Got a New Board- Exocet WindSUP 11'8"

Oh. Yeah. Baby.

I just got the new board that I've been lusting after for a year. It's the Exocet WindSUP 11'8", AST construction, purple color, 360 x 79 cm, 220 liters volume, 56 cm Allgaier daggerboard, 44 cm powerbox fin.

Mowing the lawn can wait.

I've got the footstraps in the outboard positions for flatwater blasting. There's also a centered footstrap orientation for wavesailing, but there are rarely any waves around here so I'm tuning for flatwater. Of course, some people say they don't even use the footstraps when they wavesail this board, so maybe when I wavesail it I can just step around the straps.

This underside view shows the "step-tail" design, which combines a flat "swallow tail" planing surface with a longer "pin tail" for smooth gliding and catching waves. The 44 cm powerbox stock fin should be good for early planing with my 8.0 sail, but I'll use a much smaller fin for waveriding and SUP- either my 32 cm MauiUltraFin or my 25 cm WeedWave fin. The Allgaier daggerboard system is apparently the WindSUP's one Achilles heel. It's fine at low speed, but at planing speed the loose lips peel partly open, allowing water to shoot through the center of the board and adding drag that limits your maximum speed.

Hibuscus flower motif with flying fish, fitting for Florida. "Exocet" means flying fish in French, and Exocoetidae is the scientific name for the flying fishes family.

I bought the board at "Ace Performer," a nice local windsurf / sup / kite / kayak shop located near the Sanibel Causeway in Fort Myers. (Warning: The Ace Performer website has an incredibly annoying "magical sparkling" sound effect that repeats. Turn off your sound before you click the link.) Notwithstanding his website sound effect choices, the shop owner, Roy Massey, seems like a very cool guy. I'm looking forward to sailing with him and meeting the rest of the local crew at their regular launch sites on the causeway (for flatwater) and on Captiva Island (for the best waves in SW Florida).

Roy gave me some free rack pads to help advertise the shop.

Naturally, I'm desperate to get the thing in the water. The SW Florida weekend forecast looks typically devoid of planing-strength winds or rideable waves, but I should still be good to go for a paddle in the Imperial River or a non-planing cruise with an 8.0 sail at Wiggins Pass. Naturally I'll post a review once I have some data.

PS- Last week I found out that a tidal creek one block from my house links up with the scenic Imperial River. I can carry my SUP board down there without even having to put it on the car! I figured it out by doing the route in reverse, paddling from the kayak dock at Riverside Park in Olde Bonita Springs. Stoke!

Beginner Windsurfing: How to Reorient After Falling

The other day a beginner windsurfer (at the uphauling stage) told me he preferred shallow water because he spent a lot of time standing in the water positioning the sail. There are certainly some good reasons to prefer shallow water, like being able to walk back to the beach if you can't sail back, but I don't think positioning the sail in the water is one of the good reasons. That prompted me to write this instructional blog post. The gist of it is this: Getting off the board to position the sail is an unnecessary waste of time, and there's a way you can avoid ever having to do it. (Or at least until you start learning waterstarting, but that's an advanced skill for another day.) Even in shallow water, it's usually a lot more efficient to get ON the board before worrying about positioning the sail. Here's my pictorial tutorial:

Wiggins Pass: I'm Spoiled Again

When I lived in Fort Pierce on the East Coast of Florida I was spoiled for wind, waves, and free beach parking. Being next to a jetty-protected inlet on a sparsely populated barrier island I almost always had good, uncrowded ocean sailing options. And if the wind was straight offshore, I could find onshore flatwater conditions in the lagoon West of the island.

Moving to New England I worried that I’d be giving up my paradise. Luckily when I traded away Florida’s warm water I got in return Nahant’s frequent strong winds and incredibly perfect wavebreak. I learned how to stand-up paddleboard and how to wavesail frontside in absolute playground conditions, sliding along smooth wave faces unbroken for hundreds of meters.

Now back in Florida but on the West Coast, which is the lesser coast for wind and the unequivocally WRONG coast for rideable waves, I’ve been challenged to find my groove again. In Nahant I’d often turn to SUP when the wind was down, but here on the Gulf the waves are more dependent on local winds, so if it’s not windy enough to sail it's probably not wavy enough to SUP. Another thing that makes it tough to SUP the Florida Gulf Coast is how the waves tend to break on a short, steep, sandbar just offshore of the beach. They shape up enough to catch only a moment before crunching into one foot of water, and then they vanish where the water gets deep again inshore of the bar. The sandbar is better than a steep beachbreak, but not by much.

One of the things I’ve heard Floridians talk about is a special circumstance when the winds are light but there’s a long-period swell from a storm in the Gulf. I got to see that when we had a long period swell a few days after Hurricane Isaac. Unforunately, the Bonita Beach break was still bad, with anticlimactic closeouts on the sandbar. I decided I needed to look a little harder for a spot with a shoreline geometry that wouldn’t butcher the waves.

Dog Beach on the south end of Lover’s Key seemed to have some potential, with a flatwater lagoon that opened through a pass into the Gulf.  It worked really well as a beginner windsurfing spot for Rhonda, but it would be awkward to get in and out through the pass on a shortboard, and it’s not a place I’d like to break down.

Today I tried a NEW spot that I think is going to become my standby. It’s Delnor Wiggins State Park, on the north end of Naples. There’s a pass there, too, but you launch right onto the ocean side of the pass as opposed to in a lagoon like at Dog Beach.


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When I got to Wiggins the wind was mostly onshore and hovering around the barely-shortboardable range (see iWindsurf data).

I rigged a 6.8 and put it on my Angulo SUP. That was fun, and a good way to get a feel for where the waves were breaking. The sandbar was definitely more spread out and less steep than at Bonita Beach, making for more rideable waves. There were also some Gorge-effect waves happening where the ocean met the tidal outflow from the mangrove-lined pass. It seemed like there might be enough power to shortboard, at least with the boost from the tidal flow, so I switched from the SUP to an Exocet Cross 106. Turned out to be an awesome session. :)

Hurricane Isaac Sessions

We were pretty worried about Hurricane Isaac here in Bonita Springs last week. For a while it looked like he would hit us directly as a Category 1 Hurricane. Fortunately, Isaac was slow to strengthen, and passed far enough to the South and West that we didn’t get any damaging winds or surge. We did get some good windsurfing, though.

The Atlantic Coast of Florida got the best of it, as usual, with several days of strong onshore or sideshore Easterlies as the storm approached. The Gulf Coast didn’t feel much of that, since Easterlies have trouble making it all the way across the state, and then they’re gusty and offshore when they get here so it’s hard to find a good place to launch. I tried the offshore winds at Bonita Beach on the Saturday before the storm and had an OK flatwater session with a floaty board and a 6.8 sail.  Sunday I didn’t sail because it was really squally and nasty, and still offshore. Monday was the prime day because Isaac had crossed to the West of Florida, giving the Gulf side good SSW winds and some swell.

I had a tough time choosing what to rig because the wind was up and down with the rain showers. I ended up going with 4.2 and putting it on my 106 liter board. At first I was a little underpowered, wishing I’d gone with 4.7, then I was perfect, then I was a little overpowered, wishing I was on my 83 liter board. All told, I made out pretty well and went home fully stoked.

Here’s a video from the session. I tried a little something different this time. I made two versions of the video; one with natural sound including my awkward exclaimations, and one dubbed over with a song by Queen.  

This is the musical version.
Isaac Aftermath 8-27-12 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

This is the "vocal" version.
Isaac Aftermath 8-27-12 no music from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Florida So Far

Y’all might have noticed that I haven’t produced any fresh blog posts in a few weeks. The reason for that is that I’ve been busy moving to Florida and starting my new job as a professor at Florida Gulf Coast University.


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So far, so good. The move was a logistical challenge, but with careful planning on the part of my fiancé Rhonda and help from our friends and families it went pretty smoothly.  We rented a 22’ Penske truck and towed my minivan behind it, while Rhonda and her mom drove behind in Rhonda’s car. Here’s the caravan crossing the Hudson River in NY.

We made two overnight stops; one at my sister’s house in North Carolina, and another at my cousin’s house in Daytona Beach. It was good getting to see the family.

Four days after we left Boston we arrived at our new home in Bonita Springs. It’s a cute little rental house with a screened-in porch and lanai, and a windsurf storage shed in the backyard. Rhonda’s mom stayed for a few days and was a huge help getting us unpacked and settled in.

The same day that she went home to New England we gained a new family member- a rescue part-bulldog mutt named Grace.

Grace is about 8 years old and has a very sweet and mellow personality. We still miss Buri, but it’s real nice to have a dog around again.

Getting started as a professor has been an exciting challenge. This is my new office at FGCU (now much more cluttered.) Check out the nice view from the window!

I feel like the job is a good fit for me. The other professors are helpful and sociable. It’s definitely what you would call a “collegial” work environment.  My first week of teaching went smoothly, although I’m learning as I go since I've never taught before. They gave me a pretty easy courseload to start with. I’m teaching one Marine Ecology class with 32 students, and two sections of a Seagrass Ecology discussion course- one with 2 graduate students and the other with 18 undergrads. The Marine Ecology class takes the most preparation time, because I have to plan about an hour of lecture, plus fill another hour and 15 minutes with other learning activities for the kids because I can’t lecture for more than an hour and they can’t pay attention for more than an hour. In both my classes we’re reading a lot of scientific articles, which is nice in a way because it keeps me up to date on the scientific literature that I should be following for my own research.

So far I haven’t done any new marine biology research in Florida (not counting wading around in some seagrass beds when fishing and paddleboarding), but I’m looking forward to starting seagrass monitoring soon. With that in mind, I’ve been sitting in on a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) class that meets on Thursday nights at FGCU. Seagrass ecologists often use the GIS mapping software to keep track of changes in seagrass coverage, which they can then relate to trends in water quality and stuff like that. I’m hoping to get government funding for my seagrass monitoring, so I want to be as GIS savvy as possible when I make my bid.

The wind and waves scene here on the Gulf Coast of Florida is VERY different than it was in New England. There’s less wind, and there are no real waves to speak of. More often than not, the Gulf of Mexico is flat as a lake. Literally. Riding waves there on a paddleboard is tough, because the only time the waves approach a rideable size is when it’s choppy with an onshore breeze. Rhonda and I HAVE had some fun SUP sessions, but only on flat water, like on the mangrove-lined Imperial River near our house.

We knew we were in tropical paradise when we saw red hibiscus blossoms drifting lazily along the smooth surface of the water.

I picked up a cheap old windsurfing longboard that we re-styled as a flat water SUP so we can both go at once. One of us uses that and the other uses the Angulo Surfa 10’4”. There are tons of SUP shops in the area, like CGT Kayaks and Paddleboards, so I didn’t have any trouble finding a store where I could buy a second paddle.

I think there’s a lot of potential for windsurfing around here, though I’m a long way from getting my launch sites and equipment dialed. The first time I put up a sail here was at Punta Rassa near the Sanibel causeway. I was out SUP-fishing the seagrass flats with some fellow new professors. (One math dude, and another theater dude.) At first we were catching lots of Speckled Seatrout- almost one on every cast. But then the fishing slowed down and some squally wind came up, so I rigged a 6.8 and put it on the old longboard. The thing was a beast, but it actually planed, in a loggish sort of way. I’m saving up now for an Exocet WindSUP, which I think is going to be the perfect board for around here.

Finding the best water access points for different wind directions and different wave / chop conditions has been challenging. Most of the beach parking areas also make you pay by the hour or day, which I find super annoying. So far our best windsurfing beach find has been “Dog Beach” between Bonita Beach and Lover’s Key State Park. There’s a short walk through the mangroves that gets you to a sandbar on the edge of a shallow lagoon.

It was the perfect spot for Rhonda to have her best windsurfing session ever, with a 4.2 sail on the Angulo SUP with a jury-rigged dagger-fin.

It was a nice spot for me, too, since the lagoon opens up through an inlet to the Gulf of Mexico, where an outgoing tide can jack up the onshore-wind waves. I got some fun rides there on the old 80s longboard, though my fin hit a sandbar once or twice, so I’ll have to be careful if I’m ever riding there on a nicer board.

Today we’re starting to feel some breeze from the approach of Hurricane Issac. The wind is NE (side-offshore), so I’ve been scratching my head about where the best ocean-side launch might be. I’m going to give it a try at Wiggins Pass, a relatively short 8.1 mile drive from my house. There’s a point and an inlet at the N end of the park there, which I think will give me a bit better wind exposure and hopefully enable me to get out on my 106 liter shortboard. Tomorrow and Monday might be unsailably windy and rainy, but there’s a medium-sized lake on the N side of the FGCU campus where the kids do swimming, sailing, SUP, and wakeboarding. I think it might be a good, safe spot in an E or NE wind. As long as the alligators don’t get me.

FGCU Lake Launch.

Jibefest at Nahant

Woot! We finally had a big wind day in Massachusetts this summer, with 20 knots from the Southwest at Nahant. I got out after work and was joined by Scott from Michigan. I've never met anyone from Michigan who wasn't a delightful and genuine person, and Scott continues that streak. He sailed a 6.5 Sailworks Retro on a 108 liter RRD freeride board, and I sailed a 5.5 Aerotech Charge on a 106 liter Exocet Cross. I used a 22 cm weed-wave fin at first, but when I realized that the waves were mostly too small to ride I switched to a 32 cm MUfin "No Spin" to have better trim for flat water blasting and racing Scott.

I shot some boom-mounted GoPro camera video and edited it up with a Lou Reed song.


Nahant Waveless 7-17-12 from James Douglass on Vimeo.

Looking at the video, I notice my regular jibes are pretty good, but my duck jibes need work to be able to exit with speed.

Big Boards That Do it All

Like a lot of windsurfers I was baffled when the stand-up paddleboard (SUP) craze hit. My thinking was, “How is that even fun? It looks so slow and awkward.” Only after I tried it a few times did I start to see the appeal. SUP may not be the fastest way to navigate the water, but it’s pleasurable in its simplicity, and there’s something about standing on the surface that’s more fun than sitting in a kayak or sprawling on a surfboard. So I get it. SUP is legit.

What baffles me now is the unexploited potential in the design and marketing of multiple use windsurfer – SUP boards. Yes, there are SUPs with mast tracks that can be windsurfed, and yes, some windsurfing longboards can be paddled. But with few exceptions, the existing multiple-use boards are strongly biased towards either SUP or windsurfing, with limited capabilities for the other sport. I think that’s a shame, for two reasons:

1. There are a lot of things that a big board can potentially do well. Depending on its design, it can be a stable platform for beginner windsurfers, it can sail efficiently in light winds with the daggerboard down, it can carry a large sail for early planing, it can be paddled as a SUP in flat water or waves, or it can be used as a light-wind windsurfing waveboard.

2. Big boards cost a lot of money and take up a lot of space. So, it’s hard for most people to own a separate big board for every possible big-board use. Hence, the desirability of multiple-use big boards.

I’m not exactly sure why board manufacturers have been so half-assed about adding multi-usability to their big rides, but I have some theories that I won't get into here. For now, let’s review what types of big boards are out there, and what kind of multi-use potential they each have. As I’m prone to do, I made a chart for that, and I’ll say a little bit more about the categories in the chart:

The columns are grouped by three basic types of big boards.

On the left you’ve got typical big windsurfing boards, which are designed for flatwater sailing. They optimize non-planing glide, early planing ability, or some combination of the two. They are not designed to be paddled or wavesailed, but some work OK as flatwater SUPs. The picture below shows me riding a big beginner windsurfing board in planing conditions.

In the middle are windsurfable SUP boards. They are windsurfable because they have mast tracks, and occasionally a daggerboard or removable center fin, but they are otherwise shaped for uncompromised SUP performance. If they are intended for wave riding then they have soft rails and lots of rocker at the tail- features that facilitate catching waves with paddle power and longboard-style surfing but “stick” the board to the water and prevent it from reaching planing speed under normal sail power. See the figure below:

Given obscene amounts of sail power a surf-rockered SUP may be coaxed to plane, and in fact there is a video circulating around that shows a 12’6” SUP planing on flat water, but that’s with an expert speedsailor using a 6.6 sail in 30 knots of wind. With that much power even a bathtub would plane.

SUP boards intended for flatwater cruising are rarely equipped with mast tracks (with some exceptions). That's too bad because a flatwater cruising SUP could really cut through the water fast in light winds. It also seems like it might be easier to design a “planeable” flatwater cruiser SUP than a planeable surfing SUP, because the former could have a flat rocker and hard rails. Still waiting to see someone make that board.

An unusual type of windsurfable SUP board is wide but very compact, often with a “fish” style tail and multiple fins. Some of these boards are able to plane, but awkwardly and with no footstraps. They also don’t paddle in a straight line or catch gentle waves very well, making them most useful for specialist light-wind wavesailors who have sideshore wind and good waves and favor a certain shortboard surfing feel. The most famous example of that type of board is the much-hyped AHD SeaLion.

Image of the AHD SeaLion from Bill's OBX Beach Life.

On the far end of the table are step-tail windsurf / SUP boards, the original and most popular of which is the Kona ONE, which was introduced by Exocet in 2005 then became it’s own brand with an associated one-design racing class. The Kona does a bit of everything, but it’s too heavy and boxy to windsurf great in the waves, and it’s too narrow with too abrupt a step-tail to SUP well in the waves- I’ve tried.

Exocet later made some other Kona boards (now called the Curve 11’5”, 10’5”, etc.) with less volume and no daggerboards. The Curves have unequaled light-wind wavesailing performance  but are less appropriate as all-around windsurfing boards because they have no daggerboards and their “US Box” fin slots can’t support large fins. Some people SUP them, but they’re too narrow for most and the abrupt step-tail impedes their wave catching ability. Below, Florida's John Ingebritsen shreds a wave on a Curve 11'5".

The most recent step-tail offering from Exocet is the WindSUP 11’8”, which looks like a Kona ONE with a wider, thinner shape and a more refined step-tail design, as seen in the picture from Chuck's blog.

Supposedly it has improved light wind planing ability and SUP ability compared to the Kona ONE. It’s considerably larger than I would ideally want, but I’m encouraged by the mere fact that it exists, proving that it IS possible to have a fully-planing windsurfing board that SUPs well in waves. I really need to test one for myself, I mean, uh, for my fiancé.

Most SUPs and windsurfs on the market are good for their own sport but have very limited utility for the other sport. Fortunately, recent designs like Exocet’s WindSUP show that it's not impossible to have a board that SUPs well in waves AND planes well as a windsurf. Hopefully continued evolution will refine and diversify those designs, and maybe come up with some as-yet-unseen designs like a flatwater racing SUP that’s also an efficient planing and displacement windsurfer.

PS- Late breaking news- Exocet just introduced a 10’0” WindSUP for 2013! They must have read my mind.