OK, today will be a painful one, but it is part of the job. The superglue failed after 15 minutes on the water, so sailing was both exilerating and tourturous. The salt water shows no mercy to open wounds...they simply will never heal unless you stay out of the water. So much for that. When we woke up, John was surprisingly functional after last evenings bar tour. That is the great thing about the pace here..nothing happens before 11am.
we walked up the ally road to the breakfast patio at another small hotel just 100 yard towards the main road. We have been here already this trip, but the breakfast burrito is awsome. We were almost out of water too so after breakfast we made a quick trip to the Supermercado for more.
We were ready for some more good wind and walked down to Vela a bit early as the palms up at the hotel were already showing promise.
John was off to grab a motorcycle ride down to Dare to Fly to kite, as he does each morning. He gets 3-4 hours in before coming back to Vela to sail with us. We can see the kiters about a mile down the beach from Vela. Chris and Tim started the session on 120L boards and 6.5m sails ripping out and back to Da Reef. The longer they satayed out, the more sailors they enticed out to join them. Slowly the wind stated to build, and they came in to change gear. I went out with them on a JP FSW 101 and a 5.8 Alpha. It was decent and the waves were building along with the wind. Ultimately, we were on 85/94 L boards and 5.7m sails and fully powered as the wind continued to improve through the afternoon all the way to 5:30 when it lightened up and we quit. I got some good photos of Chris and Tim from the beach.
The bonehead move of the day goes to john...when he arrived to sail, we were on 85L boards for a while so he grabbed the same, a Starboard Kode. We watched him beach start and head out. Promlem was he was not really going anywhere but down..to his waste in water. still he struggled on eventually hitting the wind line farther out and getting planning. When he came back in doing the same sinking towards the beach in lighter wind...we realized the problem...when he put the board back in the rack, it was actually a 68 L board....he read the size backwards and thought it was an 86 L hull. Nice!
Well since we had eventful night prior we were all a bit weary of doing it again. We went to Vela for the all-you-can-
