It was windy at Lake George yesterday, with lots of PBs. I counted 15 postings with top speeds above 40 knots:


Blue numbers indicate PBs. The fastest women on the water (Nina) set a PB with 38 knots.
Interesting to see the range of board sizes, from 40 to 62 cm wide, and sail sizes, from 5.0 to 6.3.
Congrats to everyone who managed to convert the wind into speed yesterday. For my taste, it was a bit too cold, too rainy (at times), and too windy.

Some terrific results. It's great to see the boards and sails used to.
I know wind speed is subjective but it would be nice to have a wind estimate to put it all in perspective.

Nice analysis Peter.
It would be even more interesting to see the sailors height and weight in this chart, but of course, the statistics are not easily available. I suspect there is a rough correlation between sailor size and the equipment they used. I know this is true in many cases, but it would be interesting to see the outliers.

There are many tradeoffs when choosing sail and especially board size.

Do you gear up for maximum efficiency for the big squalls and risk being stuck and slow between them. Or rig for more all around ability and possibly give up a little in ideal speed conditions.

And then there is top speed v's 5 x 10 sec. Going with a slightly larger board may slightly knock the ultimate peak speed potential, but can help you to maintain a great speed for more distance and in less than peak conditions. I see evidence in the results that some who went for larger board (and sail) may have done better in this category. And where the water is very flat (as it was yesterday), bigger boards remain much more controllable with less drag penalty.

And then there is what you are most tuned into sailing - ie. you have the opportunity to sail more specialist speed gear often enough to get completely comfortable with it. You will often go faster on gear that may not be theoretically the most efficient, but that you are extremely familiar with and comfortable and confident on. If this is your experience, it's often be faster for you to stick to the gear you are most comfortable on.

And then there is the other categories. Rigging for small pure speed gear reduces your efficiency for Alphas, Distance and I hr. Greg, the second sailor on that list in the list, not only smashed his 2 sec PB, but also his alpha and NM PB's as well. Hard to do that on pure speed gear, but earns great respect for his speed on his slalom board.

Although Byron proved it can be done, with a super all around effort and numbers on his 44cm speed board, including a 28 kt hour!

And Byron's hr was knocked down from a stack in the weed 3/4s of the way in.

Saw this pop up on my feed

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sboardcrazy said..
And Byron's hr was knocked down from a stack in the weed 3/4s of the way in.

He lost less than 0.2 knots in that jibe. According to his GPS tracks, he lost about 20 seconds. His average speed before the missed jibe was 28.2 knots. Still very impressive. But he knocked it out of the park today:


I think that's a spot record for Lake George, at least for GPSTC postings. I could not find any faster postings. Please correct me if I am wrong!

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boardsurfr said..

He lost less than 0.2 knots in that jibe. According to his GPS tracks, he lost about 20 seconds. His average speed before the missed jibe was 28.2 knots. Still very impressive. But he knocked it out of the park today:


I think that's a spot record for Lake George, at least for GPSTC postings. I could not find any faster postings. Please correct me if I am wrong!

Thats correct. I think the 3 previous best in the 47's from Hamma (47. 09), Spotty (47.36) and (B-Rad) Brad Anderson (47.95) were all done in the typical SE winds of around 30 to 35 knots. Byrons run was in a SW squall and that was probably over 35 knots.