Perfect Day

Before I left the UK I had an idea of exactly how I wanted to spend every day in Oz. I wanted to get up in the morning and go surfing, then go kitesurfing later in the morning, finally windsurfing in the late afternoon. Then cook up some dinner outside on a gas stove and sleep in a tent. It was too breezy to surf yesterday and I was too excited about kitesurfing, but yesterday was pretty much exactly the kind of day I had been dreaming of. I had a good kite session in the morning (see last post) and then in the afternoon I waited for the wind to pick up and then, just after 4pm, I hired some gear from Werner and went windsurfing. It wasn't blowing that hard so I hired pretty big gear. I had one of those Starboard Aero lightwind waveboards, 117 litres, so pretty big. It was a strange board, not particularly quick to plane for its size, but handled pretty well once it was going. I had a 6.4 metre Severne sail and was fairly powered up most of the time. As you launch from the main beach theres a large flat(ish) area of water before you reach the waves. The waves were pretty big and powerful and there were some really good guys out riding them. In the slightly marginal conditions and with fairly big kit I didn't want to get right into the big breaking waves, but conveniently if you sailed slightly downwind you could hit the relatively harmless shoulder of the waves, out of the way of the pros. The waves here were still steep enough and big enough to get some great jumps but with barely any risk of being caught out by the white water. Of course I managed to go a little too far up at one point and wipe out in the path of a breaking wave. It was Coronation Beach in January 2000 all over again, but seven years on I knew what to do and came out unscathed. Despite the big kit and marginal conditions I had a great sail, pulling off some big jumps, some good duck gybes and a couple of upwind 360's. Whats more Werner only charged me for one hour, despite the fact I was probably out for almost two. That came to $35, about £16ish which is a bargain for windsurf hire in such an amazing venue. My decision not to buy windsurf gear yet has paid off so far, had I bought gear it would have set me back at least a couple of thousand dollars and would almost certainly have been too small to use yesterday.

Unfortunately the wind isn't up thismorning quite as much as it was yesterday morning, but its looking good for thisafternoon, so fingers crossed!!