I had high expectations of this session with unusally flat water (for me) but couldn't even break 30 knot 2 sec lol. I was well powered on 7.1 and 96L

What size fin ?

Did your bear away?

The water does not look too flat, bearing away at speed might bounce your board without the right technique
maybe the sail was a bit more than needed, because you tended to be on top of the board and bend the front knee

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kato said..
What size fin ?

34 in weed speed black project

Looks like I bear away about 30 Deg from my normal sailing position, which is likely about 5 Deg higher than a bean reach

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powersloshin said..
The water does not look too flat, bearing away at speed might bounce your board without the right technique
maybe the sail was a bit more than needed, because you tended to be on top of the board and bend the front knee

I did notice i was going over the back of the chop when bearing away. I expect that is par for the course in most neighborhoods?

For speed you need flatter or chop that is closer so you can go through it without jumping
With your chop probably the best you can do is find the angle with less disturbance, following the movement of the waves: Kato is an expert he wight be able to tell you more. Good fun anyway !

What sort of board?

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sboardcrazy said..
What sort of board?

Goya proton pro 96L.

I did a quick session on may AV modena 78L/52cn speed board and the 7.1m and still didn't hit 30knot 2 sec

So i doubt its the board??

Not windy enough.

I need close to 20kts to do 30kts,

Heres the wind graph in MPH from that day. I was on the water between 10am to 2pm. I sailed 7.1 race sail on small slalom board and speed board. And then switched to 4.7 on 85L FSW and was fully powered

My comments
- That is not flat water, is there a bank you can sail behind that does not stop the wind
- The BP WS34 is the right size for the 97
- The 7.1 is OK for the 20kt base wind, A 6.3 might have been better in the gusts
- You're sailing at about 115 deg to the wind on your bearaways, You need to get to 130 in the slingshot. Look for a gust on the water in front of you and bear away the final 15 deg as you sail into it.
- Try and tilt your windward rail up and keep it there. It's easier in flat water. Sailing with your windward rail into the water is slow.
- Don't choke the sail as you bear away into the sligshot. I move my back hand forward between the harness lines so I don't choke the sail

Check out this video

I'm assuming that you're using a weedie cos it's weedie where you sail. If not, have a play with a good 32 fin upright for a bit more board lift. Also look at your mast foot position. Try moving it back until the board spins out consistently then move it forward 1 inch.
Sail square to the wind to the point of being lifted then bear away . It will scare the crap out of you at the start but it will be fast. Get comfortable with your gear and sailing far off the wind. Good luck

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thedoor said..
I had high expectations of this session with unusally flat water (for me) but couldn't even break 30 knot 2 sec lol.

You are doing a constant speed of 28-29 knots for more than 20 seconds. That would be nothing special on really flat water, but in the chop you have, that's actually pretty good speed.

If you want higher speed in your conditions, you'll have to "thread the needle" between the chop lines. Read the chop carefully - typically, it changes direction and height a bit. You want to be at a spot where the chop is smaller, and/or angled downwind a bit more, so that you can go deeper without constantly going over the back of waves. It will probably just be a few seconds before things change and you need to change angle again, but find the right spot in a gust, and gain a couple of extra knots for 2 seconds.

The tips others have given certainly will also help, but there is one where I want to give you a different perspective:

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kato said..
Also look at your mast foot position. Try moving it back until the board spins out consistently then move it forward 1 inch.

That is a very common recommendation, and I have no doubt that it works for Kato and others who surf at his level. For a less skilled surfer like myself, this did not work. I had the mast base further forward that this rule suggests, and still had multiple sessions where many guys on the (perfectly flat!) water did 40+ knots, but I could not. Things changed when Boro, who has done 50+ knots in Luderitz and set spot records at various places in the US, gave me a few tips. The most important one was to move the mast base forward, almost all the way to the front. While a more backward position is in theory faster, my primary issue was control, even without spinouts - and the forward base gave me the control I needed to keep the pedal down in big gusts. One thing that convinced me to try this was that Boro, who is a much better speedsurfer than I am, had not only done the same, but also moved his foot straps forward for better control when sailing in chop in Maui. With that, he had laid down some very impressive speeds there.
Maybe that won't work for you, but when you play with the mast foot position, it definitely worth trying out positions that go against the common wisdom.

I love the Forebay. It is a required stopover when we drive through CA on I-5. The other required stopover is Sherman Island.

Recently I have just been focussing on adjusting boom height not mast foot, cause its too many variables and I can adjust boom easily on water.

This is my current approach. Mast foot middle and boom maybe 1/3 from bottom of the cut out. Then I adjust boom to get to the point where my front foot pressure is light but still secure. If front foot wants to fly out then I lower boom.

My rudimentary thinking is that higher boom and more rear mast foot do the same thing, but surely they don't lol.

Also, remember my earlier posts about not being able to sail upwind well, how does boom height and mast foot impact that.

Not sure if this means anything to you all or not

With some straightening and a few lines, your plot shows that your top speed was at around 110 degrees to the wind:


That's a pretty typical angle for both newbies to speed surfing and for chop. For comparison, here's a polar plot from my top speed PB:




Top speed was at about 130 degrees. 20 degrees less would have been about 5 knots slower. This was on mirror-flat water, so going deep was easy. In chop, it takes big balls and excellent technique to go deep.

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thedoor said..
Recently I have just been focussing on adjusting boom height not mast foot, cause its too many variables and I can adjust boom easily on water.

Yes, it can be quite confusing because different gear adjustments can have similar effects. My simplification is to set the boom height mostly based on power. Lightly powered = higher boom, full power = lower boom.

Mast base position when doing speed is based on control. Further back = less control, more forward = more control. The actual position depends not only on conditions, but also on skill and how you feel about loosing control (like full-speed spinouts and catapults). Plenty of surfers don't mind an occasional catapult or broken boom, or have enough skills to always be right on the edge. I do not like that feeling at all, and end up slowing down (or, in chop, limiting my downwind angles). I remember one day at LG where a guy with crazy skills and balls the size of basketballs rode a gust to 48 knots, while I got nowhere close to 40 (my wife proved she has bigger balls than I do by setting a couple of top speed PBs).
The next windy day, I followed Boro's advice and moved the mast base forward, was comfortable, and got 41. I was reasonably close to the fastest guys on the lake that day, but the wind was also a bit lighter so perhaps ball size did not matter as much .

One thing that has always helped me was real-time feedback with waterproof headphones and a phone. There often is quite a bit of difference between what feels fast and what's actually fast. In particular, more control can make a run feel slower when it's actually faster.

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boardsurfr said..
With some straightening and a few lines, your plot shows that your top speed was at around 110 degrees to the wind:


That's a pretty typical angle for both newbies to speed surfing and for chop. For comparison, here's a polar plot from my top speed PB:




Top speed was at about 130 degrees. 20 degrees less would have been about 5 knots slower. This was on mirror-flat water, so going deep was easy. In chop, it takes big balls and excellent technique to go deep.

Cheers. When I bear off if anything I feel less power, maybe I am oversheeting or I have too little sail for the wind?

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thedoor said..

boardsurfr said..
With some straightening and a few lines, your plot shows that your top speed was at around 110 degrees to the wind:


That's a pretty typical angle for both newbies to speed surfing and for chop. For comparison, here's a polar plot from my top speed PB:




Top speed was at about 130 degrees. 20 degrees less would have been about 5 knots slower. This was on mirror-flat water, so going deep was easy. In chop, it takes big balls and excellent technique to go deep.

Cheers. When I bear off if anything I feel less power, maybe I am oversheeting or I have too little sail for the wind?

You will have less power when you bear off, so you'll need a bit more "feeling". In the diagram above, the board speed increased by about 1/3rd when going from a beam reach to 130 degrees, but the apparent wind decreased by 30%. Considering that power is proportional to the square of the apparent wind, power in the sail dropped by about 50%. A good gust really helps in the downwind runs to limit the power drop a bit.

A larger sail size can help, of course, but a 10% increase in sail size does little against a 50% drop in power. What makes a bigger difference is proper use of an adjustable outhaul. When going for a speed run, you must have the sail bagged out so that it touches the boom (which must be wide!) to the harness lines. If you're on the correct sail size for the wind, it should be very hard to near impossible to sail back upwind without using the adjustable outhaul a lot, to the point where the sail barely touches the boom at all. You pretty much change the depth of the sail profile by a factor of 2, which then compensates for the change in apparent wind. The flat water spots in Oz where you can stand in the water to make adjustments make it easy to start using adjustable outhauls . In the session for the polar plot I posted, I sometimes would wonder why I could not get over 36 knots when I usually heard 38 or more, only to discover that I had forgotten to release the outhaul after the upwind leg.

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thedoor said.. When I bear off if anything I feel less power, maybe I am oversheeting

Oversheeting can be a problem, too, especially when you are on a sail that's small for the conditions. But it does not look like that in your video. If you assume that your board speed equals true wind speed at 90 degrees, and increases to 1.33 x true wind speed at 130 degrees, than the apparent wind angle changes only from 45 degrees to 48.5 degrees - so there's no real need to sheet out.

How do you interpret those weird diagrams?

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thedoor said..
Recently I have just been focussing on adjusting boom height not mast foot, cause its too many variables and I can adjust boom easily on water.

This is my current approach. Mast foot middle and boom maybe 1/3 from bottom of the cut out. Then I adjust boom to get to the point where my front foot pressure is light but still secure. If front foot wants to fly out then I lower boom.

My rudimentary thinking is that higher boom and more rear mast foot do the same thing, but surely they don't lol.

Also, remember my earlier posts about not being able to sail upwind well, how does boom height and mast foot impact that.

This would be reasonable with an upright fin, because you are using a weed fin you need to move the base further back to match the fin (some even hang over the back of the board)

The board probably has a reccomended position for the base on the mast track this will be too far forward with a weed fin

Having said that I'd agree the main thing stopping your 30 knots is you need to go a bit deeper off the wind

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sboardcrazy said..
How do you interpret those weird diagrams?

It's called a polar diagram and can be generated form your gps data

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ausbinny said..

thedoor said..
Recently I have just been focussing on adjusting boom height not mast foot, cause its too many variables and I can adjust boom easily on water.

This is my current approach. Mast foot middle and boom maybe 1/3 from bottom of the cut out. Then I adjust boom to get to the point where my front foot pressure is light but still secure. If front foot wants to fly out then I lower boom.

My rudimentary thinking is that higher boom and more rear mast foot do the same thing, but surely they don't lol.

Also, remember my earlier posts about not being able to sail upwind well, how does boom height and mast foot impact that.

This would be reasonable with an upright fin, because you are using a weed fin you need to move the base further back to match the fin (some even hang over the back of the board)

The board probably has a reccomended position for the base on the mast track this will be too far forward with a weed fin

Having said that I'd agree the main thing stopping your 30 knots is you need to go a bit deeper off the wind

Thanks for pointing that out

Riding with the swell helps ,maybe close the gap a bit more ,and run down a little more as others have said

it looked fast

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Shifu said..

sboardcrazy said..
How do you interpret those weird diagrams?

It's called a polar diagram and can be generated form your gps data

Interesting. Thanks.

In addition to what Shifu mentioned, polar plots are sort of like your sailing signature. You can also read VMG (Velocity made good) or upwind/downwind speed directly from the plots. If you are in race conditions, sailors that can get upwind the fastest should have the most advantage, or in speed sailing you get back to the start quicker in order to have a chance to score more gusts. I also find it a useful way to compare fins (or any trim settings) objectively if you keep other variables the same. i.e. does fin A get you upwind faster than fin B but does it give you a speed penalty on the downwind run.

Here is an interesting comparison of 3 sailors at same location at same time. Cannonball is textbook sailor with peak speed around 36.4kts on both port and starboard tacks at nearly exactly 135 deg off the wind. Boz sails for speed only on the starboard tack but gets peak speeds around 41.4kts in a wider range 135-150deg off the wind. Slowboat sails only starboard speed runs but at ridiculously deep 165 deg off the wind to get peak speed around 47.9kts. Slowy is always banging on about having to go deeper to go faster but this is crazy deep.

Whilst both Boz and Cannonball have upwind VMG's around 12kts vs Slowy's 14kts, the downwind VMG's of Cannonballs 27-28kts vs Boz 35kts vs Slowy's 45kts show the massive difference in speed sailing ability of each sailor to ride big gusts.