Holiday Weekend Wind Update

The July 4th weekend here has been characterized by big crowds at Kanaha and, depending who you ask, either good wind or really gusty wind. I’ve never seen Kanaha so crowded as it’s been this weekend. Being a holiday, all the locals are out. It’s all high-season for American windsurfing tourists here, so the parking lot is full of ubiquitous white rental windsurfing vans. In addition to the mainland America invasion, the Japanese windsurfing community has also invaded Kanaha. Parking spaces are tough to find if you show up past noon, and the launch all up and down the beach is packed with people trying to waterstart, people sailing in to get out of the water, people blowing jibes 10 feet from shore – basically pretty congested. Sailing upwind is usually the ticket to avoid the crowds, but even up there it’s getting congested.

The wind – well, my thought on the wind the last three days is that it has been extremely “punchy.” The general consensus on Friday’s wind was that it was pretty ugly. It was extremely gusty and there was lots of carnage as people exploded in the gusts and chop. One minute the wind would be blowing 4.0 for me, the next a 5.0 wouldn’t even get me out of the water. But I went out on the 5.0 just in time for the wind to spike up and average around 30. Did about 4 reaches out and back then said, screw this, this is supposed to be fun. Saturday was a little better, but not much, same conditions just scaled back a notch in intensity. Sailed 4.5 off and on. Yesterday the winds slacked off quite a bit. 5.0 was barely enough for me most of the time. Interesting to look at the iWindsurf graphs for the last few days. They really make it look much better than it actually was. Winds are supposed to back off even more today and the next couple of days.