Dog House Ramblings

Strange Winter

It's kind of hard to believe that it's Winter around here. Today, we had a high temperature of something like 74 degrees. And it was windy. So in line with my goal of sailing more this year, I headed down to the lake this morning.

It started off well enough. I rigged up a 5.5 Ezzy Wave on my old Mistral Classic 276. I'm a little leery of going out on any board smaller than that this time of year because of the water temperature - about 49 degrees. I had a couple of good rides despite the incredibly gusty conditions. At times the 5.5 was a bit much, though I also had several times where I was waiting on the wind to show up.

Then it happened. I was on a slight downwind run, well powered up when I apparently got hit by a gust. I probably was only doing 32mph, but in trying to hang on I caught an edge. I experienced the most violent wreck of my windsurfing career. It was amazed that nothing broke since I hit both the boom and the mast quite hard on the way by the nose of the board. Thankfully I was wearing a helmet because I was seeing stars when I came up.

It took me a few minutes to get going. And by the time I got back to shore, I was definitely done. I needed help getting my gear on shore, then sat counting bones for a bit. I've currently got an ice pack wrapped around my thigh and a slightly stiff neck. Advil is my friend

Now that I'm back at the house, I can see that we had winds well into the 30's, with gusts into the low 40's.

I really am getting too old for those kinds of conditions.

At least nothing more than pride and muscle tissue is hurt. And it completes my first step towards sailing at least once each week in 2008.

Cheers.

posted by The Dog @ 5:36 PM