But the reason we were all there, of course, was the windsurfing. Most days we sailed at Coronation Beach ("Coro"), which is about 30 km north of Geraldton. We'd tootle up in our un-trusty Mazda delivery van (returned to the mazda dealer 4 times), rig up on the red dirt (no grass) and sail most days from mid arvo 'til sunset. Sunset was usually the best time as the wind swung a little offshore and hence the waves cleaned up, with the added bonus that most people had left by late in the day (I wonder why? Could the answer be in the next sentence??) and hence we had more water to ourselves. The slight downside is that everyone reckoned that's when the sharks came out to play(/eat). Just a little encouragement to improve those waterstarts and hit those gybes I say...
The wind was usually strong... 25 knots or so. Our usual sail was a 4.6 - 5.0 for me, and a 4.1 - 4.6 for Pandora, but there were 3 days where I was well powered to overpowered with a 4.1. All due to lotsa high pressure out in the Indian Ocean, as well as very hot tempertures inland during the day brewing a mean sea breeze. (Nyang, in inland W.A, recorded Australia's hottest month on record, averaging 44.8degC during January 2005.) Waves also became a fascination, with the swell generally in the 1.5m range but peaking at about 3m on a couple of days. Coronation Beach was adjacent to a point, with a reef outside, meaning that there was flat water for the first couple of hundred metres with big swell outside. All in all, near perfect conditons for wave sailing, but with flat water for freestyle inside. (Not that i can do any freestyle, but Karin Jaggi (world womens freesytle champion) and Jaeger Stone (only 14 and "Spocking" like a pro) sure made it look dam easy. Way to make a guy feel old Jaeger my boy...)
Still I did my first down the line (frontside) rides, where all you could think about was "if I could ditch the sail right now this'd be an awesome surf" and which Pandora described as surfing with a V8. And I learnt about using waves as a gybe berm - which also made me a tad lazy with technique later on. But man it was good.
Carnage... well there was plenty of that. Wally broke a mast on one of the first days, just 15 metres from the beach! (We think the ground crew at QANTAS must have done a wind dance on it..) Adrian did the same, only out in the break, as well as damaging the same sail 4 times and hence personally keeping Tim@TheGSpot in business. Joel managed a tango with a painful cobbler fish and James pulled off a magnificent backloop with ear-first landing, bursting his ear drum. But unfortunately it was me that took the broken-equipment-cake/kept Geraldtons finest windsurf shops in business. My personal list was one broken universal (when I was 400 metres off shore, with the board surfing off down a wave towards the beach and my rig bobbing in the white water on its own) one sail blown out (foolishly got caught in big white water - R.I.P Retro), one harness line broken, and my "pierce of resistance"...
One board snapped in half!!
Yes, the legendary F2 Wave 256 I have sailed for the past 4-5 seasons suffered the ignomy of a Watkins endo; big jump, rear foot slipped out of the strap, heavy landing... end result - cracked the nose of the board almost clean off (though I didn't realise until a run or two later when I saw the huge gaping chasm across my board.) Very lucky I didn't have to do that swim with the noahs again....
All up... an amazing 19 days of sailing out of a possible 22. Some great new friends (Adrian, Mel, Boq, Joel, James, Simon, Tom, Mike, Bernie, Jane and
Michelle) as well as the old of course (Wally/Dave), a newly aquired taste for both seafood and hungarian dishes (thanks James!),
a loathing for Mazda econovans (grrr....), a penchant for Praise Dejonaise(sp?), a hatred for cray pot lines (the cause of my first catapult of the
trip), a fixation on bbq shapes and Emu Extract..err... Export beer, a new appreciation for the word "tronkus"...
...and a desire to return to Gero one day to do it all again.
It dont get much better than that my friend.
- Sails Used:
4.1: 3 times
4.6: 9 times
5.0: 6 times
5.5: 3 times
5.7: 3 times
6.0: 2 times (thanks Pete!)
More Geeky Windsurf info is at: http://www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/~awatkins/Sailing-Days.txt
Ok, you've suffered enough. Heres the pics...
For smaller sized images, suitable for slower speed connections, go to the SMALL image page.
