Issue 320 325 - OCT MAY 2013 2012
GREAT THE EXPECTATIONS DUCK GYBE
PETER HART TECHNIQUE A beautiful, well-stocked centre; the water is blue and the wind is strong. All the ingredients are there for a terrific holiday. But will you to actually improve ?
Words PETER HART / Photos Hart Photography
PETER HART MASTERCLASS
GREAT EXPECTATIONS Windsurifng holidays are always fun. But do you make the most out of them and always improve as much as you hoped? Harty, who’s been on a few and has observed many people not getting the most out of it, offers solid advice.
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BEWARE THE FIXED GOAL
The saddest sight on holiday is the bloke (and it is usually a bloke) who like a Pitbull with its jaws clamped solid around its victim, focuses doggedly (geddit?) on a certain move to the point where he does nothing else. With every sorry attempt he gets a little worse and lot more pissed off. Enjoyment of the windsurfing process is a distant memory. Having a specific goal is OK so long as you don’t have OCD over it. Far better to widen your desire and have the more nebulous ambition of just trying new things and becoming more skilful - planing earlier, spending more time on the plane, staying upwind and above all, controlling power and being constantly comfortable – with those in the bag, the moves tend to look after themselves. You may have it in the back of your mind to crack the duck gybe but it’s far better to chuck one in every now and then amongst regular carves and tacks. Once you’ve messed up 4 or 5 times in a row in exactly the same way, you’re on a rocky road to nowhere and it’s time to rest.
With explosive moves like the loop, it’s even less …
…especially if you keep landing on exactly the same place on your buttock . Most people fail in loops because they can’t jump. Change the focus to getting really comfortable in the air.
Watching people at a popular tourist venue, you can see immediately that the ones having the best time and set to improve are those sailing easily upwind and planing freely all the time.
A
friend of mine works for the BBC. To keep his job and continue his march up the corporate ladder, he recently had to move from London to the new HQ in Manchester. There’s nothing wrong with that. Manchester is a vibrant city with a sub tropical climate. No, the problem was that he’d recently become romantically entwined with a lady, who for various reasons, couldn’t move north. The only solution, apart from splitting, was to embark on a long distance relationship where they met as often as mutual time-off allowed, which was about every 3 weeks.
paramour are spectacularly moody. Sorry to say, it didn’t Coming out of a windsurfing trip with the warm glow of work out. success takes a little forethought and the hint of a plan, which involves more than just bombing up and down. There you sit waiting for the transfer bus at the end of Here, from observing, coaching and making many your windsurfing holiday. One of your group joins you mistakes, is a guide to improving on holiday and making beaming. “What a trip eh! 7 out of 7! Magic!” You feign a good time unforgettably brilliant. It starts with you a smile. But WHY aren’t you as delirious as your mate? having a word with yourself to decide what you want Because you feel you somehow didn’t make as much to achieve, what actually constitutes improvement and progress as you hoped, which is doubly disappointing how to best to go about it. since finally the stars aligned and you got wind every GOALS ‘SCHMOALS’ – just get skilful day. But you never quite dialled into the kit, never felt Those who arrive with fixed goals are setting themselves properly comfortable. The wind was strong, but a bit Some may call that ideal - lots of space in which to ‘funny’ and you just never felt in the mood to try some- up for a fall (or many falls as it turns out.) If you’re fixed on getting round your first carve gybe and don’t, you pursue personal interests AND the glorious anticipation thing new … and you were SO looking forward to it. cast yourself as a failure, which is a shame, as you may of amorous reunions - absence making the heart grow extremely horny and all that. What is a windsurfing holiday if not a romantic interlude well have improved in other areas. In fact you may have improved a lot more than your mate who lucked out and with an exciting but moody lover, who you don’t see very pulled off a scrappy, unbalanced excuse for a gybe – but Jim said it was like that for a while – but then it wasn’t. much and where expectations are sky high? he just got to tick the box. In a normal relationship where you see each other all the time, he said, there’s a natural ebb and flow of It’s far from a given that a bit of warmth and consecutive Specific goal setting is even worse as you climb up the scale. With explosive moves like forward loops and moods. Each has the right to be grumpy every now and windy ways will bring technical brilliance. A new place, then. But when you don’t see each other much, there’s a a different wind, different kit, different temperature, dif- Vulcans, you only have 5 or 6 good attempts in you each session before you start developing deeply negative asmassive pressure for every sporadic meeting to be won- ferent pretty much everything, added to a human with sociations; and the more you plug away, the worse (and derful, even when one or other doesn’t feel particularly psychological frailties and extravagant desires and you ‘up’ - which was most of the time since both Jim and his have massive scope for over-active under-achievement. more damaged) you get. WINDSURF MAGAZINE
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PETER HART TECHNIQUE CHOOSE YOUR CENTRE CAREFULLY
The holiday can be made and broken by the centre you choose. Most are excellent. Go for the one where they’re helpful but not over-prescriptive. Those where you’re ordered to take certain kit and sail with a certain set-up, are probably more worried about their equipment than your personal development. When you find a good one, returning is a joy, as they know you and your foibles and the advice gets ever more personal and useful..
The boys at Club Mistral Dahab. They take ‘helpful’ and ‘friendly’ to new levels
THE DILEMMA of SAIL CHOICE
You’re unsure of the conditions. The wind is offshore, gusty near the beach and before you lies a rack with 100 sails. There is such a thing as too much choice. Part of becoming a better sailor is selecting a sail size for what you want to do and where you want to do it. If you’re going for moves that involve a nifty sail transition, duck gybes, heli tacks etc, you’d go a little smaller and be happy to be off the plane some of the time. In an offshore wind, you’ll need more sail to perform in the flatter water near the beach. When getting sail advice, look for someone about the same size as you with similar aims. The problem/beauty of flat water is that the board behaves and you can handle huge sails – not that you always need to. In this 18 knot breeze pretty much anything goes. Young freestyler leaves the beach with a 2.8. That’s Andy in the background with an 8.0. Ok, he is carrying a few kilos more. In this offshore wind, the strength changes by a force or more within 200 metres. Choose the sail for where you want to perform.
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It’s better to be more vague, it a positive way. Two more general goals you can set yourself are to sail differently and to be more skilful. ‘Different’ might mean, on the speed/freestyle scale edge a little more towards freestyle. Stop going out with massive kit; ease back on the sail and fin size; work on different ways to get planing other than sitting down and hoofing; halve the length of reaches; try a different harness and line set-up.
nature of progress. It is not a smooth upward curve – more a series of jagged peaks and troughs that hopefully show an upward trend. On holiday you have time to make a big change, get worse AND get better.
Becoming more skilful is harder to quantify but try this. 1. Each day gauge how long you’re spending on the plane. The better sailors plane most of the time (given a planing wind). If not they come in and change something. It’s not just a case of going for bigger kit. A bad set-up (wrong boom height, harness lines, sail/board combo etc) all stop you planing.
Commit The worst kind of experiment is a half-hearted one. One morning at a centre a guy announced he was having his first go on a freestyle board. Bold move. But that was all he changed. He rigged a 6.5 free-ride sail, put on his seat harness and went for his preferred low boom, short line, blasting set-up. Off he went, travelled sideways for 20 minutes before swimming in screaming in guttural Slavic tones what a load of botox it was and that freestylers should get a life. Well of course. He was a beefy free-rider. His set-up directs all the power into the rails and demands the resistance of a big fin. The poor little 20cm freestyle fin had no chance. It was never going to work.
2. Similarly see each day how well you stay upwind. Staying upwind is a sign of smart kit choice and set-up but it’s also down to drier tacks and gybes, faster waterstarts and being more tactical and reading the wind better. 3. And constantly ask yourself how comfortable you are? Can you commit totally the harness to the point of sailing happily one handed on the plane? The key word is ‘relaxation.’ People are heavy-footed in tacks and gybes, not through genetic clumsiness, but because they’re fighting the kit and so start every move tense and off balance. Everyone can move gracefully and explosively if they’re relaxed and confident.
Because we (males especially) have fragile egos, we tend not to persevere with changes that appear to aggravate the situation.
To go down that route he needed to do more than just swap the board. He needed to make wholesale changes to his set-up, his stance, the way he directed the forces and his whole attitude to sailing. Put the boom up, lengthen the lines, place straps inboard, go for a smaller move–oriented rig; make life easier to start with by taking a fsw. Then get used to standing taller, driving the board rather than the rails and taking the pressure off the fin. It would all feel horribly alien to start with but at least it had a chance of working.
In windsurfing, ‘skill’ basically means good power control. You are in charge of the rig, which gives you the confidence to move freely. It’s then those gybe and manoeuvre boxes natuSimilar but totally different was the plight of an rally get ticked. If by the end of the trip you’re ambitious intermediate who had just got used controlling the power more instinctively then to sailing in both straps – placed inboard – on a you HAVE improved! big, forgiving free-ride model. To up the stakes The greatest advantage of a he plugged his 6.0 into a 140 ltr free-race model windy holiday is that you have with the straps mounted right outboard. Outtime to experiment with both board straps are there to help you balance the the kit and technique. If you just extreme Iift that a big fin generates at speed. A stay with what you know, wrongs 140 racy model needs at least 8.0 to minimum won’t magically right themselves. to push it up to full speed in 15 knots. With a You’ll just do what you’ve always 6.0 he was never going to be going fast enough. done – but more so. Forgive me As soon as he got anywhere near the straps, if I repeat this quote, ‘your body he just sank the windward rail. The combo was doesn’t know the right technique, actually unworkable.
it just knows the path most travelled.’ To improve, YOU MUST CHANGE SOMETHING. GETTING WORSE TO GET BETTER – change! We fear change. It’s partly an ego thing. With most changes, you’ll get worse before you get better and we don’t want to be seen splatting continuously in front of our peers; nor do we want to waste precious windy time – better stick with what sort of works. But such is the
HIRE CENTRES - behind the scenes On the whole hire centres do a great job. It’s a big ask keeping everyone happy. The problem is rush hour. The wind gets up and everyone demands kit at the same time. It’s mayhem as the crowd of neoprene terrorists dive into the racks, elbows out, for fear of missing out. In the frenzy to get afloat, big mistakes are made. Here are some of them.
CLOCKING THE WIND
Trips to foreign places are ideal for helping you hone your wind awareness. The heat driven winds that caress most holiday destinations are quite unstable, blowing offshore, tumbling down mountains and skudding across the water in random blocks and flicking all over the place. The good survive and prosper because they clock the wind’s idiosyncracies and work out the best areas to sail in and where to avoid. Their eyes are always open. The biggest change in people’s sailing happens when they not only spot gusts but also clock their strength and direction and react accordingly. The Dahab lagoon hole. It’s all too easy to let your apparent wind carry you into the lee of the hotels where there’s not enough to get planing again.
It’s not only the strength of the gusts but their direction. This skilful lady gets opened up by one that flicked round and came from behind.
Sailing, looking, predicting, reacting. The closer you examine the water surface, the more it will tell you about what’s coming.
What size? From the centre’s point of view, it’s better to send someone out under, rather than overpowered. There’s the safety issue and the fact that repeated catapults lead to broken noses, both human and fibreglass. Sail size is crucial. The trick is to choose your advisor carefully. Last week in Dahab I saw 16 stone Andy ask 9 stone freestylin’ Amir what he should take out. Amir said a 5.7 maximum. Two changes later Andy finally just got planing on a 7.5. Freestylers, wondrously dextrous they may be, have no concept of being properly powered up and hardly ever use a rig bigger than 5.4 even in a zephyr. Find advice from a staff member or proficient tourist who is not only roughly your dimension but who likes doing the same things. Inherited problems Most centres operate a pool system where you have access to pretty much everything. At some you have your own boom; at others you’re allocated a specific model but in all it’s rare that you end up with exactly the same kit day after day, which means you can inherit other people’s preferences/bad rigging habits. Check before leaving. Here are some examples. Straps 6’ 4” Gustav used the 95 ltr fsw for an epic blasting session in 25 knots yesterday afternoon and set the footstraps accordingly – wide and outboard. This morning 5’ 0,” 8 stone, tricky Susan is using the same board in 15 knots for some manoeuvre practise. It’s a bit of a pain relocating footstraps but if you don’t it can be like going running with shoes 4 sizes too big or small. For Susan, having the straps too wide and outboard meant she’d be locked in a wooden, straight legged stance and would be encouraged to gybe off her back foot. It would totally ruin the session. Of all the areas of easy experimentation, strap settings can make the biggest and most immediate difference. On holiday you have time (and probably a helper) to do it. I know people at home who have never changed their straps. “Why do you have your straps like that Reg?” “That’s where they were when I bought it second hand.” Ask a pro about his strap width and he or she will instantly reel off a figure (e.g. 61cm for waves, 56cm for slalom). Theses are figures they need to know when having custom boards made. They’ve reached them through a lot of trial and error and are ones which they know work for their size, leg length and what they want to do.
solid stable platform for moves. Narrowing the stance and moving the front strap back, lifts the nose, reduces wetted surface and makes you more sensitive to trim at speed. But of all the changes, it’s the size of the strap that makes the biggest difference. A bad catapult where a foot got caught in a strap persuades many early on to prevent a repeat by making them so titchy that they barely accommodate a toe. Tiny straps leave your heels in the water, make you sink the windward edge and head up and are harder to get into. Worse still for gybers, they block the ankle. It can’t bend so you can only commit forwards by standing on your tippy toes and bending at the waist. For those erring towards manoeuvres over speed, bigger, inboard straps instigate radical change making you stand taller and rely less on the straps to support you when sailing. And when you see the toes of both feet straddling the centreline, you know you’re flirting with a new dimension SAILS – check and tune Out on the water the rig feels awful. “An expert rigged it, it’s got to be fine. It must be me.” The assumption that centre sails are always rigged perfectly is flawed. I have a few things to say about this. There are some centres out there, (I don’t use them) where if you so much as dare to touch the out or downhaul, a warning shot is fired from the guard tower and you’re led off to a debriefing room to be informed that the sails have been tuned precisely according to the scientific written settings. There is NO argument. What a load of tosh. Perfectly tuned for who and what? Good sailors are constantly tweaking their sails especially in unstable winds. It’s an essential part of the game. In the face of such bigotry I suggest you take your business elsewhere. The other more common situation is where you’ve inherited another’s misguided tuning. Clare had been struggling all morning on a 4.5. It turned out to be flat as a board. The person before her had probably been catapulted by a rogue gust so they pulled the guts out of it with way too much outhaul. That’s such a common mistake. You have to rig small sails with shape and power. That way you widen the wind band. When they’re flat they pull from nowhere in particular. The power is on and off (mostly ‘off’) and it’s the instability that provokes the catapult. Half an inch less outhaul transformed the sail. It’s a vital rule sailing at home or at a centre, if the sail doesn’t feel right, change something.
Widening and narrowing your stance makes you stand and sail differently. Going wide feels inefficient and a little uncomfortable for straight line blasting but promotes a more WINDSURF MAGAZINE
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PETER HART TECHNIQUE CHANGE
Getting the most out of a windsurfing holiday, and indeed any training session, involves more than just plugging away. “Time on the water, time on the water” they all cry as if it’s a failsafe cure-all for all technique ills. It isn’t. It represents an opportunity to improve but also to perfect mistakes and get really hacked off – especially on a foreign trip. The only way to exploit the opportunity is to experiment with everything especially the kit and set-up.
Re-rig A common complaint from the better windsurfers is that centre rigs feel heavy and life-less. “Have a go with mine.” I say. “What a difference!” They say. Of course I use a very fine brand of sails and hardware but the main difference is that mine had been rigged that morning. The centre rigs may have been rigged and fully tensioned for a few months or more. When a sail stays rigged, carbon masts form a pre-bend and lose some of their memory – i.e. they don’t spring back like they used to, which means the leech hangs like a limp lettuce and the sail has lost its mojo. The solution is simple. Re-rig the sail and insert the mast against the pre-bend. If you were a centre manager with 200 sails hanging in racks, would you re-rig them every couple of days? Probably not. But if you want to breed life back into the one you’re using, that’s what you can do – you have the time.
The Set-up Police Perhaps the most delicate stage of your career is when you’re striving to get planing and find that joyous hooked-in, strapped-in planing stance. It’s here that the right set-up, notably boom height, line placement and length, is absolutely vital. It’s also at this stage that you most distrust your own judgement (is it me? Is it the kit?) and want someone to set it up, look you squarely in the eye and assure that it will work. It’s then that you attack the task with confidence.
This guy is doing fine. But this low boom, short line blasting set up on a big free-ride board with outboard straps, is good for only one thing, blasting. And he’s already doing that quite well. By just raising his boom, he’d already put himself in better shape to gybe.
But sadly it’s a very common sight, that of people trying to plane with a set-up that makes it impossible. Where’s the scapegoat? It may not be wrong advice as such. A typical example is where someone tells the centre rigger they want to practise hooking in and getting used to
the harness. Rightly they’re given a smaller sail and a big board. The lines are set quite long and the boom quite low (chest high). The long lines give them space to move and the low boom is more comfortable when they’re standing close to the mastfoot, forward of the straps off the plane, which is the best mode to be in for harness practice. The next time out, and this time they want to plane, they remember the set-up. Of course it doesn’t work. Hook height is set according to where you’ll be standing on the board – low for off the plane, higher for when you move back away from the mastfoot into the straps. If you don’t move it up, you have to squat right down to commit to the harness, can’t direct any power into the mastfoot and so can’t keep the nose down. It’s that ‘c’ word again. If you’re not planing and most around you are on similar kit are, come in and CHANGE something.
CLOCKING the WIND Winds abroad can be different, quirky even. For a start they may be warmer and therefore less dense and so less powerful for a given strength. If they’re offshore, they’ll be gusty; and if they’re thermal, they may be hitting the water from above and spreading across the water in blocks. All these factors affect sail choice, how the sail handles and where you’re going to have the most fun. On the third day of my recent Dahab trip, everyone was having a bad day. The shore was littered with people adjusting harness lines and re-tuning sails. But it wasn’t the sails, it was the wind. It was marginally more northerly and so rolling down off the mountains and then tumbling across the water.
INHERITED PROBLEMS, BAD ‘GOOD’ ADVICE
The great thing about the well-equipped centre is the range of choice and scope for experiment. The not so good thing can be the lack of continuity and the risk of inheriting someone’s rigging or set-up mistakes. You may be in a hurry but in truth you have time to check and adjust everything. When someone sets the kit up for you, make sure you tell them exactly what you want to do with it – plane or not plane, blast or gybe etc.
Outboard straps in gusty winds increase the risk of you burying the windward edge and stalling when you run into a lull. Did you mean to set them there? Or did you just inherit the set-up.
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This set up, low boom long line, is fine for practising harness work standing forward of the straps off the plane. But he will really struggle to plane unless he puts the boom up
Big board, small sail, big bloke. Ok so far but the very high boom - it’ll be almost impossible for him to get into the straps without sinking the tail. Improvement is thwarted until the set-up is changed.
PETER HART TECHNIQUE THE BEST TIME of your LIFE
During down time on my clinics in Dahab, I often take a boat into the lagoon and just observe. It’s a microcosm of the windsurfing world. On the same small stretch, world-class freestylers pop and spin around total beginners. You see improvers from a variety of nations renting from a number of centres all of which have their own ideas as to what kit and set-ups work best. The vast majority are loving it but in so many cases it’s plane to see how better kit and set-up choices and the smallest changes to how and where they sail could enhance the experience.
But most of the time it is the best fun you possibly have wearing rubber! The water state looked a bit like that created by the pulsating indoor fans. As the gust hits the sail, it feels as if someone has shot random rocks into it. It shakes and rattles and pulls from everywhere. Our easterlies at home are a bit like that – lots of noise but no substance. On bad wind days, the first priority is to keep your pecker up. Readjust your expectations. Everyone’s a hero when the wind is consistent and the water flat; but there’s a special satisfaction to be gained from performing well in tricky winds. See these fluffy, thermal, gusty breezes as an opportunity to develop your wind sense. Yes, look upwind to spot the gusts and lulls but do more than that. Really study the water surface. Not all dark patches are alike. Some are proper dark, in which case brace yourself; others are mottled which suggests the wind is bouncing across the water in little lumps and won’t give you much to lean against. And start to see if you can work out not just the strength of the gust, but also note if there’s a change in direction. A common sight in Dahab is people getting dumped in by a gust that has whipped round and hit them square on the nose. But if you clock the direction of the ripples as they approach, you can bear away before it hits and save a slam-dunk.
IN the wind zone The trick to sailing in many popular spots is to identify and stay in the windy area. A classic example is the 70
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Dahab lagoon. The comment made at some point by everyone who sails there is: “it’s funny. I can plane going one way but not the other.” That’s because they launch in the clear windy spot and then sail into the lee of the hotels, where there’s enough wind to keep them going but not enough to get going in. So when they turn, they drift around off the plane until they hit the clear wind again. There are literally millions of man planing hours wasted by people sailing too far along the Dahab lagoon. From a technique perspective the biggest mistake people make in gusty venue is to use the gust to go fast and use the lull to turn round. It’s as if the drop in pressure in the sail is the cue for them to do something, which is a major reason why carve gybes lose speed all the way round. How life changes when you learn to stay with gust by bearing away and then use that acceleration to take you into the move.
From a technique perspective the biggest mistake peo- ple make in a gusty venue is to use the gust to go fast and use the lull to turn round. The walk of Misery and Humiliation A successful windsurfing holiday is surely about maximising quality water time. People who have not dialled into the kit, the place or clocked the foibles of the wind, spend a disproportionate amount of time just trying to get back to where they started from. If you’re constantly trying to squeak upwind, or God forbid, walking dragging your kit, you’re wasting time, energy and draining morale. The top priority is firstly is to stay in that wind zone.
It’s so much easier to point when powered and planing. Secondly, just watch a local and see the lines they take, and where they chose to turn. In most offshore wind venues there are huge bends in the wind. Get on the wrong side of them and you get pushed into a corner. Get on the right side and you get lifted home for free. The glory of warm venue places is that the wind blows generally from the same direction. Once you work it out you’ve cracked it for the whole week. With the ability to stay upwind, your confidence soars and your holiday will be memorable for all the right reasons. This whole article seems like a thinly veiled plea to go on a clinic where all the pitfalls are pointed out and avoided. I would never abuse my position so blatantly for commercial gain - but in case you’re thinking that way …
Next month Peter continues the theme focusing on the methodology of self-coaching. But yes, as he intimated, the best way to improve is indeed to join him on one of his legendary clinics – enjoyment and learning guaranteed. For all details check www.peter-hart.com or email him for his monthly newsletter on harty@peter-hart.com