Cool Scuba and SUP Sessions

This weekend was cool because I got to do interesting water activities with my Florida friends.

Each morning started with scuba. On Saturday we had a great dive at Kimberly Bergalis Park, near my house. Here's my dive buddy Scott suiting up.

And here's my other dive buddy Jonathan cooling off in the water. Check out the total lack of wind and waves on the Atlantic. Jonathan took some underwater pictures and videos of our marine life encounters - hopefully he'll post them online so I can embed them in another post.

Saturday afternoon I taught some friends from out-of-town how to stand-up paddleboard on my Kona longboard. I think SUP is a good share-with-friends sport that isn't too hard the first time around. It might be a good back door into learning windsurfing for less gung-ho people, because it lets them figure out their board balance before adding the complication of sailing. Hmm...

The paddle I'm using for SUP is a cheapskate home-made affair. It's the head of a kayak paddle shimmed with duct tape, fitted into the aluminum rod from a pool skimming net, then duct taped some more around the outside of the joint. The handle knob (not pictured) is also duct tape. It's not pretty, but the price is right, and I was able to make two with one kayak paddle so Scott can go, too. If you're thinking about making your own SUP paddle, remember the length from the end of the blade to the top of the handle should be equal to your height plus about ten inches. Since I'm 5'10", my paddle is 6'8".

Red Green would be proud...



Later Saturday afternoon my jetski-owning neighbor Bill invited some people out for wakeboarding. Bill has never wakeboarded (he has a bad back) but he likes to tow people because he's a sadistic bastard... uh, I mean a generous gentleman. I found wakeboarding to be an intense mixture of scary, thrilling, exhausting, and painful. Kinda cool but not exactly my cup of tea. I'm more of the "ease into it at my own pace" kind of person than the "charge into it rough and tumble" kind of person.

The pinnacle of the weekend was finally getting enough wind for a planing windsurfing session on Saturday evening. A month ago I might not have hassled with rigging the 8.7 sail and the big yellow shortboard, but this time I was more than grateful for the opportunity. Awesome. :)

There wasn't any wind Sunday, but a dive session at Bathtub Beach in Stuart and another round of masochism behind Bill's jetski were enough to thoroughly satisfy my watersports quota.

Today I was responsible and worked until 6:30, but still got out for an amazing sunset SUP session at Fort Pierce inlet. I crossed the inlet to the North Jetty side, where the water was crystal clear and I could look down 15 feet to see snook, jacks, barracuda, and other big gamefish stalking around the rocks of the jetty. I even had a sweet, blue-planet style encounter with a giant manatee. He came RIGHT UP under the board and sniffed around it for about five minutes. I was crouching down on the deck, so we were like, face to face at water level. COOL! Actually, I think there were multiple manatees, because the close-encounter one had a series of prop scars on his back and the one I saw paddling back from the beach didn't. Next scuba dive will definitely have to be from the state park at North Jetty.

Wind Withdrawal; Dealing

Since I started windsurfing regularly in fall 2002, in Virginia, I've been seriously hooked. The first couple years in VA I took the winters off; no sessions between Thanksgiving and April Fool's day. As the addiction deepened, though, I started using more neoprene and doing it 12 months a year. I dealt with Virginia's lighter summer winds by using big sails, formula boards, and longboards, by taking trips to the Outer Banks, and by doing lessons and local races with the William and Mary and regional windsurfing clubs.

Here in East Central Florida, it's different. Ironically, while the weather is warm year round, Florida's "off season" for windsurfing is MORE pronounced than it is up north. From mid May until the end of summer there are no frontal systems of any significance, and no thermal winds besides a piddling, 5-10 mph seabreeze. Check the next week's iwindsurf forecast for my home spot... The horror, the HORROR!

In these winds, planing is not possible on typical windsurfing gear, which requires ~15 mph, and is rare even with formula gear, which requires ~10. My new kiteboard gear needs ~12, but with fickle wind changes, the constant threat of thunderstorms (think Benjamin Franklin), and no experienced kiters at the beach to help launch and land when the wind is that light, kiting really isn't a workable summer option. The majority vote in my "when will I get to use my Evo 83 waveboard" poll was "not until an August / September tropical storm system". I'm afraid that's about right, and it may be similarly long before I can do any kind of shortboard windsurfing or kiting. Sigh.

So, what am I going to do about it, besides whine and blog? Here's what I'm thinking:

1. Work. I'm busy with seagrass research in the Banana River Lagoon, and trying to publish various chapters of my grad school dissertation in science journals. I hate to admit it, but the lack of wind is helping.

2. Scuba dive. No wind means no waves, which means good visibility near shore in the Treasure Coast region. Last Sunday I dived off Pepper Park on North Hutchinson Island, and Tuesday I dived off Kimberly Bergalis Park on South Hutchinson. It was neat to see firsthand the submerged reef that waves break on in rougher weather. It's a mix of limestone ledges (fossil coral; the exposed foundation of Florida) and big boulders of living "worm reef". It rises from a sandy bottom about 13 feet deep to within 7 feet of the surface. Last time out we saw a big nurse shark, and a mix of tropical and warm-temperate fish species. Plus some whopper spiny lobster that might be fun to catch when the season opens.

3. Teach. Maybe if I can get some of my friends and colleagues comfortable windsurfing in this summer's 5-10 mph I'll have some partners in crime for fall's 10-20 mph. I also made a long paddle for SUP and I'm sharing that around, too.

4. Leave. When my seagrass experiment is done I'm going to take a trip to Washington State to visit my folks and windsurf the GORGE. That will be 8/18 - 8/27 if you're going to be there then and want to windsurf with a world-famous blogger. :P

CO2, Acid Oceans, and Coral Reef Loss

I assume everyone reading this blog has heard of global warming. You know the story. Burning fossil fuel releases greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), which build up in the atmosphere and make the planet hotter. Before the year 1850 the CO2 concentration was about 285 parts per million. Now it's 390 ppm, and forecast to be 760 or more by 2100 if we keep burning fossil fuel! That's a huge change!

This graph shows how the CO2 level has changed since the 1950s. The little squiggles show yearly ups and downs caused by plants growing in summer (which sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere), and decaying in winter, which gives off CO2. But beneath that natural oscillation is a long-term increase that's definitely caused by humans.

Global warming isn't the only bad repercussion of the rise in CO2. There's also ocean acidification. Here's how that happens:

1. Pollution puts more CO2 into the atmosphere.
2. Some CO2 from the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean.
3. The dissolved CO2 reacts with H20 (water).
4. The reaction releases H+ ions, the cause of acidity.

Acidity is measured as "pH", and the more acid something is, the LOWER its pH is. In the 1950s the ocean water pH was 8.20. Now it's down to 8.07. That might not seem like much, but it actually means there are 25% more H+ ions in the water than there used to be. I.e., the ocean is 25% more acid than before! If the pH drops to 7.8, as is predicted for the future CO2 increase, the ocean will be 250% more acid!

That's not enough to burn your flesh or anything, but it's definitely enough to mess up the body chemistry of animals and plants that live in the ocean. Particularly, it makes it hard for them to form shells and skeletons out of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), because the CaCO3 disintegrates in acidic water. It's the same idea as when you put a tooth (also made of calcium carbonate) in a glass of coke.

Coral skeletons are made out of CaCO3, too, and the continued existence of coral reefs is dependent on the rate of accretion of new coral skeleton exceeding the rate of breakdown of old coral skeleton. Acid in the ocean is a double whammy for reefs because it slows down the growth of new coral AND increases the dissolution of old coral.

Even if we weren't doing anything else that was bad for reefs, the CO2 acidity increase could completely destroy them within a few decades. Add to that several other negative impacts humans are having on reefs, such as nutrient pollution, overfishing, and climate change, and the corals are basically screwed. It's not like a "this might happen in the future" thing, either. It's already well under way. The average coverage of live coral on Caribbean reefs used to be 50-60%. Now it's less than 10%, with most of the space taken up by dead, dissolving coral overgrown with algae, bacteria, and weedy sponges. Diving in the Dry Tortugas last month I saw some of the best-protected reefs in the Caribbean... and even there the live corals were few and far between.

The situation is definitely bad. In an excellent article for the public, reknowned coral reef expert and conservationist Dr. Nancy Knowlton put it this way: "If people don’t change the way they’re doing things, reefs as we know them will be gone by the year 2050. It’s actually really depressingly unbelievable." Yikes! Time to get way more serious about curbing emissions, and reducing nutrient pollution and overfishing. No bull.

FYI: Much of the information for this post came from a seminar given at the Smithsonian Marine Station by Dr. Chris Langdon, a coral reef expert from the University of Miami's Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

New waveboard - When will it get wet?

I went up to Cocoa Beach on Sunday for a "board meeting" of the windsurfing magazine volunteer test riders. We were wrapping up our findings on a batch of light-wind shortboards for a review that will come out in the next issue. There were some AWESOME boards in the test, and it was cool to see how we mostly agreed in what we thought about them.

The day was also exciting because the magazine editor delivered the high wind board that I bought from a guy in Saint Petersburg. It's a 2006 Starboard Evo 83, designed to be ultra-maneuverable and exciting in rough water and waves.

I have no idea how long I'll have to wait until it's windy enough to ride it. It might be this week in a strong sea breeze, it might be later this summer in a near-miss hurricane, or it might not be until the first frontal system of fall. You can make your bet in the poll in the sidebar.

Selling Two Boards, Buying One

*UPDATE - 1 July 2009 - Both my boards have been sold. If you came here looking for used windsurf gear for sail in the US, try the iwindsurf buy/sell section instead. It's like Craig's List for windsurfing.*

*Begin original post*

Florida has entered a depressingly wet and un-windy weather pattern that looks like it may last all summer. I haven't planed in two weeks. And check out the iwindsurf.com forecast for tomorrow:

Florida-

San Francisco Bay, for reference (Damn you Catapulting Aaron)-

Florida has typically light and inconsistent flow from the West; just enough to squelch any chance of a sea-breeze from the East. Plus, thunderstorms. Sigh...

Anyway, to satisfy my need to do SOMETHING windsurf-related, I've decided to update my board quiver. I'm selling the Tiga Free-X 281 that I recently bought and fixed up, because I haven't been using it much. It overlaps too much with my longboard. Here's a picture and details on the board in case anyone wants to buy it:

Board = Tiga Free-X 281 from 2000; same mold as the Bic Techno 283
Condition = Some peeling cloth on deck pad, one glassed-over repair on nose, otherwise fine.
Volume = 150 liters, Length = 281 cm, Width 69 cm
Fins = 48 cm Finworks pointer, good condition, 40 cm Curtis weed, well-worn
Footstraps = Brand new JP footstraps
Characteristics = Easy-riding, fast, good for 6.5 - 9.5 sails, and especially suited to first-time shortboard riders or heavier intermediate riders.
Price = $190, or $100 if you're poor and under 30 years old

I'm also selling my smallest board, an F2 Maui Project Style 250. I really love this board- it's quick, jumpy, and turny, but always under control, even in the air. It has been a big confidence booster for my sailing in the ocean on rough days. The only reason I'm selling it is to make room for a hopefully-even-better pre-owned board that I just bought. (I'll report on that board soon.) Here's the pics and info on the Style:

Board = F2 Maui Project Style 250 from 2002
Condition = Good. Some chips in the paint that I spray-painted over with white enamel, otherwise fine.
Volume = 87 liters, Length = 250 cm, Width 55 cm
Fin = 25 cm MFC freestyle / wave fin
Footstraps = DaKine Supremo aftermarket straps
Characteristics = Nearly-perfect blend of speed, control, and maneuverability for jumps and jibes. Also good as a waveboard. Suits sails from 4.2 - 6.5, but you'll want a bigger fin for sails > 5.8.
Extras = Comes with the 255 cm board bag.
Price = $300, or $250 if you're poor and under 30 years old

The boards are also posted in the classified ads section of iwindsurf.

Windsurfers Have a Third Leg

When I first started windsurfing I remember looking at my dad's longboard and wondering how the heck anyone got their feet all the way back into the footstraps. What kind of sadomasochistic board designer put them where you couldn't even stand without sinking the tail? A few years later, I was able to occasionally get my back foot in one of the back straps, but only by almost doing the splits, with my front foot much further forward. The only time I ever tried to put my front foot in, too, I took off with terrifying, uncontrolled speed until I veered downwind and catapulted over the handlebars. I didn't try it again until after college when I moved to Virginia and got my own windsurf.

All that confusion and retarded progression was because I didn't realize I had a THIRD leg. In fact, all men and women who windsurf have one. It's the mast base. What I was failing to do as a youth was to transfer weight up off my first two legs, through the sail, and down into the mast base. If I'd done that it would have been much easier to get my feet back in footstrap territory without sinking the tail. And by maintaining mast base pressure (MBP) when in the footstraps I could have distributed my weight more evenly for a less bucking and swerving ride.

If you compare a windsurf board against a surfboard or a directional kiteboard, you can totally see why the footstraps are so far back. It's because the mast base substitutes for the front foot.

Remembering to use that imaginary third leg is KEY to almost everything in windsurfing. There are different ways to apply MBP depending on what windsurfing situation you're in. Hanging down on the boom when accelerating onto a plane, extending the body and committing weight to the harness when striving for speed and control, pressing down on the boom and sheeting in during a hard carve or jibe intitiaton... the list goes on. He who controls his MBP controls his destiny.

Fort Pierce Beach Renourishment + Sucky Weather

Fort Pierce inlet, which cuts through the barrier island I live on, wasn't always there. People dug it in 1920 to replace "Indian River Inlet", a nearby natural inlet that had closed over. I'm not sure why they put the man-made inlet 1 mile south of the previous, natural one. Maybe to be closer to downtown Fort Pierce.

Anyway, when they dug the inlet, they put jetties on the North and South side to help stabilize it. The jetties do an ok job of maintaining the inlet, but they screw up the beach on the South side. Since sand tends to drift from North to South in this area, the beach North of the Jetty accumulates sand, while the beach to the South is constantly eaten away, threatening to erode naively-placed shoreline developments.

The upshot is that the county has to spend lots of tax money to periodically replace the lost sand on South Beach. They manage to kill two birds with one stone, though, by doing the job with sand removed by dredging the inlet (see video).



Once they have the piles of sand on the beach, they bulldoze them around to get the beach looking smooth, flat and aesthetically pleasing. It's pretty impressive from an engineering standpoint, and pretty dubious from an environmental standpoint.

> I'm not sure whether it has affected the windsurfing or not, since lately the wind has been sucky, the rain has been frequent, and/or I've been busy. So far this month I've only managed to get two days of shortboarding in 15 or more knots, compared to April where there were 8, and March with 14. When there is wind, it's usually brief and accompanied by rain squalls and thunder and lightning. I think it has to do with the subtropical low-pressure system that has been malingering around here. Clyde from the East Central Florida Windsurfing group sent out this cool satellite image link that shows the nastyness of the Florida weather. Should be interesting viewing during the more serious part of hurricane season.