Bluesky account, SUPdate, and new GPS watch

Well, gee. It has been a while since I've made a blog post. Blogs are so "old internet" now. Gears are churning in my mind, though, and I'm thinking that maybe old internet has some advantages over the extremely algorithm-driven, addictive, doom-scrolling-for-profit, orchestrated-and-manipulated-by-oligarchs-aligned-with-fascists disaster that is "new internet." 

Towards that end I've created an account on supposedly-less-worse-than-facebook-and-twitter/X social media platform "bluesky" - https://bsky.app/profile/jamesgdouglass.bsky.social

Bluesky doesn't allow posts more than 300 words, but that could kind of work out if I put long rants and picture-filled posts here on my blog, and just link to them on bluesky. Unlike facebook, I think bluesky doesn't deprioritize posts linking to outside websites. 

As for personal news, I've been working a lot trying to keep up with my teaching and research responsibilities at FGCU and I haven't been able to do as much watersports as I would like. I am still paddleboarding at least once a week, though, and I've changed paddleboards. Unlike the pre-hurricane-Ian days when I lived in a house with a shed and could store lots of toys, I am now limited to what I can store permanently in my 2009 Chrysler Town & Country mini-van, and one 14' SUP board that I store on top of the kitchen cabinets with a little rack system that probably voids the security deposit on the one-bedroom apartment I live in with Rhonda. 

The 14' SUP I originally had on top of the cabinets was a 23" wide Riviera RP raceboard from 2017. It was really beat up and many-times repaired from injuries sustained even prior to 2022's Hurricane Ian. Anyway, I finally decided to give it away after getting frustrated with how much trouble I had staying on it in the rough water 2024 Key West Classic race. After all, I still had a slower but more seaworthy 14'x27.25" Fanatic Falcon 2014 raceboard collecting dust in my buddy Serge's backyard shipping container storage unit. So the Riviera went away and I'm now exclusively using the big red Fanatic, which is also windsurfable, by the way, because of the mast track I installed in it a long time ago. 

My favorite paddle route is circumnavigating Lover's Key. It's an annoyingly long, trafficky drive from where I live now to Lover's Key, but I know I can always get a dirt parking spot there, and it's free. There's a closer place where I can get in the water (the Estero River), but flat water paddling is comparatively boring, and paddling the wide Fanatic in flat water is kind of sad because it's significantly slower than the narrow Riviera was. If I'm in bumpy water or waves I don't notice that.

Anyway, in December I gave myself a little present to help me motivate and track my watersports and other exercise. It's a "Garmin Instinct Solar" GPS watch. The GPS isn't on all the time- just when you turn it on to track an activity, but it has motion sensors and a heart rate sensor that ARE on all the time, so if I want to see what my heart rate was when I was asleep, or something, I can look at that data via a bluetooth wireless connection between the watch and my smartphone. (Kind of creepy, but whatever.) The heart rate monitor in the watch gets what I think is accurate data when I'm jogging, based on what I know my maximum heart rate is from prior monitoring with chest band HR monitors. However, the HR monitor in the watch gives total garbage data during standup paddling. I don't know if it's because of the different wrist motion, or water conductivity, or what. 

I have yet to try using the watch for "intervals" type workouts of the sort I used to use my "SUP Speedcoach" GPS for, but the watch beeps and buzzes every time I complete a mile, so I can glance at my wrist and see how my pace was for each mile paddled or jogged. If anyone else has some tips for getting the most out of this type of wrist GPS for SUP training, I would love to hear those. 

Sloppy stars surfski kayaking practice in the ocean

I have a new-to-me surfski kayak that is fast but quite tippy in rough water. It's a Nelo 560.

To improve my rough water balance and comfort level for the October 3rd Key West Classic race, I've been deliberately paddling in the ocean at odd angles to the wind and waves. (It's not THAT hard to go straight upwind or straight downwind, perpendicular the bumps, but getting the waves from the side and at oblique angles is quite tricky.) I've sometimes done a workout like this as "sloppy squares," drawing boxes with my path, but I changed it up this week with what I'm calling "sloppy stars." I program the workout in my Speedcoach GPS as 10x800m with no rest between the segments, and then I just have to estimate what angle to go at and remember to always turn left at the end of each segment to make the star pattern. I'm pleased with how this turned out.

Good Florida Christmas Vibes, WindSUP Tweaks

As one might expect for a Northwest native living in South Florida, I sometimes miss the feeling of cool-weather Christmas. This is not to say that my hometown of Olympia, Washington had picture-perfect snow-white holidays- it was mostly deep green, wet, grey gloom- but something about the darkness outside emphasized the warmth and cheer inside.

This season in the subtropics, though, I'm feeling cheery in a different way. For one thing, the weather has been SUBLIME, ranging from pleasantly cool (AC off, windows open) to ideally summery (walk the dog wearing just your bathing suit, jump in the river to cool off midway through the walk). Also, our little municipality of Bonita Springs is making a good effort to bring a festive mood, with the palm trees in the park wrapped in lights, and lots of free concerts and stuff at the band shell. In the Latin neighborhood across the street, lighted yard displays make a night-time color show that compliments the daytime show provided by the brightly blooming bougainvillea and other exotic foliage.

Also, the windsurfing and paddleboarding have been pretty good. Not too many days of true shortboard conditions, but lots of formula windsurfing weather, and even a few good swells for SUP and WindSUP. I think one time I had to wear a shorty wetsuit, but otherwise it's still boardshorts warm.

Here's a track from a 16 mile long formula windsurfing session on Saturday. Winds were about 10 knot from the SW and I used an 11.0 Gaastra Nitro IV sail with a 70 cm F4 fin. Compared to my old fin, this F4 definitely gives me better upwind angles, making it less obvious which parts of my track were going upwind and which parts were going downwind. (In my old tracks you could tell that compressed zig zags were going upwind and stretched zig zags were going downwind.) There was a light wind zone within about 1/4 mile from shore, which is why you see my angle to the wind "pinched" after tacks near shore.

Another fun thing that I've been able to focus on more since the teaching semester ended has been some tweaks and modifications to my boards.

Tweak #1- Redoing the daggerboard gasket on the WindSUP.
The Exocet WindSUP 11'8" is a great board but it has a crappy "Allgaier" daggerboard system that includes poorly fitting, loose gaskets. I'd been meaning to rig up something better for a while, but didn't get around to it until one of the gaskets actually peeled off while I was sailing. After that I disassembled the gasket and cut a piece of flat PVC board to cover the opening. That was great as far as looks and hydrodynamics were concerned, but it made the daggerboard unusable. Phase two of the modification was cutting a slot in the PVC for the daggerboard to go through, and getting a piece of floor border vinyl to make a gasket over it. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Phase 1- Just the pvc board covering the slot

Phase 2- Making a vinyl gasket

Phase 3- Putting it all together

Tweak #2- Grafting a planing rocker onto my surf-rockered SUP.
I love my Angulo Surfa 10'4" as a SUP, but as a windsup it leaves something to be desired because it has too much tail rocker to plane. Since I first got the board I've been mentally picturing what it would be like if it had a step-tail, similar to the Exocet WindSUP. Finally I decided to bite the bullet and actually attempt to graft a flat section onto the tail. I agonized a lot about what type of outline shape the flat section should have, and I sketched lots of different possibilities on the bottom of the board. Eventually I decide to go for a "swallow tail" with moderate "winger" cut-outs, and I cut the tail outline into pink insulation foam slabs that I got from Home Depot. The height of the step in the step-tail was dictated by the thickness of those slabs (~1"), but it happens to be about right for making the last two feet of the board bottom flat. The hard part has been fairing the slabs to the right diagonal angle. I started by making a frame and using a saw, then after I expoxied the slabs to the board I used a rasp and a straight edge to take some more material off. I think I almost have it now, and I'm hoping to put the first layer of fiberglass on it today. I'll finish the modification, including dropping a US box fin box in each lobe of the swallow tail for a twin-fin, after I get back from family visits up North. Something to look forward to for the new year.

GPS + Camera + Windsurf + Mac = Epic Nerdery

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.