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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999 Posts: 20935
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Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 9:14 pm Post subject: |
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sav1 wrote: | Isobars, when are you landing sideways after a jump and find it beneficial? The only time it's a plus is when doing lip slides and I understand you don't wavesail. |
Let me be clear; by “sideways”, I mean significant, sometimes dramatic misalignment, but not a full 90 degrees, between one’s flight path and where the board’s pointed at touchdown. That said …
The short answer: to open up the range of directions I can move in at any moment or throughout a reach.
The details:
While airborne, I watch upwind to see if there's an oncoming swell I want to catch quickly. If it's too close for me to bear off in the air to land "normally" aligned then carve back upwind to catch that swell, I'll land pointed where I want to go -- in this case towards that swell -- and sheeted for max power the instant I touch down. (It's a carryover from dirt bikes in sand dunes, where if you’re sliding in one direction while pointed in another, you get to choose, by varying throttle setting and body weighting, whether to go with momentum or go where you’re pointed.) That can be done with a single fin and sufficient finesse, but for me it came to me quicker -- as in literally about 6 PM on a certain full nuke day at the Hatchery in the Fall of 1992, in my first session on the highest-performance multifin board of the day. (Hint: it had and still has five fins.) Nobody I know ever learned a shortboard tack, planing or otherwise, that quickly.
Another scenario in which “sideways” landings are beneficial is just bombing across the swell jumping and linking alternate right and left turns aerially, using sideways landings instead of carved bottom turns. Following a generally broad reach centered in a moving trough between two swells, I bounce off the windward lip into aerials then land the bottom turns sideways on the back side of its preceding lee clone, already pointed and immediately heading noticeably upwind, trying to imitate a pool ball bouncing off rails rather than a snowboard carving down a halfpipe. Whether linking many such turns or just catching a few, it’s fun to see how sideways, how hard, how fast, and how powered up I can land while maintaining control. Again, the extra lateral traction of multiple fins shortened the learning curve by months or years, because this takes more finesse with single fins. That’s also a reason I use bigger (and sometimes slotted) fins than spinny freestylers, gravity-boosted DTL sailors, or simply better sailors may use.
Every time I do this, stitching two to four swells together at full speed clear across the river if the swells cooperate, the incredibly apropos brand name “Windance” pops into my mind. Stuff like this, where “success” is a matter of degree and is almost guaranteed, appeals to me much more than do-or-die “tricks”. It’s also much more accessible to sailors like me with average ability and without the patience (or time, in many cases) to try the same damned thing endlessly before actually pulling it off. The few tricks (unnecessary moves done just for fun) I do took about one try to achieve … my kind of trick, and still fun.
(Anybody who thinks I’m boasting or just talking about myself doesn’t understand the concept of stoke or of encouraging the average heartland sailor with some bumps to play on how easy it is to ramp it up if he’s getting bored.)
A third scenario for landing sideways is when pointing high upwind, flat out, especially in big swell, on a small wave board (one more reason I love sailing powered way up), either for the fun of it or wanting/needing to be somewhere way upriver ASAP (ya don’t need two cars to do up/downwinders). Yer smacking big ramps the whole run, yet wanna make progress upwind, so whaddaya do? Ya jump upwind, land pointing upwind (no, not straight upwind; close reaching) at full power despite drifting off the wind while airborne, and eat yer cake, too. Speed, air, and great upwind progress go hand in hand with landing “sideways”. |
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U2U2U2
Joined: 06 Jul 2001 Posts: 5467 Location: Shipsterns Bluff, Tasmania. Colorado
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