90 degrees F WARMER in Florida than New Hampshire

I'm back in Bonita Springs after a wonderful, long, winter vacation. The first vacation stop for me was my folks' place in Asheville, North Carolina. We did lots of talking and walking in the Appalachian Mountains, and I got to catch up with my sister and my adorable 5 and 3 year old nieces. It seemed plenty chilly there, with frost every morning and some light snow that didn't stick.

Of course, that chill was nothing compared to the next stop, at Rhonda's folks' place in Hudson, New Hampshire. There was a decent layer of crusty old snow on the ground when I arrived, and it was soon complemented by a foot of fluffy new stuff. The kind of snow you get when it's far below freezing is sure different from the typical Washington State "mashed potatoes" snow I remember from childhood. For one thing, it doesn't consistently stick to trees, roofs, or deck railings, so you can't easily tell how deep it is on the ground. For another thing, it makes funny squeaky noises when you pack it down by walking or driving over it.

Two sets of my old cross-country skis were conveniently stored in Rhonda's mom's attic, and I was delighted to be able to use them to explore the woods and parks around Hudson with my future stepfather in law. One pair of the skis was the typical long, skinny xc style, with "New Nordic Norm" boots and bindings. The other pair was a bit wider and shorter with metal rails and "New Nordic Norm BC" boots and bindings. I definitely prefer the latter for making new tracks and for woods trails with lots of ups and downs and turns.

I had planned to do some downhill skiing / snowboarding with my future brother-in-law but we called that off because the forecast HIGH for the mountain that day was below zero F and I didn't have the gear to not get frostbite in such cold. I still got my board out of the garage and walked it up Rhonda's grandma's hill a few times for the heck of it. The effort / payoff ratio of that activity reminded me a lot of SUP wave riding. The thrills by themselves don't quite outweigh the effort, but when you add in the exercise endorphins and the outdoor nature zen, it's a win.

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. :)

Nahant Beach Parking Closure Nightmare 2012

**UPDATE: As of Memorial Day, the lot has been open. It's not paved or anything, but it's open, and the price is still a reasonable $3.00**

This is a warning to any Bostonians who might be hoping to go to Nahant Beach this weekend, 12 May 2012, or any time soon: Don't bother.

 The whole dang parking lot has been closed since fall for some horrible, never-ending renovation project. I live on Little Nahant so my view looks right over the parking lot, and I can say for sure that it is NOWHERE near being finished. They don't even seem to be working on it. The digging machines have been parked there motionless for month after month, but the scene never changes. Does anyone know what the problem is? There's certainly no indication of the prolonged closures on the unhelpful Nahant Beach website.

 Last month when we had a warm weekend there was a huge line of cars across the causeway waiting for an hour to get into the lot- only to be turned away by the cops at the Tides Restaurant. Nahant did put up a sign saying the lot was closed, but you can't see the sign until you've already driven across the causeway so it's totally useless. Hopefully the collective rage of all the people getting turned away will light a fire under the people in charge of the lot renovation and will make them start actually WORKING on it. Grrr...

Marine Biology is Hard Sometimes

Last time I was in Lubec, Maine for fieldwork it was snowy and frozen. This time it's not... quite. Rather, it's 37 degrees and raining with 25 mph winds blasting frigid Bay of Fundy waves against the seaweed covered rocks that we're surveying.

Instead of insulated survival suits we're wearing rubber rainsuits over many many layers. Between low tides we're retreating to a little cabin at an old coast guard station. In the closed space we can smell every note of each other's musty socks and hear our annoying cereal-chewing and tea-slurping noises as loud as bombs going off. But we're professional marine biologists, so we can deal.

New England Windsurfing Season Opener

It was too warm and windy to pass up the chance to get on the water in Nahant this afternoon. I had a blast riding at Dog Beach with Scott McKay, both of us on 4.2 meter squared sails. I filmed with my GoPro camera. The song in the video is Alec Eiffel by the Pixes.

Seagrass Epifauna from Nahant

Lately I've been sorting through a lot of eelgrass samples from the waters around Nahant, quantifying their "epifaunal communities." In other words, I've been counting the little snails and bug-like organisms that live among the grass blades. Some of the eelgrass denizens are familiar from my previous studies in Virginia and Florida, like these Lunar Dovesnails, Astyris lunata. These tiny whelks are predators, but they only eat sessile (non-moving) organsisms like encrusting bryozoans and colonial seasquirts.

Other critters that we've found are a bit stranger. I immediately recognized this one as a male "caprellid" amphipod, also known as a skeleton shrimp. He looked a lot like a species we used to see in Virginia; Caprella equilibria. But his rounded head was strange, as was his red exoskeleton and the green fuzz on his neck and arms. I now think that he is an invasive species, Caprella mutica, from Japan. Because these plankton-feeding organisms like to cling to hard surfaces underwater, they're easily transported around the world on the hulls of ships or in bushels of oysters for aquaculture.

Two other species of amphipod that I found were also new to me. I think this first one is a Gammarellus, but I'm a bit tentative on that ID.

This one I'm pretty sure is a Dexamine thea, because the shape of the mucronations (spikes) on the back segments is distinctive. In life the Dexamine and Gammarellus are prettier colors, but here they're bleached white from being preserved in ethanol.

One of the weirdest creatures we encountered was very small- less than a millimeter long. With eight legs it looked just like a mite or a tick. It turns out that is IS a mite, from a mysterious group of marine arachnids called the halacarids. It has sucking mouthparts for draining the juice from cells of seaweed.

In this more detailed photo you can see the two claws on the end of each its legs. Cute!

I started with snails and I'm going to finish with snails. These ones are Banded Chink Shells, or Lacuna vincta. I like their scientific name better. Though their coloration is a little like the Astyris lunata, their shape is rounder, and the opening of their shell lacks the siphonal canal typical of predatory whelks. That's because they are algae-eating herbivores. Lacuna are extremely abundant in the eelgrass beds of Nahant, and we hypothesize that they're important in keeping the eelgrass clean of algae, especially in the summertime when fish deplete the populations of other small grazers like amphipods.

Merry Christmas from Frozen Maine

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.

More photos.

Was my last session my last session?

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.

John "Badass" Coelho

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. :)

Intertidal Insects, Etcetera

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.

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

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, sis! (August 1982)

>PPS- Happy Birthday, Mom! (August 1947)

Rare Summer Northeast Wind Session

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

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.

New England Firsts

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.