Location : Gower
Date: 21/10/2006
Via the forum, a few of us arranged to meet up and take advantage of the wind forecast.
Tom, SWAT, Missile, Foilman, Foilboy, and me (froggy). The "Foils" left home at 3:15 to avoid the traffic and get there for the crack of dawn. Tom had been out on a "free bar" works do the nght before and for some reason arrived a bit later. We got there at about 10:30.
Beach was the more common rippled effect makeing runs to the sea impossible, but the wind was SSW so we could do fast runs Northwards and just about manage to ride back. And fast runs they were.The wind was 24mph when we arrived. SWATs fist exploratory run up the beach clocked over 40mph. So did mine. The sand was hard packed so we thought.... woooo hoooo!.
It wasnot long before I had clocked 45.4 mph (73.06kph) with my 4.8 Kitewing and SWAT had reached 48.7mph (78.375 kph) with his 5.5. New records for both of us, and a knats whisker away from the 50mph target.
Unfortunately the wind moved round to a more westerly and dropped a little, so no matter how hard we tried, no more speed.
Foilman was doing some impressive jumps and hopefully there are some pix on the forum soon. My camcorder seems to have been playing up, so Foilboy's recordings may not be there. Hopefully some of Tom's will. and Foilboy's digital pixs too.
At one point, when we were just about to do a photo shoot with out nosnow.pl t-shirts on, a serious squall came in and the wind went from 20ish mph to 40+ mph in a matter of seconds. As SWAT dissapeared, we had to drag Foilman back from the dunes, seriously overpowered - he couldnt keep his feet on the ground. So couldn't walk upwind to drop his kite. and it rained. SWAT has dissapeared in to the beyond the 50m visibility of rain/wind/sand combination. We sorted Foilman out and the wind dropped, visibiliy cleared and sun came out. That was mad. Next thing, we saw SWAT walking back up the beach. He was ok, but he'd had the wing ripped from his hands and on impact with the ground, broken a mast tube on his 5.5 pro. We wondered what had happened to the 5 or so kitesurfers who were out on the water. I wouldnt like to be out on the sea when that happened.
Anyway we got the ramp out, did some jumps. The wind moved round to SW and dropped a bit more. so we still couldn't beat the morning's records.
Great day though.
