Round Two

by Alan Cole · Published Tuesday, October 6th, 2020 · Updated Tuesday, October 6th, 2020

After a somewhat disappointing windsurf session first thing this morning I decided to go out for Round Two once the tide had dropped.

Typically, once I got off the water this morning the wind picked up to a perfect 30 knots and continued to blow like that all day. The tide had dropped enough by 2pm so I headed back over.

This time I only took my bigger wave board along with my 5m and 4.5m sails. I rigged the bigger of the two sails so as to make sure I was powered up. I didn’t want to be under-powered again like this morning.

A Rainy Windsurf

Once on the water however a huge rainstorm came through and as it did the wind dropped to next to nothing. I tried to get going and couldn’t so waited on the beach for the rain to pass. Once it had the wind picked back up again and I was able to blast out through the whitewater and out into the waves. The waves were pretty big to say the least. Big towering walls of dark foreboding water rushing towards me and huge walls of whitewater just ready to pounce.

I sailed out the back, gybed and sailed back in weaving between the walls of swell.

And so the Wind Dies

As I gybed near the beach, the rain started hammering down again. I managed to sail half way out through the whitewater but as I did so the wind dropped off completely again. There I was, floundering without even enough wind to water-start. I managed to make it back to the beach but there still wasn’t any wind. Windsurfing can be such a frustrating sport at times!

On the plus side, I didn’t trap my finger whilst rigging this time and I was much more comfortable in my 3/2 summer suit. Although with air and sea temperatures around 14ºC even that was a little too warm really.

I thought maybe it was just me being a bit rubbish but the wind graph from the weather station confirmed the winds for me.

You can see where it picked up at around 10am after I’d tried with my 4.5m this morning. You can see that it was blowing all day long until I got back on the water where at around 3pm it just dropped like a stone.