Go! Gumby Go!

I turned the corner onto South Kihei Rd and saw whitecaps. Big, fluffy spraying-off-the-top whitecaps, and chunky swells even with the short fetch from Maalaea Bay. Perfect for a fast downwinder to the Four Seasons beach. Diane was dubious as usual, she considers anything beyond a gentle zephyr to be life-threatening, but I couldn’t wait to get the board off the car and into the water. Diane doesn’t mind being my shuttle driver, gives her and Sam some time for some nice south side walks.

I hopped on the board and paddled out a few hundred yards, and instantly regretted not starting at Haycraft Park on the other side of the bay. It makes for such a ripping run when the wind is slightly onshore, and this was, decidedly. I was going to have to work a bit to clear the reefs and that would slow me down. If I had started at Haycraft I’d be riding swells the whole way. It was Nukin’. You can pretty much see from the GPS speed trace that I wasn’t getting any good swell rides for about the first mile–I had to cut too tight an angle against them to get long rides, but once I turned the corner on the Shangri-La reef it was pure rock ‘n roll.

I was paddling Gumby, my Foote Maliko 12, since the Penetrator is back at the Ding King’s, drying out. I punched a small ding in it paddling on the North side the other day–no idea how, I didn’t feel a thing–and it was enough to cause a leak. So it’s getting pumped out to be ready for the next race. Gotta say, the Penetrator FLIES in flatwater. Now that I’ve learned how to get some muscle into my paddling, and i’m not doing balance checks all the time, it just rips.

Back to Gumby and the swells. What a friken rocket this thing is in a hefty swell. Glide after glide after glide. I was looking at my GPS and seeing seven to eight MPH most times. Never less than 5.5. what a hoot. Plus I’m learning to carve the swells to get more speed and better direction control. I’m also learning to get my paddle out further and pull hard in the beginning of the stroke. This pulls the nose up and gets the board into the swells quickly.

Once I’m in a swell I put my weight forward until the nose is just skimming the water, slide my back foot towards the rail I want to set, and give it steady pressure. As long as i keep the nose down the board just keeps accelerating and turns along the face of the swell. As you can see from the trace I got some pretty long rides this way, some of them in the 10MPH range, and one at the five mile point that hit about 11. Pretty fast for a goofy looking 12 foot board.

I don’t know how this software computes average speed, must be some kind of instantaneous value averaging. But I did 7.0 miles in 1:20:34 , that’s 5.83 mph average, not 5.2. What fun! And I’m sure I can go a lot faster in similar conditions next time. We’ll see.