Utah Windriders Association

Got there around 12:30, rode the f-type and a 10.0. Planning half the time. Still fun.

Most everyone else (Dimitri, Carl, John D, Rob, Layne, Paul & Angie, George, Judy) was at Charleston. Best early, when Judy on a 5.5 was smoking John and me, both of us on 6.0s. The wind got gustier and gustier as the afternoon progressed; the maximum wind speed in the gusts didn't change much, but they got briefer and less frequent. Sail sizes ranged from Judy's 5.5 to Carl's 12.5!

http://homepage.mac.com/jsouthwick/PhotoAlbum82.html

Ya, I got the Dubbockgram on the phone early: "Dude, it's 6.0 here and happenin'!", but I didn't show till 1:30. By that time, it was dropping and I rigged an 8.7 and my Roberts AVS and went out for whatever fun was left. Everyone else was raving about the two hours solid of 5.5-6.0, so I was sure I'd get some rides. Weeeellll....I headed up the lake and got to remember all over again why I haven't sailed Charleston for many years. Can't see upwind, weird things sticking up in the middle of the lake, voodoo chop, and seriously voodoo wind. One minute, you're pokin' along, next minute some black water frothed with whitecaps comes out of nowhere and it's white-knuckle hangonferyerlife. Other times, I'd watch this windline approach, get ready for a planer and this stuff would sweep over me with no effect whatsoever on my sail (or boatspeed). Plane one direction, schlog going back with no rhyme or reason.

Clearly I had missed it by two critical hours so maybe it's like Jordanelle, where you have to be on the water by 12:00 or forget it. Made it to Island Beach, then got white knuckle weird wind downwinders most of the way back, with intermittent schlogs, wind-off-the-cliff-headers and mostly exhausting consternation on my part. I'm now convinced that Charleston is the Bermuda Triangle of Deer Creek, that Dubbock, DCJim, Bradshaw, Ward et al, have made pacts with the marsh gods that I'm not part of and that the weird things poking up out of the shallows are sailors of days yore, poor souls unlucky enough to make it back in one piece to landfall, whose clawed fingers are reaching for that final jibe. I swear they were grabbin' my fin...

Well, as Paul observed, at least we aren't going to the gym for our workouts, and I did get heavily worked, so at least I earned the three beers I had for dinner.

Yeah. Beautiful spring day.

The thing I like about Charleston is the lack of two stroke wave dummie fumes. It’s also quite pastoral. You could fall asleep in the tall green grass for a nap session between sailing. It’s almost too deep. You could lose a mast in that stuff.

The reach is quick, good practice for tossing the wide boy 100 cm board into jibes and spinning the 12.5 but the groups of plant branches showing in the middle of the reach keep me from really wanting to pull the trigger, especially with a 70 cm fin doing depth checks. Solid ground can’t be too far below the surface but Jim and John convinced me that there wouldn’t likely be any problem and the only thing I touched was some of the submerged branches on the way in at the end of the day. However, my experience with hitting things in the water is that it’s often an uncomfortable ordeal.

The best wind I had was upwind from the launch as I got near the island. Up there the fetch is wide open all the way to the dam. It’s a big reach too. All in all it was a good second day of the season. I sailed in board shorts, refreshing. Good crew too.