy New Board = The Starboard UltraSonic 147. It's a high-performance, 93 cm wide shortboard that achieves a fine blend of slalom-board speed and formula-board planing power. It has an ultra-light, ultra-stiff, ultra-expensive construction, with fancy shaping features like a deep concave in the top deck and a complex arrangement of cut-away sections in the tail to reduce drag and improve top speed and jibing. I tried it at the Windsurfing Magazine board tests in Cape Hatteras this spring, and I can confirm that it works as advertised. So if you're a successful orthodontist or hedge-fund financier and you've paid off your mortage and your kids' college tuitions, you should get one. And buy me one while you're at it. (The video is a short clip of one of my rides on the board at the board test.)

Best Sign of the New Generation in Windsurfing = The Techno 293 Worlds in San Francisco. The Bic Techno 293 is a board used in a growing one-design racing class for kids and teenagers, which is intended to be a feeder class for Olympic type windsurfing. Though the biggest Techno 293 fleets are in Europe, they had their world championship this year in San Francisco, California, and it was awesome, apparently.

Best Windsurfing Session for ME = August 4th in Lubec, Maine. I sailed around Quoddy Narrows in a nice East Wind from the Bay of Fundy. I was riding a Mistral Equipe XR longboard with an 8.0 camless "Freespeed" sail from Aerotech. I started out going way upwind with the daggerboard down, eventually approaching the shore of Canada's Campobello Island, where I might have sneaked ashore on a small islet and might have stolen a rock as a souvenir. The wind picked up as I went back downwind, and I got some screaming reaches, interrupted only by occasionally snagging a piece of Laminaria kelp on the skeg! When I was in about the middle of the bay I decided to make a beat against the current towards the narrows and the bridge at downtown Lubec. Though there was plenty of wind power, it was amazing how the current turned the water slick flat and slowed my forward progress to almost nothing as I got near the bridge. I barely made it under, but was rewarded when I did with the sight of a bunch of playfully leaping seals in the tidal rapids. As soon as I tacked I was rushed back out under the bridge, and took a series of broad reaches back to my launch site. Ahhh.

View Larger Map

New Angle on the Mistral Equipe Longboard

2011-07-30T05:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-23T14:33:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-14T20:47:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-07T19:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-07-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

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.

New England Firsts

2011-06-30T19:17:00.000-07:00

I'm not one of those people who is super spontaneous and jazzed to try new things at every opportunity. I'm more likely to take my time and to get deeply into one or a few things. But every now and then it tickles me to break out of the usual pattern and do something without precedent. In the last week I had two such adventures.

1. Sunday I cruised around Boston Harbor on my friend's family's humongous motoryacht. It was so much fun- maybe I should buy one? ;)

One of the coolest parts was getting close to Logan Airport and watching the planes fly right overhead. Another cool part was jumping into the water off the upper deck, which was at least high-dive height.

2. Wednesday after work I drove 2.5 hours to Enfield, New Hampshire to pick up a freebie longboard windsurf at the Dartmouth College Sailing Center on Lake Mascoma. The board is a Mistral Equipe XR, 372 cm long. It needs a little TLC, e.g. a new daggerboard gasket, but a comparable board today would cost over $2k, so I think I got a dang good deal.

The drive through the mountains of rural New Hampshire was beautiful, and the brief windsurfing session I had on the lake seemed pretty special. I can see why Yankee city-folks like to retreat up to these kinds of places in the summer. So peaceful.

Just Plain SUP

2011-06-29T06:24:00.000-07:00

My dad requested that I do a sail-less standup paddleboard video to show what s.u.p. is like from a first-person perspective. I managed to do that Monday evening, in some very small waves at Nahant Beach. The hardest part was getting over my embarrassment about wearing a helmet camera in plain view of multitudes of beachgoers, while doing a slow and mellow sport that clearly doesn't require a helmet. But thanks to my extensive prior life experience of being dorky, I was able to do it. Here's the video.

The board is a 9'8" 'Suppah Slippah' from Angulo, which has a sturdy core but a padded deck. It's shaped to be stable and to catch waves easily, and it's meant for beginner and intermediate paddlers who weigh 160 lbs or less. (There's a 10'8" version for people up to 196 lbs.) From my experience demo'ing the 9'8", I think it will also work for a bit heavier rider if they have surf or windsurf skills.

Supsailing Video

2011-06-26T19:39:00.000-07:00

While my pro-windsurfer neighbor Josh Angulo was away this week at a PWA event in Aruba, I got to use and share his van full of water toys. Angulo's stand-up paddleboards saw the most use, because the wind was usually too light for shortboard windsurfing.

Despite my initial skepticism about s.u.p., I'm becoming more of a fan now that I've had a chance to try some "real" sup boards in proper waves. (My only previous sup experience was on the Kona ONE windsurfing longboard.) The sups make it easy for even a kooky non-surfer like me to catch and ride waves. Compared to a normal surfboard a sup can get going on smaller waves, and can catch waves further offshore and longer before they break. It's also quicker to get from point A to point B by paddling a sup than by swimming a surfboard. The upshot is that you can catch a lot of waves and get good long rides on a sup in conditions that would be lousy for regular surfing. The downside is that the big sup boards are less maneuverable on the waves, but I don't mind that at this point.

I've noticed that some windsurfing skills help with sup, while others don't translate. A windsurfer's practiced ability to balance on a floating board in choppy seas helps a lot. But a windsurfing habit that doesn't work for sup is moving back on the board as it accelerates. On a sup, moving back too far can kill your speed suddenly because the tail rocker is different and because there's no sail acting as a "third leg" to keep your weight forward. Angulo's soft-top 9'8" sup has a lot of tail rocker so the stalling effect is most obvious on that, whereas his 10'8" thruster sup accelerates a little more like a windsurf board because it has less tail rocker.

My best sup session this week was actually a windsurfing session on the 10'8", which comes with a mast-track. The wind was side-onshore at a mellow 5-15 mph, and the waves were about 3' high. I used a 6.3 GunSails "Toro," which wasn't enough to get the board planing, but had plenty of juice to drive the board out through the waves, and to catch the waves on the way in. The video is below...

This board got sold out from under me yesterday, but Angulo has some more sups with mast tracks coming in soon. I'm curious to try some of the slightly smaller sizes, and to experiment around with different fin setups to see if they can get more windsurf-like planing performance. Talk to Josh if you want to demo or buy one of his sups or windsurf boards. His email is joshangulo at mac dot com.

Racing and Freeriding Videos from the 2011 ECWF

2011-06-17T21:15:00.000-07:00

Hey. I edited up some more footage from last weekend's East Coast Windsurfing Festival on Long Island. Watching myself make all kinds of mistakes in the races has me motivated to shore up my major weaknesses, like tacking.

Here's a video of the races. I only filmed on Saturday (the windy day), but we also did some non-planing races on Sunday. Overall, I came in third place in the "Open" class, behind Josh Angulo (who won every race on Saturday) and Bill DeGeorge. The songs in the video are by Nirvana, Jimmy Hendrix, and David Bowie.

After the regular racing was over on Sunday we did a fun relay race on longboards. My team, captained by Peconic Jeff, won first place in that, as you can see in Peter R's video...

Between races I took a spin on Angulo's 110 liter freestyle-wave board, the "CV1". The song in this video is by Led Zeppelin.

Angulo literally took a spin the same board during the freestyle contest. It was pretty impressive.

East Coast Windsurfing Fest Report: Angulo-vision

2011-06-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

Woo hoo! I just got back from the biggest gathering of windsurfers I've ever seen north of the Frisco Woods Windfest in the Outer Banks. It was the "2011 East Coast Windsurfing Festival" at Hecksher State Park on Long Island, New York. The event was organized by Mike Burns, the East's best freestyle sailor, and it had racing, freestyle, relay-races, just-for-fun stuff, and gear demos with Josh Angulo. Also, it had WIND, especially the first day. I got a lot of video that I haven't had time to fully edit yet, but for starters, here's a little clip that compares the first-person experience of being me on a windsurf to the first-person experience of being a PWA champion on a windsurf.

She Comes in Colors

2011-06-05T09:03:00.000-07:00

Nahant served up another nice windsurfing dish last Thursday. This one had tiny waves but blasting offshore wind, so I used my small 83 liter board and 4.7 meter squared sail for the first time in a while. The song in the video is "She's a Rainbow" by the Rolling Stones.

Saturday's serving was a different style, with mellower, straight-onshore wind. It was nice to just cruise and do a little bump and jump with the 106 liter board and 6.8 meter squared sail. I set up my camera in the window of my apartment to take a picture every 10 seconds, hoping that it would capture me in windsurfing glory. It didn't work very well because my sail was just a tiny spec in the wide-angle panorama and I had to pick through hundreds of boring pictures to find the OK ones.

The most interesting were a few that captured some European Starlings oddly frozen in flight.

These birds are obnoxious, non-native species that like to peck native birds to death with their sharp yellow beaks to steal their nests. They were introduced back in the 19th century by nutty literary buffs who wanted to bring all the birds described in Shakespeare's plays to the new world. True story.

Movin' and Groovin' and Workin' It

2011-05-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

I've moved into my new place in Nahant. Needless to say, I like it a lot better than the old place in Lynn. Now I feel less like I'm in Massachusetts as a career necessity, and more like I'm here to enjoy the full spectrum of living. It helps that the last week has seen a sudden bloom of summer, with a 10 degree C jump in temperature. I'm on a three-day streak of doing beachy social stuff, which is amazing.

Yesterday I got a good windsurfing session with great company in warm-for-New-England, side-shore conditions. Jay Turcot from British Columbia took a bunch of nice pictures, some of which I've copied below.

Nahant Beach has gone from sparsely-peopled a few weeks ago to quite the scene now, with full parking lots and folks of all sorts doing things of all sorts.

They have lifeguards and they charge you $3 to park, but I reckon that's not too much money in the grand scheme of things.

Some people who are new to wavesailing were out there looking remarkably confident. Like Claudio, here getting out through the break...

In typical Nahant fashion the waves were long and came in well-organized sets, so you could even ride on the same wave as your buddy. (I'm on the red 6.8 Aerotech Phantom and the blue Exocet Cross 106.)

I think Jay is a really good photographer. Check out this seagull in flight, and the artsy sand ripples.

Jay also got this sweet sunset picture from out the window at my new place. Pretty cool, huh?

In other news, work has been going well. We finished a big weeding and surveying push for our seaweed biodiversity manipulation, and I put out a bunch of temperature dataloggers and wave force dynamometers so we can compare the physical conditions among our sites. The wave force dynamometers have been a bit of a headache. First the balls were falling off, then the carabiners that hold them to eye bolts in the rock were coming unscrewed. I think I've got things sorted out now, though.

This is a bunch of us up near Pemaquid, Maine doing the surveying and weeding.

This is my buddy Brendan at a restaurant in Canada. We had a little down-time between morning and evening low-tides when were working in Lubec, Maine, so we went over the border to explore. Canadians put gravy and white cheese on their french fries and call it "Poutine". It's OK.

This is a shaggy mouse sea-slug, scientific name Aeolida papillosa. It's in a tidepool surrounded by Ascophyllum nodosum rockweed.

The tube with the wiffle-ball is a wave-force dynamometer, and there's a temperature datalogger under the little PVC shade hut.

When a wave sweeps over the dynamometer, it drags on the ball, which is tied to a spring inside the tube, and a little rubber stopper is deflected some distance in accordance with the force of the wave. Assuming the dynamometer itself doesn't bust loose, you can go back later and measure the deflection on the rubber stopper to see how strong the strongest wave was.

Hedging His Bets for the Rapture

2011-05-22T08:29:00.000-07:00

**UPDATE- Doh! My dad fell off a ladder after being menaced by a giant spider while pressure-washing. He broke his arm and part of his pelvis and he's in the hospital now getting pins and screws and casts and stuff. Maybe he tempted fate a little too boldly? If you want to tease him or cheer him up you can leave a message on his blog.**

My dad was pretty concerned about Judgement Day yesterday, so he spruced himself up to increase his chances of being among God's chosen.

When the rapture turned out to be a bust he reverted to his old ways pretty quickly. LOL.

Ballet, what?

2011-05-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

Most of my adult life I've been a marine biologist living in one small coastal town or another. I've been able to wear flip-flops or hiking boots every day, enjoy windsurfing and simple beach life, and socialize with familiar friends and co-workers at beer-and-bbq-based parties. Basically, it has been great.

The only thing I thought I would do more as an adult that I haven't done so much is partake in an urban cultural scene. You know, like going to indie rock shows and theatrical productions and talking about fancy things while drinking coffee with creatively-dressed artists in cafes and bookstores. I'm probably not cut out to be a full-time hipster or intellectual, or even a half-time one, but now that I live near Boston I reckon I can marinate myself in culture now and again, and hope some soaks in.

I got a good dousing on Saturday at the Boston Ballet. It would have been real expensive, but a friend of mine who is a theater person managed to score a couple free tickets. Awesome! The dances they were doing for this particular show were choreographed in the 1950s, 70s, and 80s by two famous ballet dudes: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. (The latter guy was apparently the same one who came up with the dances for "West Side Story".) The music was classical stuff by Mozart, Debussy, and Stravinski. The Mozart part seemed more like "old school" ballet, with lots of dancers lined up on the stage at one time, all the ladies in twirly tutus, and the men in little gold jackets that didn't cover nearly enough of their deeply-wedgied buns.

The Debussy part (my favorite) seemed more modern and had a good dramatic romantic segment with two star dancers. Ballet dancers all seem to be good-looking, but the blonde diva in that part was especially, um, radiant. The Stravinski section of the ballet was good, too. I can't quite describe it, but I thought it had a vaguely "Eastern" vibe with the costumes and stuff.

Conclusion: Ballet is pretty cool. I might even pay to go to one someday.

Angulo to Korea, Random Windsurfer in Memphis

2011-05-10T20:01:00.000-07:00

*UPDATE* Angulo is doing pretty dang good in Korea so far. He's had top-3 positions in several heats, mixing it up with Albeau and Dunkerbeck, and has made it to both winners' finals. (Link to the standings.) It must be those battens I helped him with last week. ;)

So, I didn't manage to get a windsurfing session today, but I did do some windsurfing-related tinkering at Josh Angulo's house after work. We custom-tweaked the battens on his 8.7 and 9.5 Gun "Mega XS" race sails, and I picked up some special slalom fins he bought from Dave Kashy. Josh and his mountain of equipment leave tomorrow for the PWA contest in Ulsan, Korea. Hopefully the gear modifications will help him kick butt.

In other news, a windsurfer in Memphis, Tennessee is apparently adapting well to the Mississippi River flooding...

(The latter news bit was passed along by Windsurfing Magazine on facebook.)

Biologist's Mother's Day Song

2011-05-08T18:21:00.000-07:00

A lady biologist friend of mine was passing this around for Mother's Day. It's a sweet video, and it explains how, for a variety of real and interesting biological reasons, we all get a little more than 50% of our hereditary traits from our moms. Thanks, mom.

First ride on a twin-fin waveboard

2011-05-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

Warning: This is purely a windsurfing geek post. It contains almost no interesting commentary on people, places, relationships, philosophy, culture, or emotions. Also, the music in the windsurfing video is obnoxiously heavy.

Friday evening I went windsurfing on Josh Angulo's "Victory" quad / twin waveboard. The board was shaped by Josh's brother Mark, and has sort-of a "classic" outline; relatively long and narrow with a turned-up nose. The volume is around 100 liters- a little more than the biggest production board in the Victory line. I was able to tack and uphaul it fairly easily, which was nice in the initially-light wind conditions. The fin set-up was "twin", with two 17.5 cm x-twin fins from Maui Ultra Fins. I used a 6.3 Gun Sails "Toro", also a loaner from Josh.

Compared to the single-fin freestyle wave board that I usually use in waves; the Exocet Cross 106, the Angulo Victory needed a little more wind (or a push from a wave) to pop onto a plane, but it was very smooth and much, much turnier than any board I had ever ridden previously. I mean, the board could turn faster than I knew what to do with, which was cool. It was also really good at re-directing from the top to the bottom of the wave, and wouldn't snag even if you hit the crumbling part of the wave lip in an awkward way. Check out the video below. The music is "Jesus Built My Hotrod" by Ministry.

Double Rainbow, Sunset, Josh Angulo, Frontside Rides, Etc

2011-05-06T10:57:00.000-07:00

Woo hoo! This is such a cool day. It's bright and sunny, it's a Friday, my new roommate just gave me $1125 in cash, I'm about to go windsurfing, and Josh Angulo just moved to Nahant with a garage-load of windsurfing gear that I can use and you can demo, like, whenever.

Here's Angulo in his garage with a ton of "Gun" brand sails. They're good sails and they're cheap, and you can test-ride them in Nahant if you want. I've got a 6.3 in my car now, and Josh's custom twin-fin waveboard on my roof. Heh heh heh.

Last night was a killer windsurfing session, too. Beautiful rainbow and sunset and LONG front-side rides on small, clean swells. I filmed it with my GoPro camera.

Windsurfing Good Times

2011-05-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Before I go out for a windsurfing session I like to cast my net, so to speak, among the other local sailors who might be persuaded to join the session. In Virginia it was a big net; the Windsurfing Enthusiasts of Tidewater email list. In Florida it was another big net; the East Central Florida Windsurfing yahoo group. Here in the Boston area we have a big city but not much of a net. The de-facto system here is based on semi-overlapping nuggets of windsurfing friends who call and email each other or chat on iWindsurf's East Coast forum. Unbeknownst to many, however, there IS an official Boston windsurfing email list, which is maintained by the local chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amcbos-windsurf/ You don't have to be a member of the AMC to join the yahoo email list, so I recommend that every windsurfer in the area join it now.

Anyway, this morning when I noticed good 15 - 20 knot winds at Nahant I sent out a message on the AMC list. Jay Turcot, a young, West Coast Canadian, answered the call to join me there. I was zipping around on a 5.5 sail when he arrived, and he blasted with a 6.2 for maybe an hour until the wind dropped. Then we both rigged bigger sails, but had a hard time getting going because the wind had dropped way down to around 10 or 12 knots. Jay had a nice camera with him, and got this picture of me trying to grab the last scrap of good wind with a 6.8 sail. Thanks, Jay.

So, while I'm on the topic of windsurfing organization in Boston, I should mention these two weird but potentially cool things:

1) Semyon Dukach, the Russian blackjack genius who was the subject of "Busting Vegas" is looking to start a windsurfing center on a nice piece of Boston Harbor property in Winthrop. "East of Air" seems to be in the conceptual stage at this point, but I reckon it's a winner of an idea.

2) There is a credible rumor that Professional Windsurfing Association wavesailing world champion Josh Angulo, fledged in Maui, crowned in Cabo Verde, will be moving to Nahant this summer. (He wants his son to be able to get an American education and his Cabo Verdian spouse would like to work towards her citizenship.) If Angulo makes it happen, he'll start a rental / lessons / retail operation on Nahant for Angulo Boards and Gun Sails. That would rule.

New View

2011-04-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

My escape plan is set. I'll be leaving my sleazy Lynn apartment on May 31st and moving into the third floor of a funky cliffside house on "Little Nahant". The new place (131 Wilson Road, Nahant, MA) has a patio, garden, and a living room with an awesome view of the beach. Plus, I'm going to get a washing machine so I never need stinkin' quarters to do my laundry again. Woo hoo! Before I toured the place I was worried that being on the 3rd floor would complicate my windsurfing gear schlepping, but it turns out there's no problem, because the third floor is actually the first floor when accessed from a driveway on the upper side of the cliff. Heh heh heh.

It's more expensive than where I've been living, but it's a 2 bedroom, and once I split it with a roommate I'll actually be paying less than I am now.

This is the view from the living room. Lynn looks a lot better from this distance than from the inside.

Ok, I'll Move

2011-04-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

Every time I whine about my awful violent neighbor or the disheartening urban decay of Lynn, Massachusetts, folks tell me to move. Well, I think I'm ready. I worked hard to get my PhD and get a job, my student loans are fairly close to paid off, and I don't reckon I need to live in a gloomy ghetto at this point in my life. What I'll probably do is look for a 2 bedroom place on Nahant and split it with a roommate. Should end up being about the same price, and being free of my psycho neighbor (see today's video below) will be priceless.

Warning: Disturbing and Profane Content

True Months and Other Insights

2011-04-23T09:01:00.000-07:00

I turned 32 a couple days ago. I know that's still too young to whine about, especially since I remain fairly gorgeous and healthy, but it's old enough to make one think, and I had plenty of thinking time this week in Lubec, Maine. I spent five days up there weeding and surveying an algae experiment with the help of PhD student Kylla Benes and her dog "Moose". To tell the truth Moose didn't help much, though he did provide entertainment and moral support. In return, I removed this humongous, bloated tick from under his collar.

Apparently ticks are one of the first signs of spring at the Northernmost point on the US Atlantic Coast. Other signs I noted were frogs calling in the bogs when the temperature got near 50 (it happened a few times), some green blades of grass poking up through the brown, and a helicopter crew filming near our Quoddy Head field site for an upcoming episode of the dumbass macho reality show, "Dual Survival". (Fortunately we got to our field site at dawn before the rangers hired by the film crew blocked the trail- we had no idea what was going on until we ran into the one of the rangers as we were hiking back. He wasn't mad at us or anything, in fact he thought it was stupid that they had brought him out there, saying, "I don't why they just couldn't put up a sign instead of making me sit here on the trail all day.")

I'm back down in Massachusetts now, where spring is further along. The grass is completely green and there are buds on most of the trees. We're under a Biblical deluge at the moment, and not far from the rain / snow line...

...but if the saying "April showers bring May flowers" holds true, next month should be amazing. Plus, Jesus is coming to earth, according to this lovely billboard in my town. Yay!

Back to the topic of weather: Having now inhabited a bunch of states, I've come to the conclusion that April isn't April everywhere. Here's what April is, really-

Washington State: April is actually March; a month that lasts until June or July.
Texas: April is June, plus lupine and azaleas.
Virginia: April is April, with a little June and February thrown in.
Florida: April is July, with a seabreeze.
Massachusetts: April is March.
Maine: April is February.

Another thing I can conclude is that how much I like living in one place or another is only sort-of related to the weather. A place's social harmony, closeness to nature, and R&R opportunities are more important, as are the details of my work and personal life when I'm living there. For example, I never clicked with Houston, TX, even though it was warm and sunny. The city was so sprawlingly flat, urban, anti-nature, and socioeconomically divided, and I was so poor and overwhelmed with undergraduate work and social/romantic struggles, that I rarely felt at home. Where I'm living now in Lynn, MA is a crowded jumble of old houses, tenements, and run-down factories populated by gloomy old folks and poor new immigrants, and the weather is lousy... BUT I still like it better than Houston because my job is rewarding, I have access to windsurfing and snowboarding, my social life is ok, and I get a good fill of nature through my marine biology research trips.

The nature thing is especially important for me. Whether the weather is good or bad, every place has plants, animals, and natural features and processes that define its unique character and deepen its history. When I feel like I have a good connection to that natural history I can overlook stuff like rain and cold and stress. So I like places where the nature isn't totally obscured by development. Lynn has the sea, at least, and even Houston has a bayou or two that hasn't yet been turned into a paved flood channel.

Not this one, though.

Um, what else is new? Two weeks ago I went to the Cape Cod peninsula for the first time, and was very stoked to find such a naturally-awesome and sparsely-populated place relatively close to my new New England home. I reckon Cape Cod is to the Boston area as Cape Hatteras is to the Hampton Roads area; a beachy, relaxing vacation place a little down and to the right; a bit far for a day trip but perfect for a weekend. I went there with my coworkers to attend the North Eastern Algal Society conference at the Woods Hold Marine Biology Laboratory.

This is a picture of Dr. Matthew E. S. Bracken with his grad students on a walk to the "Knob" in Woods Hole. The wind was blowing 30+ that day but I didn't have my windsurf because we all rode down in a Northeastern University van. Doh!

On the drive to Cape Cod one crosses an impressive man-made hydrological feature called the Cape Cod Canal, which connects waters above and below the Cape to allow shorter and safer passages by ships. I hadn't even known the thing existed, so I was thrilled by how awesome it was, especially since the day we stopped there was very windy, causing the canal to look just like the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River Gorge. I wonder if anyone ever windsurfs in it?

The swells looked nice.

Anyway, NEAS was a great conference and I got a good response to my poster explaining the seaweed biodiversity experiment that pays my bills now. The slideshow below shows "plots" from the experiment. The plots are marked by a bolt drilled into the rock of the intertidal zone. The mini hula-hoop denotes the boundaries of the plot, within which we have weeded some of the seaweeds away to create "monocultures" of certain species. Thus, our three seaweed diversity treatments are: Control (no weeding), Ascophyllum monoculture (everything but that species weeded away), Fucus monoculture, Mastocarpus monoculture, and Polyculture (mix of the three main species, but thinned out to have the same starting density as a monoculture).

We have 450 of these plots distributed across 3 sites in Nahant, MA, 3 sites in the Boothbay region of ME, and 3 far-Northern sites in Quoddy Head, ME. The week before the Woods Hole conference I worked a couple days at the Boothbay region, and lucked out to have unseasonably nice weather on the second day. These final pictures are from that day, taken on the grounds of the Newagen Inn. I love how much Maine reminds me of Washington State. I get nostalgic whenever I smell the moss and pine needles and kelp and stuff.

I haven't windsurfed in over a week, but I'll get out there again soon.

For Sale: (sniff sniff) My Slalom Board

2011-04-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

*UPDATE- SOLD*

I owe the Federal government big bucks this year and it's gonna be tight so I need to sell some stuff. My most valuable possession is probably my all-carbon, badass-black 2009 Exocet Warp SL 71 windsurfing board. It has 118 liters volume, handles 5 - 9 meter sails, and sells new for $1700. Mine is in practically new condition with no dings or anything. You can have it for $775 without a fin, or $850 with a 44 cm Tectonics Maui 44 cm slalom fin. You'll have to pick it up or pay the full cost of shipping which could be a lot.

The other stuff I'm selling is listed in the sidebar: a 4.2 Naish wavesail, a 30 cm carbon MFC freewave fin, and a semi-dry wetsuit for scuba diving.

Windsurfing Mag Board Test Wrap-Up

2011-04-04T17:14:00.000-07:00

From left: Me, Josh Angulo, Andy McKinney, Josh Sampiero

Wow, it sure was an incredible week at the Windsurfing Mag board test house in Avon, NC. My hands are as calloused as hooves, and muscles I didn't even know I had are sore from promiscuous use of so many boards and sails. Some of my favorite memories are:

1. Giving someone's significant other her first-ever windsurf lesson, in cloudy 48 degree weather, and watching her get the hang of it and sail off on her own just a few minutes later.

2. Having the wavesailing champion of the universe, Josh Angulo, rig my sail and hook it up for me. (And remind me, as I giddily ran towards the water, that I had forgotten my harness.)

3. Hearing the chatter of an overtaking board and John Ingebritsen shouting "Yeah Baby!" as he blew past me for about the twelfth time.

4. Finding the board and sail combination that actually let me keep up with Ingebritsen for a while during the big group photoshoot. (Exocet RS5 115 and 6.5 Ezzy Freeride way beyond powered.)

5. Watching beefy editor Josh Sampiero plane on 4.2 and 3.7 sails in a nuking squall on the 110 liter Angulo CV1... while petite Anne McKinney of "Wind NC" was still able to hang on to her 4.2 and ride a 69 liter Tabou DaCurve.

6. Hating a board on my first ride, then changing the footstrap positions and loving it.

7. Watching four friends from Newfoundland raise righteous hell on the water- both in the Pamlico Sound and in the hot tub. Mainly the hot tub.

8. Seeing one range of boards (the Tabou Rockets) praised by all but a few discriminating testers, while a certain board in another range garnered nearly unanimous derision.

9. Being one of few who planed on the really light wind days. (Thank you JP Super Lightwind and Starboard UltraSonic 147, and thank you formula windsurfing for teaching me how to pump.)

10. My Virginia buddy Chad Perkins winning the board toss. W.E.T. power!

11. The awesome big dinners cooked by Sue from Buffalo, the awesome alcoholic hot chocolate drinks prepared by Maddy from Florida, and the awesome sweets made by Anne and others.

12. Having two big catapults when my fin hit a sandbar- but catching both on my helmet camera.

I'm going to try to embed my day 3 through 7 videos below.

Day 3: 8-14 mph Northeast. Rode the JP Super Lightwind in the morning (on video), and the Starboard UltraSonic 147 in the afternoon (not on video).

Day 4: 10-24 mph Northeast shifting East. Rode the Starboard Carve 111, JP All Ride 106, Angulo CV1 110, Goya FXR 116, and Tabou Rocket 125.

Day 5: 10-18 mph North in the morning, fizzled later. The only board I rode was the Starboard iSonic 117 with an 8.1 Gun Sails Future.

Day 6: 15-25 mph West. In the morning I rode the Angulo Magnum 112, RRD Firemove 110, Naish Gran Prix 128, Angulo Kihei 155, Starboard iSonic 117, F2 Xantos 140, Tabou Rocket 145, and Naish Nitrix 155. For the mid-afternoon photoshoot I rode the Exocet RS5 115, but didn't film it because I didn't want to be wearing my dorky camera in the pictures. You'll just have to trust me that it was awesome. Late in the day when the wind really cranked I nabbed a 5.0 and rode the JP All Ride 106 and the Naish Nitrix 105.

Day 7: 20-30+ mph West. Rode the JP All Ride 106 and the Naish Nitrix 105, with a smaller fin than the stock fin on the latter. Sail sizes were 5.5 way overpowered and 4.2 just right.

It's the garbage, mainly

2011-04-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my friends Chad and Lisa dropped me off at the Norfolk, VA airport for my vacation-ending direct flight back to Boston. It's always gloomy going from the relaxed and verdant South to the crowded concrete North. The airplane part isn't so bad, but the subsequent subway ride to Wonderland Station, the bus transfer from there to Lynn Central square, and the walk from the square to my apartment, take one progressively deeper into post-industrial urban decrepitude.

There are a lot of sensory clues that you are entering a crummy area: The smell of the old man next to you on the bus, the feeling of rattling over potholes, the rustle of Walmart shopping bags full of Coke and Doritos. Mainly, though, it's the sight of garbage everywhere. On the road, on the sidewalk, in the marsh grass, snagged on fences, in melting snowbanks, in the branches of trees. It gives you the feeling of living in a place where nobody cares about each other or about anything; a human dumping ground.

While my car was in the shop this morning ($768.00 parts and labor for a new water pump and three new belts- F'ing A!) I took some pictures around my neighborhood and made them into this depressing musical montage. Then so nobody could accuse me of whining without taking action I got some old trashbags and picked up the parking lot next door. We'll see how long it lasts.

The song in the video is "4th of July" by Soundgarden.

Windsurfing Mag Board Tests - Videos

2011-03-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in the upstairs living room of a big rented house in Avon, North Carolina. We just had a humongous Thai dinner cooked by Sue from Buffalo, NY, and now a bunch of the fellas are sitting around the dinner table drinking beer, wine, and coffee and talking about religion, taxes, and politics. I reckon they got in this philosophical mood after our windsurfing celebrity guest, Josh Angulo, arrived yesterday. Josh gives a lot of credit to Jesus for helping him and his family through some rough patches in life, and when he was showing us the "Angulo" boards he brought for us to test he explained why they all have "Jesus Loves You" written on the bottom. Even though my own spiritual views are pretty different, I can identify with feeling a heart and soul connection between windsurfing and life.

Anyway, the windsurfing here has been great. I'm posting some footage of the first two days of our trip...

Day 1: 25-35 mph Northeast. Rode the Naish Nitrix 105, RRD fsw 101 (not in the test), JP All Ride 106, Starboard Carve 111, Quatro Freeride 110, F2 Vantage 126, Tabou Rocket 105, and Exocet Cross 114.

Day2: 10-20 mph Northeast. Rode the Starboard UltraSonic, Exocet Twixx 145, Goya FXR 144, and JP Slalom 76.

Chad Perkins took this sunset picture yesterday.

Windsurfing Mag Board Tests - Personalities

2011-03-29T10:41:00.001-07:00

Hey Dudes and Dudettes! Greeting from sunny Avon, North Carolina, where I am participating in the Windsurfing Magazine freeride board tests for 2011. We have an awesome batch of boards here. These are just some of them...

More importantly we also have an awesome batch of people here, notwithstanding several Canadians. Andy McKinney, the owner of the "Wind NC" watersports store, filmed some of us at dinner the other day.

Today is our one "light wind" day of the week. I got planing this morning on a big board with an 8.5 sail, but it seems to have tapered off a bit since then. Sunday was super windy (25-35 mph) and monday was pretty windy, too (10-20 mph), so we're not missing it real bad. The rest of the week is supposed to nuke. If it was just a little warmer it would be perfect.

I'll post some helmet camera windsurfing action videos pretty soon.

Very Windy Day at Nahant

2011-03-19T19:50:00.000-07:00

My smallest windsurfing sail is 3.5 meters squared. It needs very strong wind to work properly; about 30 knots. I never used it at all during the two years I lived in Florida, but Friday I got a legitimate session on it here in Massachusetts. My sailing pals Fred, John, and another guy whose name I always forget were there on blue 4.2, orange 4.7, and red 4.7 msq sails, respectively. The guys on 4.7 were overpowered, but they're good windsurfers so they could handle it. There was also a young first-year windsurfer named Chris(?) who gave it a bold shot with a big board, a 4.2, and a small fin that I leant him.

To be honest, the conditions had me a little nervous, and I didn't do anything cool besides blasting back and forth. Sure was fun, though. As a bonus, the weather was an unseasonably warm 70 degrees or so. (It's back to the low 40s now.)

3.5 Windsurfing in Nahant, MA, March 2011 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Here's a wind graph of the day from the nearby iWindsurf monitoring station at Children's Island. I was out from around 4:00 - 6:30...

Beginner Board Dilemma

2011-03-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

This summer I'd like to teach some of my new Massachusetts friends how to windsurf. The problem is that I don't currently have a board suitable for beginners, and if I get one I'll probably have to sell one of my other three boards to make space. My current board "quiver" is:

Starboard Evo 83- High wind, wave-oriented shortboard used with 5.5, 4.7, 4.2, and 3.5 m^2 sails. 83 liters volume.
Exocet Cross 106- Medium wind, wave-oriented shortboard used with 6.8, 5.5, and occasionally 4.7 m^2 sails. 106 liters volume.
Exocet Warp SL 71- Medium wind, speed-oriented shortboard used with 8.0 and 6.8 m^2 sails. 118 liters volume.

The one that would probably have to go would be the "Warp", since the other two are vital for wavesailing, which is my favorite kind of windsurfing. It would be nice if the beginner board could have some of the characteristics of the Warp it would be replacing, specifically:

1) Fitting inside my van.
2) Fitting the role of early-planing shortboard for me.

I was thinking something like an older Starboard Start, Starboard GO, or Bic Nova might do the trick. Maybe one with just a small, removable center fin instead of a full daggerboard. I guess there's no rush to make the switch now, though, since it will be a few months before it's warm enough for beginners to get in the water. In the meantime, if you think you want to buy my Warp or sell me a beginner board, let me know. I would consider selling the mint-condition warp for $800 with no fin or $900 with a 44 cm slalom fin. Here's a picture-

Nice Session at Nahant

2011-03-12T19:13:00.000-08:00

It was "nice" in New England today, with sunny skies and a high around 50. The surf was waist to head high at Nahant Beach, and the 38 degree water was full of surfers, paddleboarders, kayakers, and a windsurf or two if you count me. The wind was flukey and offshore, but strong enough on average that a 5.5 and 106 liter board worked OK for me. I spent a fair amount of time getting rolled by the waves and swimming after my gear, but the drysuit stayed watertight, thank goodness. I had one or two memorable rides where I felt like I really carved deep furrows in a big wave. Heh heh heh.

There were also several kite-powered buggies buzzing around. It's amazing how fast those guys can get going with a kite much smaller than an on-the-water kiteboarder would use in the same winds strength. I guess it takes less force to keep wheels rolling than it does to plow a board through the water.

You have to get out pretty early to catch Barnacles

2011-03-10T20:01:00.000-08:00

One of the lab groups that I work with at the Northeastern University Marine Science Center, the Trussell Lab, does a lot of experiments with barnacles, the snails that eat barnacles, and the crabs that eat the snails that eat the barnacles.

The tricky thing about doing research with barnacles is getting the barnacles back to the laboratory intact. You see, barnacles literally glue themselves to the rock that they settle on as larvae, and if you try to pick one off you'll inevitably bust it and kill it. So the only way to get barnacles for your experiments is to put a little piece of rock or tile in the water where and when you think the barnacle larvae are going to settle, and then pull it out once it is encrusted in small adult barnacles.

In New England, the barnacle larvae, little swimming bug-like creatures, usually descend from the plankton down to the rocks around the beginning of spring. This Tuesday though, Trussell's PhD student Catherine Matassa noticed that the critters were already starting to settle on the rocks of Nahant, weeks early. That meant we had to scramble up to our barnacle hotspot in Maine to deploy a bunch of tiles for them to settle on. (The barnacles in Nahant usually don't settle in great enough densities to make usable tiles- that's why we have to go to Maine.)

It's cold in Maine in winter (DUH!) but I got to use a loaner "Mustang Suit" that kept me fairly warm. It was neat to see frost and ice floes all around while doing marine biology stuff. Luke Miller set up a tripod to do a time-lapse video while we were working. I'm wearing the orange suit with the black legs.

36 Degree Water Windsurfing Season Opener!

2011-03-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

Following my first New England winter, a time with typical highs in the 20s and 30s, last weekend's temperatures in the 40s and 50s seemed like a breath of summer. Time to the inaugurate the 2011 windsurfing season! (The one session in Florida doesn't count.) I couldn't jump right in on Saturday, though, because there were a few chinks in my thermal armor that I didn't want to expose to the 36 degree water of Massachusetts Bay. I.e., though I had purchased a "bag" drysuit in the fall, I still needed some 7 mm booties and a proper hood to go with it. Those bits were easy enough to find at a dive shop in Somerville, but it meant I had to wait until Sunday to get started.

Fortunately, the wind was still pumping from the South in the 15 - 20 mph range when I arrived at the Nahant causeway. I was so excited I ran a stop sign going into the beach parking lot and got busted by a Nahant cop. He also nailed me for not having a state inspection sticker, so I cursed my $95.00 - wasting haste. Arrrgh. Finally at the launch spot I rigged my trusty 6.8 Aerotech Phantom and 106 liter Exocet Cross with a 32 cm Maui Ultra Fins "no spin" fin. There was a small swell coming in and the wind was almost perfectly sideshore. The suit kept me plenty warm enough, although I chose to sail relatively conservatively to stay out of the water to the extent possible. Here's a video from the session, with an intro showing the beauty of spring in Lynn:

First Massachusetts Windsurfing of 2011 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Florida Keys Snorkeling and Watersports

2011-02-28T19:59:00.000-08:00

I had a great preview of summer last weekend in the Florida Keys. Muchas gracias are owed to my buddy Raphael, who snagged a great cabin for a group of us at Bahia Honda State Park.

View Larger Map

The cabin was on the edge of an old, flooded quarry, which was a uniquely interesting place for snorkeling and watersports. Muchas gracias are also owed to my friends Brandon and Lisa, who drove me down there and brought along all their watertoys for everyone to use. Brandon is the guy to whom I sold my Kona longboard when I left Florida. We sailed it with a 9.8 sail and managed to get planing in the gusts.

Bahia Honda February 2011 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Later in the day (when I was tired of filming) I got the notion to try to circumnavigate the island on the windsurf. It took me 1 hour and 17 minutes if anyone wants to challenge. The trickiest part was going under the short, low bridge on the East side of the key, where I had to get off the board and wade in deep mud. A smarter circumnavigator would have made that part of the passage with the wind and the tide and saved the wind- and current-opposed bridge crossing for the bigger bridge on the West side of the key.

Luke's Lapses

2011-02-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

I work with a guy named Luke Miller who is another blogging science nerd like me. Dr. Miller is really good at setting up control and monitoring systems, both for scientific purposes like creating laboratory aquariums that realistically simulate the natural environment, and for random things like building a barbecue grill that monitors a roast's internal temperature, adjusts itself accordingly, and posts to its own twitter account when the food is ready. Something Luke did recently that I thought was especially cool was make a time-lapse movie of the progression from summer to winter in his backyard in Nahant, Massachusetts...

I think the time lapse thing is beautiful, in a melancholy sort of way. Luke also has a shorter but higher-resolution time lapse video of snow accumulation during a storm, which is posted on the same blog page where I got his season video.

I'm not sure if I have the right technology and skills, but I might want to try to set up a time-lapse video in my own Lynn, MA neighborhood. Perhaps I could focus on this dirty snow mound in front of the liquor store.

Windsurf Turtle Rescue; Weather and Range Limits

2011-02-17T20:10:00.000-08:00

I came across a story today about a Texas windsurfer who heroically rescued a green sea turtle (Chelonias mydas). The turtle was one of many in the area that had been stunned by a recent cold snap that affected water temperatures in the Laguna Madre.

Adult green sea turtles are herbivores that mainly eat seagrass.

Green turtles are happiest in water warmer than about 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit), but they can tolerate somewhat colder water, at least for a while. If it gets as cold as 8 Celsius (46 Fahrenheit), however, they can barely swim, and they will die if it doesn't warm up. Usually the turtles flee if it starts getting too cold where they are, but in a shallow bay, like Texas' Laguna Madre, the water temperature may drop faster than the turtles can find their way out to warmer open water.

Although animals being killed by extreme hot or cold weather is a normal part of nature; one of the mechanisms that sets the geographic range boundaries of particular species, it's sad when it affects critters like the green turtle, whose populations are struggling to recover from human impacts like overhunting, loss of nesting habitat, and plastic ocean trash. So I don't think it's "unfair" for people to intervene by assisting such endangered species when they're caught off guard by something like a cold snap. In fact, it's awesome.

Another Valentines Day, Another Dollar

2011-02-13T16:55:00.000-08:00

If you remember from a few posts back, lightyourface.blogspot.com is my "brilliant" invention to turn your monitor into a flattering mood lamp for Skype chats. Well, in honor of Valentine's Day, I have added a special, romantic addition to lightyourface. If you go to lightyourface.blogspot.com and scroll down a bit, you will see a humongous, pink heart come into view. That luminous heart will bathe your visage in a light so seductive that whomever you are talking to in your video chat window will be overwhelmed with lust! Use with caution.

PS- I've made almost two bucks so far from the ads on lightyourface, and about sixteen bucks from the ads on my blog. If I can get it to the point where lightyourface is really popular, so the money-making ratio reverses, then I'll take the ads off my blog.

I Love Haidt

2011-02-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

A while back I posted about a cool concept called "The Moral Equalizer", which was articulated by a University of Virginia psychology professor named Jonathan Haidt, and which had the potential to reconcile the perennial misunderstandings between liberals and conservatives. More recently I saw an ad for a book by Haidt called "The Happiness Hypothesis". I bought it without hesitation and was not disappointed. Well, not unless you count the depressing irony that the day after I finished it my girlfriend called to break up with me. Shucks. Anyway...

Haidt gathers together the most influential bits of life advice from ancient philosophy and religious texts, and discusses them in light of what modern biology, psychology, and sociology can contribute to our understanding. His book is full of juicily useful nuggets of wisdom and insight, including a final chapter about the meaning of life that actually gives a fairly satisfying answer. (No, it's not "42".) Here I'm going to mention a couple parts of the book that were memorable for me.

The Elephant and the Rider Analogy- In Haidt's first chapter, "The Divided Self", he talks about how both philosophers and scientists have realized that the mind is partitioned into very different compartments. The conscious, rational part is a relatively new addition in our evolutionary history, and it is tiny compared to the older, emotional, instinctive, subconscious parts of the mind. Hence the analogy, with a small rider who has only limited, indirect control over the large elephant.

David Attenborough shows how it's done...

The Equation- Haidt has a formula for understanding happiness: H = S + C + V. H stands for happiness. S is for "set point", your innate level of happiness, which has a strong genetic component. People born with a high set point tend to be happy by nature (Haidt says they're winners of the "genetic lottery"), while people born with a low set point tend towards depression and have to work harder to be happy. Cognitive therapy and drugs like Prozac are good equalizers for people born with low set points. C stands for the conditions of your life, like your friends, family, loves, work, where you live, whether you're rich or poor, etc. V is for voluntary activities, which include meditation, hobbies, spiritual strivings, creative outlets, etc. The C and V parts of the equation are complicated and open to interpretation.

Passionate vs. Companionate Love- Apparently psychology has confirmed what smug old-timers have always said, which is that passionate love booms quickly but fades to a modest level after a few months or years. "Companionate" love, on the other hand, starts slow but can potentially grow stronger as time goes on.

This same figure is in the book.

Buddhism vs. Western Materialism- Eastern philosophies say happiness is all about letting go of your worldly desires and accepting things as they are. The Western credo is pretty much the opposite; strive for your goals and seize what you desire. Haidt says the Eastern way is powerful but incomplete, because there are some worldly things, like un-stressful living conditions and good relationships, that ease the path to happiness and are therefore worth working towards.

Pleasures versus Gratifications- Pleasures are things like food, sex, comfortable sofas, television, backrubs, waterslides, etc. Getting them makes you happy, but your standards adjust to the amount you're getting, so you end up having similar happiness whether you're getting a little or a lot. Of course, the wearing-off of pleasures is minimized when the pleasures are varied and spaced out a bit, so something like a small-portioned, multi-course meal is better for happiness than a large bag of Cheetos, which will be exciting at first but mundane, if not disgusting, by the end. Gratifications are "activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness". For example, windsurfing is a gratification if you're a windsurfer, making music is a gratification if you're a musician, cataloging insect collections is a gratification if you're an entomologist, etc. Compared to pleasures, gratifications lead to longer lasting improvements in happiness, so it's good to find and develop the things that are your gratifications.

The Dimension of Divinity- Even though Haidt isn't religious, he says that it's important to be able to connect to a higher level above your usual self and your mundane social world. Different religions and cultures have different ways of connecting to the sacred and holy, but it's always about developing the feeling of "elevation" to something greater.

Winter Sports Weekend

2011-02-07T06:36:00.000-08:00

Yo. This weekend some grad students and people I work with at the Northeastern University Marine Science Center rented a cabin for a "winter retreat" type of thing. It was in a little Western Massachusetts town called Becket. The owner was a charming, Swiss gentleman who said his family had built a series of vacation homes in the most fabulous parts of the world, and had given them all names ending in "_treff", which apparently means "Gathering Place". This one was "Waldtreff", the Gathering Place in the Woods.

I brought my GoPro camera and filmed some snowboarding. Later Dan Blumstein filmed some sledding. The sledding was at night so you might notice a "Blair Witch Project" feel to that segment of the video. BTW, the soundtrack for the snowboarding part is "Rain When I Die" by Alice and Chains, since there was freezing rain at the mountain that would form sheets of ice on one's clothing, etc.

Snowboarding and Sledding, Feb 2011 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

My Dad Said WHAT?

2011-02-03T13:07:00.000-08:00

My dad recently wrote an ode to "Man's Best Friend". There is a twist.

If you like that, check out some other risque posts from Johnny's Rants:
Virgin Mary Appears in his Underpants
Why You Should Leave the Toilet Seat UP
"Scientific" Theories about Womens' Breasts

A Semi-Constructive Gripe About Lynn, MA

2011-02-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

The famous Serenity Prayer says, "God grant me the the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference". I'm not sure where "complaining about things on the internet" fits in with all that. Maybe it doesn't. My ranting blog posts certainly do violate the "serenity" part, but if these self-published opinions can make a tiny change in the universe, then maybe they're OK. Either way, they're enjoyable to write.

Anyway, I've got some ranting to do today, and it's about Lynn, Massachusetts, the "city of sin", my current residence. Before I get started on the negatives, let me get the positives out of the way. #1- There are plenty of good hearted people here, just like anywhere, and some of them appear to be actively involved in improving the culture and infrastructure of the community. #2- Geographically and historically the place is pretty cool. Lynn is right on a scenic, rocky coastline and has some nice hills and a few little parks and lakes. It is about as old and historic as its more famous neighbors Boston and Salem. Nevertheless, it remains my opinion that Lynn has serious challenges to overcome before it can become a generally desirable place to live.

Challenge #1- Layout and transportation. Lynn is laid out like an ancient city from before the invention of the wheel. That is, its streets are narrow and cattywompus like the spiderweb of cracks in a windshield that has been hit by a baseball. This would be OK if Lynn was small enough that you could get in and out of it by walking, or nice enough to be a place you'd want to walk around, but it is questionable on both counts. There are no convenient "arterial" roads (even the yellow roads on the map below are mostly one lane each direction) and it takes forever to drive the seemingly close 10 miles to Boston or 4 miles to the freeway. It's worse during rush hour or when the roads are further narrowed by snow piles. There's OK public transportation, but you have to take the bus to get to the outermost Boston subway stop, and the overall trip will take you a good hour.

View Larger Map

Because of the high population density, old buildings, and narrow streets, parking in Lynn is a nightmare. During a so-called "snow emergency" you can't park on the street even with a parking sticker, and if you aren't one of the lucky few to have your own driveway or a deeded spot in your apartment's small lot, you'll have to park way far away at a school or public garage. Tonight I had to pay $4 for the privilege of parking half a mile from my apartment and walking back in the middle of the blizzard of the decade. If only I hadn't spoiled my laissez-faire next-door parking arrangement this morning by saying "Good Morning!" to a man I met in the parking lot who turned out to be the grouchy landlord of the building next door, who when he found out where I lived told me I couldn't park there any more and he didn't know or care where I could or should park. Phooey. Well, it's just as well since the next-door parking lot is basically just a trash dumping-ground and weed garden, anyway. Sigh.

For contrast, check out the layout of this other city, my hometown of Olympia, Washington, which has about the same population as Lynn. Note the nice grid aligned with the cardinal directions, and the convenient, straight thoroughfares leading to the nearby freeway.

View Larger Map

Challenge #2- Being in limbo. Lynn is too far from the cool parts of Boston to be a place that someone seeking the hip Boston urban experience would want to live. Yet it's not separate enough from the Boston urban blob to be a cute city in its own right like Nahant, Salem or Marblehead. It ends up just being a big, inconvenient, low-rent, blue-collar, outgrowth of Boston with all the disadvantages of urban living but few of the perks. Because the area is low-rent and blue-collar, there also appears to be a lot of crime and gang stuff going on. I haven't had any serious problems so far besides my loud, violent neighbor (who I can clearly hear at this very moment crashing around and yelling, "F*ck you motherf*cker! Hit me again, I'm gonna f*cking kill you, n*gger!"), the trash in the parking lot, the overturned shopping carts on the curb, some bad attitudes here and there, etc., but the local papers are always full of sketchy stuff that makes me nervous when I'm walking back from the bus stop with my bags from the airport or something.

Shopping cart in a snowbank, far from any supermarket.

Challenge #3- I sense that there are some political, economic, and demographic problems facing Lynn beyond the basic stuff that I talked about, but I don't really know enough to weigh in on all that.

Upshot- I think Lynn is going to show some signs of improvement in the next decade or so, but it has a long way to go. For now the most positive thing I could say to someone thinking about living here is, "the price is right".

PS- On a totally unrelated note, I just signed up to do a spring break board test for windsurfing magazine the first week of April in Avon, North Carolina. You know I'll be videographing and blogging up a storm about that... at least as much as I can without giving away the magazine's proprietary secrets. Woo hoo!

Miami Olympic Class Regatta

2011-01-29T07:51:00.000-08:00

A while ago I posted about Olympic sailing and the controversy about what types of boats, windsurfers, kiteboards, etc. should be Olympic classes. This week there was an Olympic Class Regatta in Miami for all the types that will be competing in 2012. The videos from that do a good job of showing what the competition is like for the different kinds of boats. (Day 2 video below.)

It was a good regatta for the American contenders in the RS:X Windsurfing class, led by Robert Willis for the men and Farrah Hall for the women, who were 15th of 31 and 12th of 30 international competitors, respectively. That's pretty amazing, considering that for the last several years the Americans, generally underfunded and lacking national support compared to the windsurfing athletes from other countries, had struggled to break into to the top international level of competition. Their big improvement this year shows that the American athletes, coaches, and various support people are starting to really get it together. Go USA!

PS- There are more pictures of the windsurfing part of the competition on Alex Morales' Miami windsurfing website: windsurfingtour.com.
PPS- There are even more pictures, videos, and lots of detailed reports and analyses at waterhound.com.

Massachusetts vs. Florida, Advertisements, Etc.

2011-01-27T21:02:00.000-08:00

First of all, sorry about the ads. Most people I surveyed said they would tolerate them, so they're in. Basically I still have around $10,000.00 of student loan debt from my undergraduate studies at Rice University and I figure even if I just make ten bucks a month it will help with that.

Second of all, O.M.G., Florida is totally underrated. I appreciated it well enough when I lived there, but I didn't fully grasp the glory of the F state until last weekend when I left the ice-crusted soul grinder of the urban northeast and stepped into the summery eden of Florida's Treasure Coast. What a change going from the crooked, narrow, dirty, slush-lined streets of Lynn and Revere to the warm wide avenues of West Palm Beach and Vero. From run-down roast beef sandwich shops to charming open-air restaurants. From craggy skeletal trees to lush palms and Bougainvillea flowers. From paying $46 to skid down an icy hill on a snowboard to riding free over the warm ocean on my buddy's kiteboarding gear. From lonely bachelorhood to my girlfriend's sweet embrace.

Here's some recent pictures from before, during and after the recent Florida trip. This first one is from Logan airport on my way out. By some miracle my flight was one of the few that wasn't cancelled during that particular blizzard.

This next one is from Florida. It's Emily at her birthday lunch. Cute, huh? She's not actually Mexican, but she can speak Spanish and she enjoys guacamole and fiestas.

Back to reality again, these two are at the "Wonderland" subway station in Revere, Massachusetts. It's the nearest subway station to where I live in Lynn, but you still have to take a longish bus ride to get there. It's across from an abandoned dog-racing track. Yuck. Revere and Lynn are mysteries to me. I don't get how ideally located waterfront communities so near the thriving yuppie metropolis of Boston can maintain such a level of sleaziness.

This one is from my trudge home from the Lynn bus station. That's my luggage, which probably isn't designed for such challenging urban terrain and weather conditions. The snow pile alongside the road is over my head.

Wednesday we had another big snow. After I dug out of my parking spot the plow came and piled a bunch of snow in it so now I don't have anywhere to park where I won't get towed when it snows. Shucks. I actually like the snow, though. It's pretty. It's just the urban living that gets me down sometimes.

Addendum to Overrated / Underrated

2011-01-22T08:16:00.000-08:00

It seems I left a potentially misleading section in my recent post, "Overrated / Underrated 2010".

With regards to ideals of beauty being overrated, I meant to say that there was more than one way to look attractive and that different people have different tastes.

I didn't mean to say that I wasn't into the classically gorgeous one-in-a-million supermodel look, i.e. my girlfriend's look, because I totally am. Tall thin girls with angular faces and pouty lips are not overrated, just rare.

An Explanation of My Stup.. I mean Genius Invention

2011-01-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I put together a little "demo" of my amazingly useful and wonderful website invention for lighting your face nicely when you're talking on a webcam.

So far I've only earned $0.01 from the combination of advertising on lightyourface.blogspot.com and on james' blog, so it might be a while before I'm ready to take anyone for a ride on my yacht.

Apparently They Windsurf in Rhode Island

2011-01-20T17:02:00.000-08:00

And they actually do it a lot better than me, as evidenced in this high quality amateur film documenting the 2009 / 2010 Rhode Island windsurfing season. The film, "An Ocean State of Mind" was put together by a guy named Steve Frazier. It's half an hour long, but it's good all the way through if you've got the time.

An Ocean State of Mind from Silent Ink. Productions on Vimeo.

I'm glad I'm not the guy whose nose picking and subsequent wiping-it-on-his-wetsuit was forever immortalized at 7:01 in the video. If that was me I'd have been a little sore with the videographer.

Interactive Kiteboarding Calculator

2011-01-17T18:25:00.000-08:00

A while ago I posted a table relating kite size to body weight and wind speed for kiteboarding. It starting getting a lot of hits, so I decided to go ahead and soup it up as an entirely interactive kiteboarding calculator, modeled after my windsurfing calculator spreadsheet. It has two pages- one for kites and one for boards, which you can switch between by clicking the "kitesize" and "boardsize" tabs at the bottom. As with any effort to apply simple math to a complicated and subjective thing, it ain't perfect, but it ought to help give less experienced kiters a rough idea about what kind of gear they need.

If you can't view the embedded version, you can download the file here.

A genius idea that will make me rich beyond belief

2011-01-17T12:02:00.001-08:00

Boy, am I smart. I just came up with an invention that will revolutionize electronic communication forever and make me a bazillionaire like the guys from Google and Facebook. It's a mostly blank screen with a yellowish background and a few orange words. The purpose? To give your face a bright, warm "monitor glow" when you're using a webcam. (It assumes you have your incoming webcam image "windowed" small enough that my bright background will be sufficiently exposed to do its work.) I've tested this side by side with a plain white screen and concluded that it makes the user look at least 50% less like an evil wizard / witch and 50% more like a romance novel hunk / heroine.

Try it for yourself at lightyourface.blogspot.com. It will have an ad banner, but you can drag your webcam window over that part. Help me make this thing go viral and I might let you ride on my yacht later when I'm cruising the Med'.

PS- Note that this is MY original invention, established 17 January 2011, and if anyone tries to copy or steal it I will sue your pants off like the Winklevoss Twins.

Nice MLK Quote

2011-01-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Image from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080729.html

I'm bad at following MLK's advice, since I tend to rant self-righteously, and often hypocritically, instead of reaching out to those with whom I disagree. But I'll see if I can change that a little in the coming year.

The Greatest Mistake of My Life?

2011-01-14T07:39:00.000-08:00

I've always put two spaces after a period, but it turns out that's absolutely wrong. If the only writing of mine that you ever read was my blog you wouldn't have noticed my two-space habit, because blogspot.com automatically changes all double spaces to single spaces when one publishes a post. I thought their space deletion was a glitch, but now I realize it was an autocorrection. Dang.

It was shocking to suddenly switch from thinking I was the smart one doing it right to realizing I was the dumb one doing it wrong, but I am now doing my best to adjust and change. Even as I type these sentences, though, my thumbs can't resist their reflexive double-tap after a period. This will be difficult.

PS- Thank you M. Scott Jones for pointing this out to me.

Overrated / Underrated 2010

2011-01-12T18:22:00.000-08:00

As a belated end-of-the-year post I wrote this paired list of things that I think are overrated and underrated. I meant it to be a mix of serious and funny, but it might have just come off as a snobby liberal rant. If so, sorry. Anyway...

Overrated: Ideals of Beauty. There's much more variety and flexibility to what people find attractive than you would think from looking at magazines where the models are uniformly tall and thin with angular faces and pouty lips. Yes, the model look is beautiful to most people, but there are lots of different face and body types that some people find just as good or better than the model look. So however YOU look, you are probably quite attractive to some people, and with luck you may find a mutual attraction.

Underrated: Nudity. There are many practical applications for nudity besides sex, including feeling the sun and the breeze, even-tanning, temperature control, simultaneous humbling and confidence building, and comedy.

Overrated: Gambling. It's so lame. I can't believe it's one of the top 3 vices. I wouldn't even put it in the top 100 vices.
Underrated: Windsurfing. An endless free ride, boundless territory to explore, thrilling speed and sensations, safe and accessible to kids and retirees alike. Yet only a few have tasted the glory.

Overrated: Bunches of people. I don't know exactly what the relationship is between the size of an urban area and the average happiness of the people in it, but I'm pretty sure there's a point where bigger is NOT better. Yeah, I know cities offer cultural stimulation and diversity, potentially. But shoulder to shoulder, bumper to bumper, wall to wall just doesn't strike me as a karmically- or ecologically-sound mode of living, especially when the urban area is so big and overlapped with other urban areas that it takes forever to get out of it and into a more rural or natural place. I think a decent rule of thumb is that any urban area that takes more than about 15 minutes to flee is too big for its own residents' good.

Underrated: Individual people. Notwithstanding a few real sociopaths, I think the majority of folks are nice when you get to know them, and are strong, intelligent and beautiful in their own ways. I reckon it's important not to let your preferences and prejudices regarding nationality, age, gender, politics, race, social status, etc. block your ability to see and value any individual person. Of course, it's hard to open your mind to the amazing wonderfulness of individuals when you encounter so many at one time, in such a stressfully impersonal setting, that they become "bunches of people," as above.

Overrated: Skinny Jeans on Men. Two words- pinched, testicles.
Properly Rated: Leggings on Women. By all accounts this fashionable type of lower-body covering is very comfortable and practical for women, and from the man's point of view, "Rrrraow!"

Underrated: Sweatpants. I'm wearing some right now. Damn, I'm cozy. Please, fashion gods, make these cool so I can wear them outside without people giggling.

Overrated: The Threat of Socialism in a Democracy. There's nothing bad about moderate socialism in a democracy, really. In fact, the USA has always been governed in a partially socialistic way, has it not? I think most Americans would like to keep free 911 emergency services, keep free parks, public restrooms and freeways, keep free education for poor kids, and keep old people taken care of, even though all those things are socialistic. Yes, some socialistic countries like the USSR have been awful, but some like Sweden have been awesome, so we ought to realize that socialism itself is not the threat, and start trying to figure out what REALLY makes the difference between an awesome or awful country.

Underrated: The Threat of Capitalism out of Control. The flipside of the "socialism is evil" thing seems to be the naive idea that capitalism is perfect as long as the government doesn't interfere, to which I say, "yeah, right". For capitalism to work, I think the government NEEDS to interfere sometimes, just like a referee needs to blow a whistle and call foul to keeps sports teams playing fair. If there's no referee, or if one of the teams buys off the referee, you go from a "best man wins" situation to a "dirtiest cheater wins" situation. You get Tonya Harding on the podium and Nancy Kerrigan stuffed in a dumpster, which is where I'm afraid the whole country is going if we keep letting corporations muck with government.

Overrated: Making the most money. I think we focus too exclusively on wealth as the measure of success, which I reckon makes people greedier and more narrow-minded in their pursuits.
Underrated: Being a good person. We ought to appreciate other measures of a person's success, like the quality of their work, the positivity of their relationships, and their contributions to making the world a better place.

Overrated: Commuting. Seriously, what an awful way to spend a large fraction of your time, money, and mental reserves of patience.

Underrated: Living near where you work and play, or vice versa. That's the way to do it, in my opinion. Walking is also extremely underrated as a way to get from point A to point B, get a little exercise, get some mental clarity, etc.

Overrated: Tech Toys. Does checking email on your phone really make you $50 a month happier?
Underrated: Science Itself. Like, as a way of understanding and appreciating the universe.

Overrated: Growth. Nothing can grow forever on a planet that isn't getting any bigger- not the economy or anything else. So why do we always make it our implicit or explicit goal to increase growth?
Underrated: Sustainability. Yep, sustainability is what we ought to shoot for. But not "sustainable growth", which is the oxymoron of the century.

Overrated: Booze. The better it makes you feel, the worse it makes you feel, and the older you get the trickier it is to break even.

Slightly Overrated: Caffeine. It doesn't get you very high, but you still get addicted. On the plus side, it's the only drug you can do as much as you want at work.
Slightly Underrated: Marijuana. It can set your thoughts and perceptions loose in a happy, dreamy way, and open your mind to the intricate and miraculous wonder of the universe. Or it can make you feel queasy, insecure, and lost in existential weirdness. But either way it's pretty safe, as long as you don't get caught.
Underrated: Endorphins and Adrenaline. It's amazing how positive, relaxed, and satisfied thrilling physical activities can make you feel. These are probably the closest thing there is to the perfect drug.

Overrated: Advertising. We have to pay for cable tv. So why does it still have stupid ads? I guess as long as we keep watching ads they'll keep showing ads.

Underrated: Education. Education is underrated in general, but also specifically as an aid to critical thinking and an antidote to the intense brainwashing kids get from advertising. I reckon all tykes should have to take a class at some point on how to recognize and resist marketing tricks and not just take for granted all the ads they see.

Overrated: Packaging and Containers. The amount of bags, boxes, wrappers, cups, bottles, etc. that we use one and then throw away is totally ridiculous.

Slightly Overrated: Recycling. Taking a perfectly good bottle, grinding it to bits, melting it down in a giant furnace, and making it into another identical bottle isn't much more earth friendly than just making a bottle from scratch.
Underrated: Reducing and Reusing. Reusing bags, bottles, and containers and not buying stuff with a lot of excess packaging is the smart way to go. As a corollary, tap water is extremely underrated and bottled water is extremely overrated.

Overrated: Faith. I should be specific about this, because I don't think all kinds of faith are overrated. Faith can mean being able to trust people and be optimistic and hopeful in the face of adversity, which I think is cool. But faith can also mean steadfastly believing something without evidence, and refusing to change your belief even if evidence arises that it is untrue. That's the overrated kind of faith; the kind that makes most religions certain that they're right and the others are wrong, even though they're all on equally shaky ground.
Slightly Overrated: Common Sense. Common sense is often ok, but there's a fine line between common sense and naive oversimplification, and some smug proponents of common sense are actually way over on the wrong side of the line. Ahem, *Palin*.
Underrated: Skeptical Inquiry. Have you ever seen something you were directly involved with get reported on the news, and been appalled at how inaccurately or misleadingly it was represented? Well, I have, and now I assume that everything I see or read is a little off the mark, either accidentally or as a result of deliberate bias, even if it's presented with a tone of authority. I think if you really want to know about something you have to dig a lot and think critically.

Overrated: Our Level of Control Over Nature. We can't make food and drinking water from nothing, we can't make our garbage, shit and pollution disappear, we can't change the day-to-day weather, we can't always get rid of invasive species and diseases, and we can't bring back critters that we've driven too close to extinction.

Underrated: Our Ability to Inadvertently Screw Up Nature. We have already massively transformed the surface of the earth, the contents of the oceans, the gas composition of the atmosphere, the course of our rivers, the supply of our groundwater, and the number of species alive. Every piece of the planet is traced with our tracks and wakes, bullet holes and bomb craters, sidewalks and sewage lines, and the roar of engines and factories is everywhere. To assume that none of those huge, man-made changes could ever have any harmful side-effects, i.e. global warming or ocean acidification, would be very stupid.

Alright, that's it.

The Bunny Hill of DOOM

2011-01-08T21:05:00.000-08:00

Do not underestimate the danger of a bunny, or a bunny hill.

I went snowboarding with some pals today at "Nashoba Valley", a small ski resort near Boston. Since we were all newbies or nearly-newbies we stayed on the "bunny hill". A bunny hill is a small hill with a gentle incline for beginner skiers and snowboarders.

Back when I lived in Washington State I was a decent downhill skier and would have scoffed at the sissyness of a bunny hill. But on a snowboard I found the little hill plenty challenging, and even managed to bang myself up a fair amount until I began to get the feel by the end of the day. My friend Katie was also having a tough time at first, but leapfrogged ahead of her husband Nick and me when she traded her rented snowboard for skis in the afternoon. I took some video with my GoPro camera. The more awkward / funny stuff is at the beginning, and the getting-the-hang-of-it is towards the end, set to "Electric Feel" by the band "MGMT".

Bunny Hill Snowboard at Nashoba VAlley from James Douglass on Vimeo.

I'm really stoked on snowboarding now and I'm going to try to get some more sessions this winter. I actually went ahead and bought a board, boots, and bindings with the some of the $$ I got from selling my kiteboarding stuff. (It wasn't too expensive, and I should still have plenty for visiting my Florida sweetheart, which is my #1 winter well-being expenditure.) Anyway, the board is a "Ride Agenda 159" 2010 model.

The folks at the shop helped me set it up for a "duck foot" stance, which is with both feet angled slightly toward the tips. Most people set up their snowboards asymmetrically based on which foot they prefer to be the "front", but I went for the symmetrical duck foot stance because:

1. That's how kiteboards are set up, so I figured I would already be used to riding with either foot forward.
2. I'm just obsessive compulsive enough that asymmetry nags me.

The stance worked fine and I was able to lead with either foot, but it was easier leading with my right foot, which means my natural stance is "goofy foot" and I'll have to work a little harder to get the hang of left foot forward.

Rare Humongous Waves in Fort Pierce, Florida

2011-01-05T19:24:00.000-08:00

This happened a couple months ago, but the YouTube video just turned up today, prompting my post. A strong, long Nor'easter storm off New England sent mega swells South to Florida, where they turned usually-tame Fort Pierce inlet into a heavy, double-overhead break. Some of my kiter buddies were brave enough to ride it. Here's Brent Beringhaus and Greg "GK" Kuklinski. Wow.

And the video.

I don't know if any windsurfers made it out that day. I was in Boston. Wah wah.

Douglass Christmas 2010 - Blizzard Babies

2010-12-26T07:59:00.000-08:00

Gee, I feel like I'm in an episode of "Little House on the Prairie". Snowed in, sister's baby is worryingly ill, supplies are running low, and I'm about to have to cross-country ski over to the doctor's house. At least the wireless internet is still working fine.

Here's my older niece yesterday with her favorite present.

And here are some other nature and people pictures from my folks' new place in Asheville, North Carolina. These were taken by my aunt Mary Garland and Uncle Tom, who are big-time nature enthusiasts.

Apparently it's a blizzard in Boston, too, with 50 knot gusts. I wonder if anyone is windsurfing?

Olympic Sailing Classes; Sailboat, Windsurf, Kite?

2010-12-18T08:58:00.000-08:00

They've had sailing in the Olympic Summer Games since 1896, but the number of divisions and the types of boats have changed a lot, as interestingly described in this Wikipedia article. Right now they race about 7 types of boats, which includes one type of windsurf. In this post I briefly describe all the current Olympic classes, then weigh in on the controversy of whether things should be rearranged to add kiteboarding as an additional class.

The longest enduring model of boat in the Olympics is the "Star", a 22' keelboat with a crew of two, which was designed in 1910 and has been in the games since 1932.

The second longest enduring Olympic sailing class is the "Finn", a 15' dinghy sailed by one person, which was designed in 1949 and has been in the games since 1952. Compared to other singlehanded dinghys, the Finn favors a bigger, heavier sailor, so the burly male sailors of the world insist that the Finn remain an Olympic class to give them a chance to compete at the top level.

The third oldest Olympic Class is is the "470", a high-performance 15' dingy sailed by two lightweight athletes. It was designed in 1963 and has been in the games since 1976. The 470 is really complicated, with a lot of sail area divided among three sails, and a "trapeze" so the sailors can hike out over the water to balance. It requires a bunch of weird physical techniques from the sailors, like pelvic thrusts and disco pointing, to reach maximum planing performance. Fabulous!

Since 2000 there has been an even more complicated and higher performance 2-person dinghy in the Olympics. It's called the "49er". These boats have a ridiculous amount of sail area and special wings that the sailors stand on to get leverage over all that power. 49ers are fast enough to be competitive with windsurfs and kiteboards.

There's two other kinds of dinghy in the Olympics, the Laser (for men), and the Laser Radial (with a slightly smaller sail, for women). The lasers are nice, cheap, simple boats with one sail that are very popular with recreational sailors. The laser is a singlehanded event in the Olympics, but it can hold two people if they're not too heavy.

There was a 20' catamaran called the "Tornado" in the Olympics from 1976 to 2008. They dropped it for 2012 but they're probably going to bring it back in 2016. It has a two person crew.

The newest Olympic boat is the Elliot 6m, a moderate-sized keelboat with a full array of sails and a crew of about 3. It was designed around 2000 and will sail its first Olympics in 2012 as a women-only event.

Last but not least is the windsurfing class, which has been in the Olympics since 1984. In '84 the board was a "Windglider", which was a flat-bottomed longboard similar to the original Windsurfer One-Design that popularized the sport in the 1970s. In '88 they used round-bottomed boards called Division II boards, which were fast in light winds but awkward to sail. They used round-bottomed boards again in '92, but with some upgrades to the board and sail. From '96 - '04 they used a modern, flat-bottomed longboard called the Mistral One Design. That was a good board, but people complained that you had to be a very specific weight to be competitive. They also complained that the narrow longboard wasn't representative of performance windsurf racing in the 2000s, which was mostly done in 100% planing conditions on wide shortboards. In 2008 they changed the Olympic windsurf board to the "RS:X", a cross between a longboard and a wide shortboard, which used a daggerboard in light winds but fully planed around the course without the daggerboard in stronger winds. (For more info on the different kinds of windsurf racing, and picture, check my older blog post here.)

The perennial crisis for Olympic sailing comes from the fact that hardly anybody cares about sailing except sailors, and sailors care SO MUCH about their own favorite types of sailing that they rarely see eye to eye regarding what types should be in the Olympics. That and there's a high cost and hassle per athlete in sailing because of the large and expensive equipment and the logistical support needed. With those challenges in mind, I think that the organizing principles for choosing Olympic sailing classes should be:

1) Representing the most popular, affordable, and portable type(s) of sailing with the minimum number of classes.
2) Providing an interesting spectacle for TV viewers, raising the worldwide profile and popularity of sailing sports.
3) Giving a fair chance for the most talented and dedicated athletes to rise to the top.

For #1, I think it's useful to start by supposing you can only have ONE kind of sailing in the Olympics, so you have to pick the most general. Then as you add additional classes you do so in the way that hits the broadest branches of the sport first and the finer divisions later if resources allow. If there could only be one kind of boat in the Olympics I would pick a simple, single-handed dinghy like the Laser, which has all the elements of a traditional sailboat, including a fixed mast, a centerboard / keel, and a movable rudder.

If there could only be two kinds of boat, I would pick Laser and kiteboard, because kiting is the most different kind of sailing from the Laser, yet it still meets the criteria of being popular, affordable and portable. As a bonus, kiting would be a good TV spectacle (#2 on my "organizing principles" list).

If there could be three kinds of boat, I think windsurfer would be the next to include. Windsurfing is not as distinct from traditional sailing as is kiting, but it's still pretty different, seeing as the sailor stands up and holds the sail and doesn't use a rudder. Windsurfing is also pretty good as a TV spectacle because of the speed and the focus on the athletic rider.

If there could be four kinds of boat, I would add a sporty, 2-person catamaran. Little catamarans are the cheapest and most popular kind of high-performance sailboat, their split hulls effectively differentiate them from the first four kinds of boat, and they look pretty dramatic on TV when they get up on one hull. The Tornado catamaran that they've been using lately seems like a good one.

If there could be five kinds of boat, I would add a moderate-sized keelboat with a crew of about 3, since a lot of the world's recreational sailboat racing is done on boats of similar nature, i.e. bigger than a dinghy. Having a "real" sailboat in the Olympics might also help evoke the nautical mystique and the seafaring and naval battles of yore. As for the particular boat model, I think the Star has had a good run, but it's an old design that's boring compared to modern keelboats of similar size like the Elliot 6m. So I'd vote for the latter or something like it.

Only if there could be six or more kinds of sailboat would I consider adding a high-performance dinghy (aka "skiff") like the 470 or the 49'er. If it came to a choice between the two, I would go for the 49'er, because if you're going to go high performance you might as well go all the way for the maximum TV spectacle, and also because the 49'er is supposedly more accommodating of different size and weight sailors.

I'm getting pretty long-winded here, but I can't skip #3: giving a fair chance to the athletes. Making the competition fair for more than one specific body weight has been a major point of contention. One solution might be splitting the classes into actual body weight divisions by rule instead of de-facto body weight divisions by class of boat. Then you could get rid of some of the cheesy classes of boat like the Finn that only exist for the heavier sailors. Having fewer classes of boat, but more competitors per nation per class of boat, would give the competitors more opportunities to train together and share equipment and stuff.

For windsurfing and kiteboarding, fairness could also be increased by relaxing the one-design restrictions to allow different sized sails or kites for different weight competitors. That seems to work pretty well in the Kona ONE windsurfing class. You could also go a step further by allowing windsurfing and kiting competitors to choose different equipment for different conditions under a "box-rule". A box-rule allows a diversity of gear, but sets certain limits on the amount of stuff each competitor can bring, what size it can be, whether or not it can be custom made or has to come "off the shelf", etc. For example, the box-rule for the formula windsurfing class says you can bring one board with a max width of 100 cm, three sails with a max size of 12.5 m^2, and three fins with a max length of 70 cm. Switching gear between races would require a shift in the way the competitions are held, but you would need a shift, anyway, if you were going to try to accommodate kiting. That is, instead of launching from a marina or boat ramp like the current Olympic classes, the kiters would have to stage their show from a beach, and the beach would suit the windsurfs better, too.

I think some kind of blend between a box-rule and a one-design rule would give the best combination of fairness, coolness, and affordability for Olympic windsurfing and kiting. Like, multiple sizes of sails and kites would be allowed, but they would all be the same model, and there would just be one model of board. Being allowed to use a jumbo kite or sail in light wind would make 100% planing competition realistic in winds down to 7 or 8 knots. And the windsurfing class could finally get away from the continuous sail pumping, aka "air-rowing", that characterizes underpowered windsurf racing. Air rowing is an extremely athletic skill, and I have the greatest respect for those who are good at it, but it looks super lame and unappealing and windsurfers rarely do it except in Olympic style competition.

One problem with getting a tight box-rule for kiteboarding (which I believe is a prerequisite for fair Olympic competition) is that most kite raceboards have at least three fins, with an infinite variety of fin sizes, shapes, and tilt angles that need to be tweaked and changed all the time for different conditions.

A possible way around that would be to use a twin-tip kiteboard with a single center fin that could be adjusted on the fly for different conditions. This kind of board is a recent development, but it apparently performs on about the same level as the more fin-crazy directional raceboards.

Whew. I should stop there.

Cold Weather Limits Survey Results

2010-12-16T06:31:00.000-08:00

Dang, is it ever cold here in Massachusetts. There is a lot of wind but I am definitely NOT thinking about windsurfing. Actually, that's a lie. I AM thinking about windsurfing, but only in a mournful, unrequited love kind of way. If it got up to 4.5 Celsius (40 Fahrenheit) I might don the drysuit and give it a go, but this below-freezing stuff is just not my style.

I reckon now would be a good time to post the final results of my "What's your minimum air temperature for windsurfing or kiteboarding?" survey. Here they are:

Looks the most common temperature cut-off is between 10 and 7 Celsius (50 and 45 Fahrenheit), but there is a significant minority of insane people who claim to ride in sub-freezing weather. Must be Canadians and Europeans.

Leaks - Good or Bad?

2010-12-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

I had to stay home with a bad sore throat today, which was a bummer because I missed a bunch of marine biology student presentations at work, as well as big wind for a windsurfing lunch-break I had planned. It turned out to be ok, though, because I got to lay back on the futon and watch a cool Netflix movie that had been sitting on my breakfast table for a month. The movie was a documentary called "The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers". I didn't know exactly what it was about until I started watching, but I soon realized that even though it described a 40 year old event, it was apropos to the current fuss about WikiLeaks. Check out the trailer...

Did you catch what Nixon said?

"I think it's time in this country to quit making national heroes of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspaper."

Ellsberg's outing of the "secrets" Nixon was talking about revealed how presidential lies had mislead the US into the awful Vietnam War. Along with the later Watergate Scandal, they contributed to Nixon's ouster and to the long-overdue US withdrawal from Vietnam. Who knows how much longer the war would have dragged on, and how many more millions of Vietnamese and thousands of US soldiers would have died if Ellsberg's leak hadn't exposed the false pretenses and un-winable nature of the Vietnam War. That was a case where the whistleblower was in the right, and the government was definitely in the wrong.

Now check out this quote:

"Some may mistakenly applaud those responsible [for the leak], so I want to set the record straight. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people, and there is nothing great about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends."

That was Hillary Clinton, responding to Julian Assange's recent "WikiLeak" release of a bunch of secret correspondence among US diplomats, which revealed, well, nothing new, really, unless you thought that world leaders WEREN'T a bunch of egotistical, conniving sleazoids.

(As an aside, it's interesting that this WikiLeak has garnered much more media attention and government condemnation than the Afghanistan and Iraq "War Log" WikiLeaks earlier this year. The war log leaks showed that the Iraq and Afghanistan operations are horrible, bloody, hopeless grinds, which are accomplishing little in the way of improving those countries, and even less in the way of making the world safer from terrorist attack. But folks don't seem to care about that news nearly as much as they care about the gossipy "she said WHAT about WHO?" world-leader trash talk in the latest release. Sigh.)

Anyway, I think the important question is, who is in the right this time around - the secret makers or the secret leakers? I won't say much about whether Julian Assange himself is a hero, a lout or a terrorist, except that I don't think he's a terrorist. He has some date rape allegations pending from this summer in Sweden, so he might be a lout. Then again, the alleged date rape incidents occurred right after Assange had made himself hated by the most powerful governments and spy-agencies on earth, so he could easily have been the target of a professional frame-up. So I think we need to reserve judgement on the personality of the man for now and focus on the rightness or wrongness of the leaks, starting with Clinton's main arguments against leaking the secrets:

Have the leaked secrets really put diplomats, spies, and other "innocent people" in mortal peril? I doubt it, because WikiLeaks and the news companies like the New York Times that have the secret files are careful about erasing the names of individuals who might be endangered before they release anything. As far as I know, no individual has been outed and done harm through any of these leaks, including the old Pentagon Papers.

Have the leaks really been harmful to the cause of world peace and social justice? I doubt that, too. You can't oppose war and injustice if the war and injustice are kept secret by the government.

Eh, that's about all I have to say now, but I'll definitely be watching this closely to see how it develops.

Quitting Kiteboarding

2010-11-30T16:59:00.000-08:00

I learned how to kiteboard about a year and a half ago when I was living in Florida. Although I often had gear failures and frustrations, I mostly avoided injury, and I found kiteboarding to be easy, fun, and well-suited to Florida's prevalent, light seabreezes. Windsurfing remained my preferred sport for winds over 15 knots, but a 12 meter squared kite and a few kiteboards took care of most of my "light wind planing" needs. I figured I'd be a two-watersport guy for the rest of my life, but things changed.

One thing that changed was that I moved to Massachusetts, where the wind is gusty and the water is cold. I've kited a bit here, but it's sketchy. In these conditions I prefer the security of a board that floats and a sail that I know will stop pulling when I let go. It's also windier overall in Massachusetts than in Florida, and I don't seem to need anything more powerful than a 7 or 8 msq windsurf sail and a slalom board to get plenty of fully-powered sessions.

Another thing was realizing that I simply like windsurfing better than kiting. It's not that I don't like kiteboarding- I do. I think it's cool to be effortlessly powered in "tweener" wind strengths with a kite, and the soaring, Peter Pan jumps are a rush. But the basic riding sensation is more satisfying to me on a windsurf. I like the direct feedback from the board, the fin, and the sail, and I feel more like the whole assembly is an extension of myself. On a windsurf I can sail along not doing anything special, just appreciating the feeling of motion and forces in balance. I get a little of that kiting, too, but it's not as nice.

The final thing was my limited storage space, time, and financial resources. I started thinking about an extra $1500 in my pocket, a less cluttered van and board rack, and fewer "what to rig" decisions, and I decided to QUIT KITEBOARDING AND SELL MY GEAR. If I someday find myself idle rich and living in a warm, light-wind place like Florida or San Diego then I may take it up again. We'll see.

Anyway, here's a video from yesterday afternoon of what may have been my last kiteboarding session ever. Below the video I've listed the kite gear I have for sale.

Last Kite Sesh, 30 Nov 10 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

2008 Flysurfer Speed 2 (closed-cell foil kite) 12 msq. Perfectly tuned with bar and lines included. $750 SOLD
Two-line trainer kite, 4 msq, with bar and lines. $60 SOLD
Michael Gebhardt - designed directional freeride / raceboard. Unique and extremely badass. $500 SOLD
2006 Litewave Freeride 179 cm Twintip. Best beginner kiteboard ever, and very comfy ride in chop. $180 SOLD
2009 Litewave Spirit 137 cm Twintip. Do-it-all kiteboard for medium and stronger wind. Nice footpads. $250

1992, 7th grade, Rough Year

2010-11-29T12:02:00.000-08:00

At my folks' house for Thanksgiving I was able to dig up the 7th grade school picture that I had originally intended to use in my "Ugliness, Fairness and Happiness" blog entry.

Updated Windsurf Calculator Online

2010-11-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

Note: the Kiteboard Calculator can be found here.

Yo yo yo! When I realized I could embed an Excel file on my blog I decided to do it with the latest version of my Automatic Windsurfing Equipment Calculator. Heh heh heh. Some changes from the old version of the calculator are: 1) Fixed the lbs / kgs typo, 2) Added a decimal place to the wind strengths table, 3) Simplified the fin size calculator, 4) Added several more categories of board to the board size calculator. Lemme know what you think.

Calculator embedded below, or download the file here.

Conductivity to Salinity Conversion for Excel

2010-11-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

At work the other day I was trying to make sense of a bunch of water quality sensor data from the Indian River Lagoon in Florida. The sensor had measured electrical conductivity as a proxy for salinity (saltier water conducts electricity better because the salt ions ferry the charges), but no conversion had been made from conductivity to actual salinity.

It turns out that converting from conductivity to salinity is tricky, because the mathematical relationship depends in a complicated way on both temperature and pressure. (Although you don't have to worry about the pressure part if you're dealing with surface waters at 1 atm pressure.) In my Google search for answers I found a website that will do the conversion for you if you enter a particular conductivity and temperature into a box. But that's not much use if you have hundreds or thousands of concurrent temperature and conductivity recordings that you need to convert in a spreadsheet. So I dug deeper and found a 1983 paper that had the actual formulas needed for the conversion. I put the formulas into a Microsoft Excel worksheet and fed them the Indian River Lagoon sensor data. It worked! I think.

Interestingly, it seems that the part of the Indian River Lagoon where the readings were taken gets a bit saltier than the ocean in Florida's winter dry season, but is only about 2/3 as salty as the ocean in the summer wet season.

Anyway, I'm making the Excel file that does the conversion available for download here, along with an example using the sensor data from the IRL. I'm trying to embed it below. If you're a scientist and you notice some error in my calculations, let me know ASAP so I can fix it. Thanks.

Onshore Offshore Sideshore Frontside Backside

2010-11-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

I had fun windsurfing at the Nahant Causeway on Wednesday afternoon. The wind was "side-offshore" from the Southwest, and it picked up throughout the session up to the point that I was overpowered on my 4.7 meter squared sail. The waves were waist to chest high and nicely set up for long "frontside rides". Here's the video. The song is by the band "Air".

SW Wavesailing Nahant 17 Nov 10 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Also, since I'm always blogging about "onshore, offshore, sideshore, frontside, backside" etc., I figured I ought to put in some pictures that illustrate what those terms actually mean in the context of riding waves with a windsurf. I defined the terms earlier in my "windsurfing slang" post, but I think the pictures will help.

First up there are the wind angles, which are defined relative to the line of the shore. Onshore wind blows from the ocean directly towards the beach, in roughly the same direction that the waves are moving. Offshore wind blows from the shore to the sea, in the opposite direction of the incoming waves. (Waves often originate from hundreds of miles away where the wind is blowing in a different direction. That's why there can still be waves when the wind at the beach is blowing offshore.) Sideshore winds are blowing parallel to the shore, from the right or the left. Side-onshore and side-offshore winds are diagonal to the shore.

You can ride waves on a windsurf in any wind direction, but you have to ride the waves in different ways, depending. In onshore wind, the wind and the waves are moving in the same direction- towards the shore. So you have to ride downwind with your back to the wave. This is "backside" wave riding. It's generally considered the least desirable kind of wave riding, because the wave's movement subtracts from the apparent wind speed, the waves are often disorganized and bumpy with wind-driven chop, and after you're done riding the wave you have to work your way upwind through a bunch of waves to get back where you started. Onshore wave riding is still awesome, though.

Offshore wind can be cool for waveriding, because you can ride with your body facing the wave, banking off of it like a nascar driver on a raised track as it pushes you upwind towards the shore. It's also a fairly easy downwind trip to get back where you started and catch another wave, like riding an escalator up and taking a waterslide down. This is "frontside" wave riding. It can be a bit hard to initially catch the waves, though, because you have to ride upwind to do so. It's also impossible to get ahead of a wave in straight offshore wind, so once you're on it you either have to ride it to the end or sneak out over the back of it before it breaks. Also, offshore wind tends to be gusty and light near the shore, and it has an element of danger, because if you break down you might get blown out to sea. For these reasons, folks usually prefer side-offshore wind over pure offshore wind.

Sideshore wind is probably the best of both worlds, because it allows you do both frontside and backside wave riding. Backside waveriding in sideshore wind helps you get upwind at a steeper angle than you can normally sail because you're getting a boost from the wave. And frontside waveriding in sideshore wind has a dynamic feel where you alternate between riding powered by the wind and riding powered by the wave. You can even mix frontside riding and backside riding on the same wave in sideshore conditions. What a lot of people do is ride the wave backside at first to grind upwind, then when wave the wave gets closer to shore and starts to steepen up and break, they swoop downwind do some frontside turns on it. Super cool.

The Basic Evolutionary Explanation for Why We Age

2010-11-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

Evolution by natural selection favors traits that enhance an organism's chances of surviving and reproducing. So you'd think evolution would lead to organisms that could stay strong, healthy, and fertile forever.

Obviously, though, that's not the case. Almost all species of animal, including humans, have a limited lifespan and lose their fitness and fertility as they age. Why?

There are a couple of theories. The main one, which is still the most accepted, was first articulated in the 1950s by a scarily intense-looking British MD named Peter Medawar (below). Dude, you're freaking me out with that cold stare!

Anyway, Medawar's theory has to do with the fact that nature is harsh, and most wild animals die from things like predators, accidents, or disease well before they reach their maximum lifespan. That means that old individuals are rare in animal populations, even when age itself is not what's killing them. You can see that illustrated in the graph below, which I made for a hypothetical animal species in which individuals have a 50% chance of getting killed in any given year. Remember that this demographic pattern arises even without aging. I haven't said anything yet about why aging occurs, but I'm getting to it.

Since the chances of surviving a long time in a dangerous environment are slim, there's strong evolutionary pressure for animals to kick ass and reproduce when they're young, whereas there's little pressure for them to maintain their health and fertility beyond the age when they're likely to be dead anyway. It's easy for genetic mutations that cause deterioration with age to accumulate in a population where most of the individuals breed and die before they're old enough for the deterioration to start. For example, natural selection would quickly get rid of a mutant gene that caused arthritis early in life, because those that had the gene would be less likely to reproduce. But natural selection wouldn't easily get rid of a gene that caused arthritis late in life, because most individuals with the gene would have already reproduced and died before the arthritis could interfere. Genes that cause age-related ailments may spread even easier if they have beneficial effects when the organisms that have them are young. E.g., evolution would favor a gene that increased early reproduction, even if the same gene lead to sterility in older individuals.

One of the predictions of Medawar's theory is that species that lead dangerous lives in nature will also tend to age early, while species that have few predators or risks will have evolved to stay healthy and fertile longer. That's why mice, which are very vulnerable to predation in the wild, only live a couple years in captivity, while the Aldabra Giant Tortoise, which has no natural enemies, may have an unlimited lifespan.

And what a life it is!

Humans are a funny case because modern civilization has drastically reduced our chances of getting killed by predators, diseases and accidents, but evolution hasn't had enough time to push back our aging process accordingly. Given enough generations of modernity, we could potentially evolve to stay healthy and fertile longer, but there are a lot of other things going on with human population and society that make our future evolution hard to predict.

Cold Weather Limits, Drysuit, Stuff for Sale

2010-11-13T09:27:00.000-08:00

November scene from Canoe Beach, Nahant, Massachusetts

Y'all probably noticed the poll about cold weather windsurfing and kiting that I put in the left hand sidebar. (Encountering my cold weather limits here in MA got me curious about other folks' temperature thresholds.) The survey results are spread out, but most people, including me, seem to call it quits somewhere between 45 and 50 degrees F. In my experience, that's the temperature zone where it becomes critical to have all your extremities covered and your core well-insulated. Any "chink in the armor" will be painfully obvious, and you may be a bit uncomfortable even when totally swaddled. Personally I'm amazed how I can be totally cozy in 55 degrees, even with no gloves and my hood pulled back, while in 45 degrees I can barely handle it with all my gear on.

To try to extend my limit down to ~40 degrees, and extend my season by a month or so on either end, I picked up a used drysuit. It's a "bag" style suit that you wear clothes underneath. I haven't had a chance to use it yet because the week of cold wind we were having suddenly gave way to calm, sunny 60 degree weather. But I did go ahead and shave my wrists and ankles so the gaskets will seal better. Apparently if you have a hard crash a bit of water will squeeze through the gaskets, so you don't want to wear any nice clothes underneath it.

To make room for the new drysuit I'm selling an older semi-dry wetsuit that I never use anymore, cheap (see sidebar). It's 6 mm thick and very warm, but it wouldn't win any prizes for flexibility. Anyway, the price is right if somebody wants it. I'm also selling a couple fins, one for just 5 bucks, and a nice 4.25 msq sail.

Another Song by My Sweetheart

2010-11-10T20:58:00.000-08:00

Dating a musician is pretty cool because, in addition to the usual stuff you share when you're getting to know each other, you can learn interesting things about your lover from her song lyrics. You might even learn more than you want to know. But I guard against that by assuming that any depressing or angry song was inspired by a lesser guy from the past, while any song that is happy, romantic, or naughty is about me. Nevermind that most of the romantic songs were written before I knew her- I'm sure she was dreaming of the study windsurfing marine biologist she hoped to meet one day.

I like this particular song, "Eve Ocean", because it draws metaphorical relationships between the wild ocean and female emotions, because it sounds good, and because there might be a bad word in part of it but you have to guess what the word is. The only downside to the song is that to listen to it you have to watch this video of me windsurfing at Revere Beach.

Revere Beach Windsurfing 11-10-10 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

You can watch windsurfing-free videos of Emily and her band here and here, and you can download some of her mp3s here.

Unremarkable but of Sound Karma

2010-11-09T18:22:00.000-08:00

I didn't windsurf over the weekend or yesterday. It was so cold, rainy, rough, and dark that I just couldn't convince myself to put on the wet wetsuit. SIGH. I got a lot of work and reading done but it felt strange and sad to hear the wind screaming and not to answer. I had known my watersports season wouldn't last all year here in Boston, but I wasn't prepared for it to end right then.

So today when the mercury creeped over 10C for the first time in a while, I creeped down to the Nahant Causeway to sail. The conditions were mellow compared to the previous days' gales; a flukey 15 knots from the North with waist to chest high swells from the East. I only planed in the gusts with my 5.5 sail, and only managed a few so-so wave rides, but it felt good. Yeah, I'll hang up the boom for the winter. But not quiiiiiiiiite yet.

The song in the video is by The The.

N Nahant 11-09-10 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Nahant Windsurfing; Pre- and Post-Frontal

2010-11-06T10:09:00.001-07:00

View of Boston Skyline from Nahant, MA, 5 November 2010

One of the fun things about being a windsurfer is trying to figure out the weather patterns of a new area, how they change through the seasons, and how they interact with shoreline geography to determine the best spots to ride at different times. I had all that figured out when I lived in Virginia and Florida, but I'm still working on it for Massachusetts. A cool thing about Mass is that it gets big, rotating storms that start with onshore wind and rough waves, then shift to sideshore or offshore wind and nicely-groomed swells as the storm moves out to sea. That was exactly the scenario that played out last Thursday and Friday in Nahant.

Thursday had blasting 30 mph winds, fog, and sideways rain from the Northeast. I went windsurfing from the causeway after work and was overpowered on 4.2. The wind and the relentless, incoming waves were very challenging and I got tired out quickly, partly because I had stupidly wrecked myself the night before by going to the gym for the first time in two years. Anyway, it soon it felt like I was stuck in molasses and I was almost too tired to walk or swim after my gear when I crashed. My old wetsuit felt like it was squeezing the life out of my sore muscles, and my hood and helmet strap felt like they were choking me. During some washings I felt water gushing in my nose and flowing out my mouth. Yikes! Next time it's like that I'll take the wiser local windsurfers' advice and launch up by the Lynn / Swampscott line where it's more sideshore and protected.

Friday the wind was a mellower 10-20 mph from the Southwest, but the big swells were still coming in from the Northeast. I used a 5.5 sail and my floaty 106 liter board and got some fantastic "frontside" wave rides with blue skies and in the company of a bunch of surfers and paddleboarders. I tell you what- the feeling of rushing "down the line" on a frontside wave ride on a windsurfer is the most awesome thrill I have ever gotten in any sport. So much power, so focused. The pictures below are from Friday. It was a "minus" tide so the beach was even broader than usual. It looks like the waves are small, but if you compare them to the little black speck down by the water (a surfer) you can see that they're actually big.

In other news, it's getting COLD here, and I don't know how much longer my watersports season will last. I may be able to get a few more days if the repair I just did on this hole in the back of my wetsuit holds.

Also, the forecast for the next couple days is ridiculous. HUGE waves and NUCLEAR wind. Given my scary experiences on Thursday I'm going to play it safe and may sail a flatwater spot or just stay home if it's too hardcore.

Surf forecast for the upcoming week from magicseaweed>

They Still Kill and Eat Dolphins in Japan

2010-11-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

Here's something that I think hippie liberals and tea partying patriots can BOTH raise a stink about: The fact that DOLPHINS, the cute clever kind like Flipper, are being brutally killed en masse in Japan, for food. Yuck! They're not even covered by the flimsy International Whaling Commission regulations that supposedly limit the killing of larger whales.

It's ridiculous for a number of reasons:

1. Dolphin meat far, far exceeds the legal limit of poisonous Mercury.
2. Hardly anybody even likes dolphin meat- it's 1/3 the price per pound of the cheapest grade of tuna, and they can only get rid of it by deceptively packaging it as other kinds of whale, or sneaking into poor kids' school lunches.
3. It probably wouldn't even be economical to kill dolphins, except that the fishermen cull a few of the cutest ones from each batch they round up to sell for $150,000 to places like SeaWorld and "swim with the dolphins" resorts. (So don't give your money to any of those places!)
4. Dolphins are probably the most intelligent and self-aware non-human animals on earth. They are aware of everything that's going on around them as all their friends and babies are rounded up into a cove for the slaughter. They leap and squeak in desperate efforts to communicate (perhaps trying to reason with us?) as they are agonizingly killed one by one by haphazard skewering.
5. Dolphins are relatively long-lived and slow reproducing animals that could easily be driven to extinction by the hunting. There used to be more than one town in Japan that hunted dolphins, but now all but the one town of Taiji has run out of dolphins to kill. They kill 20,000 each September in Taiji. Ugh.

I got on this dolphin-protecting tear just now after watching "The Cove", a documentary about the little town in Japan where all the dolphins are being killed. So that you can do something besides just get depressed about it, there's a page here with suggested things you can do to help. I embedded the trailer below.

The fact that this movie has come out and exposed what's going on, and Japan's only response has been to soup up their propaganda, makes me think that the Japanese government SUCKS. Seriously, I'm having major second thoughts about my plan to buy Subaru when my student loans are paid off.

Quick Way to Find Out Where to Vote

2010-11-02T05:28:00.000-07:00

It's Nov 2nd, y'all. Time to vote.

You can just type your address into this link and it will tell you where you're registered to vote:

http://pol.moveon.org/votinginfo2010.html

Also, remember to vote for progressive liberals and not corporate-funded shysters or scary bozos from the Tea Party.

I really think this is a make-or-break time for the USA, since it's our first big election since the "FEC vs. Citizens United" supreme court decision. That horrible decision allowed ultra-rich corporations to make unlimited campaign donations, likely opening the floodgates to corruption and revving up the money-is-power-power-is-money feedback cycle that threatens the fairness of our society and the rights of not-ultra-rich people.

Serious Kite Accident in Nahant

2010-10-31T20:22:00.000-07:00

Dang. While I was windsurfing on the East side of the Nahant causeway Saturday a kiteboarder got nearly killed on the West side of the causeway at "Dog Beach". Here is the ikitesurf forum thread that describes the accident...

http://www.ikitesurf.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=16556

On a related note, American kiteboarder Rob Douglas broke the world speed sailing record AGAIN, just a few days after the last record was set. His speed over 500 meters: 55.65 knots / 64 mph. Crazy. Then he broke his wrist and had to go home to America from Namibia where the record attempt was happening. Check out the ludicrous video.

This kind of thing reinforces my decision to only kite in lighter winds.

The Best Personal Advice Ever

2010-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

Life is not entirely straightforward.

For one thing, it's chock full of bewildering, unanswerable questions: Where does consciousness come from? Why are you YOU? What's up with this relentless, un-rewindable flow of time that leads to death? Is there any kind of meaning or design or fate or continuation of spirit beyond your several decades of eating sleeping breathing aging and if you're lucky reproducing? Etcetera.

For another thing, life tends to involve a lot of weary work and suffering, especially if you have lofty goals like pursuing an advanced degree or a competitive career, or if you're coping with unfortunate circumstances like you're a soldier in a particularly horrible war in the middle of winter and your boots have holes and lice are gnawing your testicles and your friends are getting blown to bits all around you and you don't know where your family is and your side is losing. Yikes!

In spite of those challenges, and excepting some extremely unlucky cases like that cold soldier, life can be pretty good. I feel like mine is good, at least. Besides luck, I reckon all it takes is a little effort and the right attitude. To that end, I want to share the bits of personal advice or insight that have made the biggest difference for me in really enjoying life.

#1- Try to have a positive attitude and be optimistic, even when things seem ridiculously bad. My mom gave me that piece of advice when I was in the 6th grade, I took it to heart, and almost immediately I noticed a huge improvement from dreadful anxiety to tolerable drudgery. The positive things I tried to focus on were pretty cheesy, like, "I'm going to have some delicious Apple Cinnamon Cheerios in the morning, then after school I'm going to look for salamanders in the woods and check out Ginger on Gilligan's Island." But that was a lot better than the negative things I had been dwelling on before, like, "I have to wake up in the pitch dark and walk to the bus stop in the cold rain past the mean dogs to be bounced around like a pinball and harassed by huge 8th graders in the crowded, putrid hallways of middle school." Yep, a positive attitude is totally key. Besides making you feel much better about your circumstances, I think it can actually improve the circumstances themselves, over time. :)

#2- Don't be shy, or afraid to take a chance. This is something my dad always told me when I was a kid, but it took a long time for me to get it.

#3- It's good to be introspective and to try to reason things out in your mind, but if you find yourself obsessing over an intractable problem or anxiety and you're not making progress or getting closure, just let it go and distract yourself with something else. You'll likely realize that the problem wasn't such a big deal after all, and you're gonna be fine. My dad told me that when I was in college and dealing with a stressful school, relationship, and personal crisis, and it really helped. I should also give some credit to my childhood best friend Erik Stoddard for giving me similar advice in a different form when we were about eight years old, "James, you worry too much." Ha ha. It's sort-of the same advice the Beatles give in their song, "Let it Be".

#4- You should work hardest on the things that you're best at and the things that you're worst at. I'm not sure who told me that, but I think it was one of my highschool teachers. Anyway, it was awesome advice. Working on the things that you're best at is cool because those are kind of what defines your character. Working on the things that you're worst at is also cool because it sort of breaks the chains that might hold you back in life. Erik Stoddard's childhood insight comes into this one again for me, because I will never forget how he said, "James, you have book smarts but not people smarts". Well, I worked on my book smarts and got a PhD, which is great, but what has really improved my life since highschool has been working on my people smarts. I'm still working.

#5 (Bonus)- Windsurfing.

Flat Nahant 10-30-10 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Kiteboarder Breaks Speed Record... by a lot

2010-10-19T18:52:00.000-07:00

At various points in the past decade, each of three very different types of watercraft; windsurf, kiteboard, and specialized sailboat, has held the world record for wind-propelled speed on liquid water. So it has been an interesting decade, if you're into that sort of thing. Here's a rundown of the record-breaking from sailspeedrecords.com. This is average speed measured over a 500 meter stretch. A knot is 1.15 mph:

Year, Type of Watercraft, Skipper Name, Venue, Speed
1993, Yellow Pages (wing-sail sailboat), Simon McKeon, Sandy Point, Australia, 46.52 kts
2004, Windsurfer, Finian Maynard, Stes. Marie Speed Ditch, France, 46.82 kts
2005, Windsurfer, Finian Maynard, Stes. Marie Speed Ditch, France, 48.70 kts
2008, Windsurfer, Antoine Albeau, Stes. Marie Speed Ditch, France, 49.09 kts
2008, Kite-board, Robert Douglas, Luderitz Speed Ditch, Namibia, 49.84 kts
2008, Kite-board, Sebastien Cattelan, Luderitz Speed Ditch, Namibia, 50.26 kts
2008, Kite-board, Alexandre Caizergues, Luderitz Speed Ditch, Namibia, 50.57 kts
2009, Hydroptere (hydrofoil trimaran), Alain Thebault, Hyeres Bay, France 51.36 kts

and just the other day...

2010, Kite-board, Alexandre Caizergues, Luderitz Speed Ditch, Namibia, 54.10 kts (62.3 mph!)

Wow. I think it's unlikely now that windsurfers will ever recapture the record, since Antoine Albeau's amazing 49.09 knot run in perfect conditions in 2008 is a full 5 knots slower than Caizergues' new kiteboard record. Oh, well. I think it's just easier to get extreme speeds on a kiteboard because of the physics of it. The kite is higher in the air where the wind is unobstructed, the board and fin can be smaller, and the kiteboard can run at a deeper downwind angle. Of course, "easy" is relative. All these record attempts look extremely difficult and dangerous to me, and I wonder how long it will be before someone gets killed smacking into a sandbar or something. Yikes.