24 August 2008 - Billiant wind

5.6 nautical miles

Totally, totally different sailing conditions to yesterday... couldn't be more different [unless it would have been too much wind to be sail-able at all].

This is the wind graph from cyprusmeteo.com - with scale in metres/second. Converting 7.2 m/s (multiply by 1.944) you get pretty close to 14 knots (13.9968... but I bet the wind was never exactly that!] which is quite a bit less than the 19 knots that windfinder.com showed. But I suspect from the webcam that cyprusmeteo.com is inland whereas I suspect that windfinder.com gets airport readings which will be coastal... and more what we experienced.

This is the wind graph from windfinder.com - with scales in Beaufort and Knots. I went out at approx 15:30 which means we were Bft 4-5 at that stage and Bft 5-6 for most of the time sailing.

The sailing was exhilerating and fun. Tim was my crew and we really enjoyed the sailing. He remarked that my Wayfarer was more fun sailing that his trimaran.

I learned a new technique - surfing along the breaking side of a wave. I suppose it's like the surf-boarders do on the really big ocean waves, but this was new technique for me. You needed to do it on a bigger wave and the closer in to shore the less possible it was. I did the first by accident and then Tim pointed it out to me and I kept trying on other waves and tried to find how to get started. Really exhilarating.

Galini is wonderfully stable - today we were sailing and went about and Tim slipped to the leeward side of her which caused her to heel even more so the leeward deck was in the water and then I slipped and fell face down with my chin hitting the leeward side deck, cutting my chin and wrenching my neck/back. When we had sorted ourselves out we noticed the French girls [I must get their names fixed in my brain sometime] had capsized. I decided we would go in as I didn't want to damage myself further.

On the way in we saw Nicko sailing out on a laser... and then capsizing... twice. When he got back on the club he told us he had capsized 6 times! So... shows how gentle Galini is - we didn't capsize at all... just a cut chin to show for the blow.

Tim is up for capsize drill when he comes back from his next trip so I look forward to doing that and seeing how Galini handles when deliberately capsized. We will test the Secumar mast-head anti-inversion system at the same time. We have the 40 litre version.