Kanaha video

We had a great day of sailing last Thursday at Kanaha and I had a GoPro mounted to my boom to capture some of the fun. I was on a 4.7 so the wind was in that nice 25ish range, and there were decent waves to go with it. Occasionally the outer reef would break, though you really can't see that from the video. The GoPro has a wide angle lens, which does a great job of capturing the most action, but definitely diminishes the visual appearance of the waves. Many of the waves you can see in the video are actually overhead, though they look about half that.

Also this is from a standard def GoPro. After seeing Sean's video, I realized how much better resolution the HD model provides, despite the compression that Vimeo (or YouTube) apply to the video after the upload. I haven't had this GoPro more than 6 months and it's already obsolete! Such is life in the hi-tech lane.

As you can see from the action, I threw a lot of forward loops. It's really my only wave sailing "trick" and still a bit new to me, so like a new toy I play with it often. In fact I was very happy to land one on my initial reach over weird wave. Turns out that weird wave is great for looping in the right conditions since you can sail downwind to hit it and it forms very consistently. It has to be a decent size though (3-5 ft is best) and try to hit the last one in a set so if you crash you won't spend the next 15 minutes trying to get out of the triangle.

As for looping in general, after sailing for 15+ years (at age 50) I finally decided to give them a real try about two summers ago, and as everyone who does them always says, they're really not that hard. Really! I was thinking about a post just on my experiences with learning to forward, but for now, just the video. Hope you find it mildly interesting. Cheers!

Windsurfing @ Uppers - April 22, 2010 from Jamin Jones on Vimeo.