A long-awaited bit of wind, last Sunday at Singapore's East Caast Park, shot on video by Lawrence Lim:

www.veoh.com:443/videos/v15128861rpMCpCZT

This is what we get this time of year, if we're lucky: a passing storm, 5 mins to an hour, sometimes longer, 5 knots to 30 knots; you can make educated guesses but you never can tell until it actually happens. Choosing what to rig is a combination of guesswork, experience, and gut feeling. This time, I had a lot of fun on my 8.5 Ezzy and stupidly large Drops 167 litre board, but had to endure several minutes of "WTF time" when the storm was really peaking. For a while I was just surfing, no harness or footstraps, crouching behind the boom, sheeted out, still planing, through the driving rain, but loving it nonetheless...well, kind of.

At almost 14 minutes, it's a long video. By 10 mins, you can see the wind has really started to pick up...at 12 mins the rain hits...lunatics are still planing on big boards with 10m-plus sails, while the hardcore have been rewarded wth fuel for their 5.0 wave sails. (Never mind the lack of waves!) Freeze the video at 13:26 and you can see me at the far right, doing nothing very slowly.

A day to be remembered!

Thats a really great vid.Loved every second,lots of uphauing?,heaps of different sails,lots of shippingand biggest fleet of Pelicans ive ever seen(love to know what happened to them when the squall came through)
Thanks for posting WW.

It must be my Hellcat...every since I've gotten that sail, it has been blowing every weekend. Thank me

Ikw777, be afraid, be very afraid.

I stopped of at the watersports club that very day during a 14hr stopover. I thought, how hard can it be. Woke up next morning with a hell hangover and a 4hr flight to follow. They tag team you there and you don't even realize it's happening, picking on poor un-suspecting tourists. First it's the pomms and just a couple of quiet ones, then the germans take over and it's a couple more. After that the ex-pat aussies turn on you and it's game over. The jugs flow and pretty soon you can't even remember which country your in.

If you do intend on following this path then plan ahead accordingly.

Jethrow

fullmoon said...

Duh,I said Pelicans,what I really meant was Optimist's.

How do you tell a Laser from an Optimist? They have both kinds of sailboat over there...

When a big storm approaches, a siren blows and those guys head for home base. Sissies! But when it's blowing without a storm, the little buggers are a right royal pain...they always seem to want to sail for miles upwind and downwind in groups of 20 or more, and we always want to sail on a reach...so guess what happens? It's like trying to cross the street in peak hour traffic. Sometimes I enjoy buzzing them, so they get a real close view of a windsurfer and realise who's having the most fun!!