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. :)
