Northwest breeze this morning at Jaycee Park in Fort Pierce. Strapped a GoPro camera to my 12 m kite's center strut and went for a ride in the Indian River Lagoon. The angle wasn't exactly right and I had to crop and zoom a lot of the video for things to show up, but I still think it came out cool. Nice view from up there.
The trend of weird winds continues in Florida. The other day we had a Northwest breeze that was rideable from South Causeway Park in Fort Pierce for a short time while the tidal current was favorable. I started windsurfing with a 5.5 sail and a small board, then the wind lightened up and I did some kiteboarding. I took video with my GoPro camera mounted on a helmet. The video color and quality seemed to degrade a bit when I uploaded it to Vimeo. Oh, well.
I was vacationing with my family at the beach in Brunswick, Georgia. My dad and I were standing at the base of a dune, looking out at the ocean and the windy conditions. For some reason it was my dad who was jonesing to go windsurfing, and not me. I didn't think windsurfing was a good idea at that particular time and place, because the beach was strewn with barrels of toxic waste and there were dead fish (mostly pufferfish) rolling around in the pollution-stained waves.
To make matters worse, dozens of large sharks had moved inshore to feed on the dead fish, and were splashing around in a savage frenzy. Some stupid tourists waded right into the water to take pictures of the sharks. At least one of the tourists had an underwater camera and was getting right up in the sharks' faces with it. I was wondering what to do about the tourists when I noticed a group of kiters approaching from upwind, doing a "downwinder" through the surf. As I watched them cut through smooth areas between the crumbling swells I noticed that the tide was going out fast, like a wave sucking back. Dead pufferfish and thrashing sharks were exposed on the bare, wet sand and the stunned kiters were stranded. On the distant horizon I saw a line of whitewater. It grew bigger, and I saw another line of white above it, then another and another, stacking up like a towering wedding cake of water. Tsunami! I didn't know where my dad was. I turned to run back along the path between the dunes, frantic to get to the trees and stilt houses where I might climb up to safety. I willed my legs to move faster, but DAMN, the harder I tried to run, the more it seemed I was mired in invisible molasses, stuck in slow motion!
And then I woke up.
Some dreams are hard to interpret, but this one was straightforward. Brunswick, Georgia was because my pal Marc had been talking the previous evening about how he'd been considering a job there. My family is always on my mind, and I guess I'm thinking of them in different places now because my folks are selling the house I grew up in and my sister and brother in law just moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. Windsurfing, well, that's obvious. The toxic waste is probably because I was recently in a discussion with some other windsurfers about the garbage and oil-strewn beaches in South Texas. Also, I almost stepped on a syringe at South Causeway park when kiting with Marc a few weeks ago, and I DID step on a dead pufferfish. (Lots of puffers died during the cold snap a while back, and even when there hasn't been a cold snap there's always a few dead ones rolling around the beach because fishermen catch them and accidentally / on-purpose kill or maim them when removing the hook.) The shark thing is also pretty obvious. The tourist photographer part was probably inspired by this scary (but later proven fake) photo series taken by a surf photographer. Kiters on a downwinder is because Marc did a downwinder on his kite Sunday. The tsunami probably came from older fear of tsunamis from living in the Pacific Northwest, plus lingering shock and horror at the Banda Aceh tsunami of 2004 and the more recent terrible earthquake in Haiti. I don't know about the paralyzed / stuck in molasses feeling, but it seems to a be a common thing that happens to me when I'm trying to run in a dream. I've been struggling to get certain things done at work so I can get on to certain other things, so maybe the paralysis feeling has something to do with that.
Anyway, I had a hard time getting back to sleep after the nightmare, because I started thinking about death and stuff. Why are we here?, what is this absurd thing we call life?, if there's nothingness before we're born and after we die what should we do with our brief window of somethingness?, how am I going to find a girlfriend and a permanent job?, what direction will the wind blow today?, etc. etc. The typical existential crisis kind of things that you think about after a bad dream at 5 am. I didn't come to any conclusions but I did sort of organize my best guesses about what happens when we die in a way that I was satisfied with. At least satisfied enough to go back to sleep for a couple more hours.
#1 Guess- Nothingness, like before we were born, which wasn't so bad. #2 Guess- Seamlessly appearing in the "now" of some random other consciousness, in some random other universe, unaware of ever having been anything else, just like you started out here. Reincarnation, if you want to call it that. #3 Guess- Some kind of afterlife or dream state more like we typically hope for and imagine. Heaven, if you want to call it that.
I've been on sort-of a kiteboarding kick lately. I don't know why, exactly. It might have to do with the fact that everyone I ride with is a kiter, so all the socializing, tech-talk, and gear-swapping I'm doing on the beach (or in the bar afterwards) is kite-centric. It's like I'm in the middle of the chain of kiteboarding stoke, learning from the good riders, commiserating with the dudes at my own level, and trying to help out the beginners.
Today was an interesting session. The weather reports and some of the inland sensors indicated a southeasterly seabreeze, but standing on the beach I could barely feel any wind. Far off in the distance, though, I could see Mike Gebhardt and Sean Farley's kites weaving around in tandem, meaning they had somehow found enough wind to do course-racing practice on their kite gear. One funny thing I noticed about Gebi's kite, and to a lesser extent Sean's, was that it was extremely high in the air. I.e. the racers were using lines significantly longer than the 20 meter default lines for most kites. That enabled them to tap into a layer of strong wind well above the surface level, and to a get longer "power strokes" when flying their kites. When the lads returned to Kimberly Bergalis beach where we were launching (in order to do some fin-changes on their course racing boards) I was amazed to see how high Gebi's kite actually was. My pal Marc talked to him and found out he was using 54 meter lines! So his kite was 177 feet up, almost as high as the top of the "wing sail" on Oracle's giant Americas Cup trimaran.
I optimistically decided to rig my own 12 meters squared kite, hoping my 20 meter lines would be enough to tap into the upper level breeze. Sure enough, even though it seemed like less than 10 knots on the beach, which usually means your kite is going to fall out of the sky, there was plenty of wind aloft to kite comfortably with my big 180 cm twin-tip kiteboard. I did notice that I lost much of my power when I flew the kite low to the water, which made sense.
Marc hadn't been planing to kite, since his two biggest kites are both busted at the moment, but he decided to double the line length on his 11 meter squared kite to (hopefully) give it a little extra pull. I was surprised how well it worked for him. He couldn't quite stay upwind, but it was still impressive that even though he's bigger than me he was still able to get going on a smaller kite. Part of that was his special board, a litewave "wing", which is very flat and wide at each end to help it plane early.
Here's the iWindsurf.com sensor reading from the nearest sensor to where were riding. I think the sensor must be fairly high up, since this seems to jive more with what our kites were feeling than with what we were feeling on the beach.
That's what they call it when you enter your own name in an internet search. It's terribly vain, but who can resist the opportunity to determine precisely how interesting and important he is, relative to other people with the same name? I certainly couldn't, but what I found when I googled "james g douglass" was more than I had bargained for...
I'm glad that my eponymous predecessor enjoyed the show, at least. Personally, I don't much care for opera, but if I could bite the dust at the symphony that would be pretty cool.
My mom has been a big-time Norway groupie ever since a high-school foreign exchange trip put her in touch with her midwestern scandinavian heritage. Our house growing up had lots of varnished wood things, straw animals, troll art, and other Norwegian knick-knacks, and around the holidays we always ate lefse, rice pudding, and funny little crackers spread with smoked fish and brown goat's cheese. Whenever we were hiking in the mountains of Washington State my mom would give a joyful sigh and exclaim, "Ah, this looks just like NORWAY!" We even hosted a Norwegian exchange student named Knut for a whole year while I was in highschool. I've personally never been there, but I have to admit, it seems like a pretty nice place.
Portly documentarian Michael Moore, who is reviled by the right wing but seems like a pretty good guy to me, was also impressed with Norway, as revealed in this short documentary. It's been around YouTube for a while, so maybe you've seen it before.
One thing that isn't quite perfect about Norway is that they're one of the three countries left that still kill whales on a regular basis. (The other two countries are Iceland and Japan.) Personally, I don't think that extremely rare, long-lived, intelligent animals should be killed for food. Especially not whales, which are some of the rarest, longest-lived, most-intelligent non-human animals on earth. It's also impossible to kill whales humanely...
In conclusion: Norway, A+ on the social justice for humans, but F- on the treatment of marine life.
The nice, steady winds for windsurfing and kiteboarding in Fort Pierce are the ones that blow from the ocean, i.e., N, NE, E, and SE. It's an easy decision to launch in the lee of the South Jetty for N, NE, and E winds, and it's an easy decision to launch in the lee of the N jetty for SE winds.
Gusty NW, W, SW, and S winds, which blow from across the land, are another story. There are plenty of places to launch in those winds, but none are without considerable disadvantages, so it's hard to decide where to put in. You can:
a. Sail the ocean.... but the wind will be extra gusty, there will be a wind shadow near the beach, and you could get blown out to sea if you break down. b. Sail the inlet... but that only works in NW or W, and only on an incoming tide. Otherwise the tide will sweep you to sea in a heartbeat. You also have to watch for boat traffic, and there are purportedly high abundances of sharks in inlets. c. Sail the lagoon... but the kite launches are narrow and sketchy with no downwind exit areas if you can't stay upwind, the water is shallow and weedy, which is bad news for big windsurfing fins, you can't go barefoot because of the sharp rocks, sticks, and oysters, and if you park your car along Rt. A1A it's liable to get broken into.
After work today I chose "c", launching from Jaycee Park with my buddy Marc. Local kiters Dave and Mike were there when I arrived, and said they were struggling with the gusty conditions. Professional kiteboard racers Mike Gebhardt and Sean Farley were also there, training for the North American Course Racing Championships, coming up in Mexico next month. The boards they use for that are really strange looking compared to a conventional kiteboard, but Gebi and Sean were making them work, riding close together and going way upwind and downwind all over the lagoon.
I thought the wind looked too strong and gusty for kiting, so I rigged a 5.5 windsurf sail and put it on my floaty 106 liter shortboard. That was fine in the gusts, but the wind seemed to be dropping a bit, and I was going real slow in the lulls, so I gave in and blew up my 12 m kite. I rode my new mustard-colored kiteboard for a while, then switched to my tried-and-true brown and orange kiteboard, which works better in light winds. Don't ask me why I picked such ugly colored kiteboards.
Marc crashed his kiteboard while bouncing through the voodoo chop created by waves reflecting off a concrete bulkhead. Then he dropped his kite in the water and couldn't get it back up because there was a lull. Then his kite drifted into the bulkhead and self-destructed on sharp barnacles and stuff. It's a pretty big bummer for Marc, since he was already on his "spare" 14 meter kite. (The first was attacked by a wave when Marc tried to rinse the sand off it in the shorebreak.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, West winds. Why do I still bother chasing them? Probably the same reason any hobbyist or athlete takes on a challenge- the pursuit of the reward is a reward in itself.
I'm a marine biology professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. My professional page is here, my personal blog is here, and my no-longer-maintained science blog is here.
