Nutty California

[coboardhead]

[coachg]

Wow, that is impressive GT. Your numbers are off the chart. I envy people who have relatively easy access to places to cruise on longboards like Seattle or S.F. Bay. A couple of years ago my wife bought me a GPS watch so I have only recently been recording distances. The longest distance I have covered in a day on a formula board is between 30-40 miles, the longest on a longboard is around 30 miles and the longest on my shortboard is 32 miles. The formula & longboard are guesstimates because they were done before I had a GPS. The shortboard was just the other day using a GPS.

By the way, I thought you were a conservative? Iso has apparently anointed you as a liberal.



Another printed lie he will deny.

Coachg

[coboardhead]

A liberal is someone who disagrees with Isobars

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Yes Coach, 30+ longboard miles a day put a lot of the west coast of Scotlands sea crossings to islands well within range, during those month long summer holidays we teachers were blessed with.

I always carried split kayak paddles on the front deck and had a technique for dealing with paddling the board and rig, without derigging anything, should I be stranded far out, and left windless. I used to slide the mast track fully forwards, lower the boom balanced over the back of the board with the sail clear of the water, sit on the front of the board facing the back, and slide my legs and feet beneath the sail to balance the rig and stop the boom from sliding off the board. You can paddle the board fin first at around 3 m.p.h.

The longest I got sucked into was on crossing to the island of Eigg in a steady light breeze only to have it die completely when I reached it, just under 10 miles out!! It took over 3 hours to paddle back to the mainland over a silent long low swell which lifted me up, and lowered me back down as it passed with the sail wafting up into air on the downward side, with me frantically lifting feet and legs to ease it back onto the board. A bleeding 3 hour nightmare!

But you can't classify eve3nts at the time with regard to ultimate place in life. I now look back on those longboard 'adventure' days with pride and great satisfaction, and memories which I will take to the grave.

And yes C.B. I am a conservative with a small c. And, Isobars comment was plural, which means he sailed at least 200,000 miles!

[swchandler]

"I now look back on those longboard 'adventure' days with pride and great satisfaction, and memories which I will take to the grave."


G.T, how right you are! I love history and adventure, especially when you've played a part in it. Yet, some of my best memories were sessions where I was sailing by myself with no other sailors around, and I've done a lot of that in the past. I can see that you feel similarly.

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Agreed Steve. It is soul satisfying tackling things alone, for those of us who strongly feel that need to be self reliant. We think alike!

[coboardhead]

GT. I love hearing about your adventures at sea. I constantly get myself into situations that require a fair amount of pain to extract myself from. This weekend did one of those bike rides where we were stuck on the backside of nowhere in a forest where a windstorm made the trail impassable and the 4 hour ride turned into 7 hours.

I’m sitting here with fresh wounds healing from endos over the handlebars and still so tired I avoid the stairs but feeling rather satisfied.

[GURGLETROUSERS]

I appreciate your pain C.B., but it IS supposed to be good for the soul! (I think.)

It's true that mountain bikes don't like it when caught out in the wilds, in a sudden severe wind storm. It spooks them, and they throw you off as a frightened horse might. Last winter one of my bikes took a hearty dislike to drifting icily cold snow, and froze up its rear mech in protest. I wasn't in a mood to take any of it and forced a gear change (I was suffering more than it) for which it repaid me by bending the hanger and ramming the mech into the spokes.

As in your case , it turned into a marathon trudge and carry back down off the moors to the road and car. I made damned sure I got inside the car with a big flask of hot tea, and it went up on the rack!

And we still think it's good for the soul, or why else would we do it!

[coboardhead]

GT.

I did leave put the bike on the roof for the drive home instead of inside where I normally would in poor weather. I hope the discipline of being pelleted with hail , sleet and driving rain will cause it to reflect on its behavior and maybe it will reconsider acting out when stressed out next time.

I do pity the souls of those who don’t ever learn to suffer.

[GURGLETROUSERS]

I think windsurfing threw away something of worth in abandoning 'proper' all winds longboards. At the peak of my obsession with them, from 1986 to 1992 I used my much loved Bic Be-Bop racing board all the year round, with the main 'cruises' during the Easter, Whit, Summer, and October camper van holidays on the west coast of Scotland.

It carried me a total of 4,780 miles in those 6 years of pre G.P.S. days where the pleasure of pouring over the maps and charts in the camper van, with endless cups of tea after exertions, working out the milage covered. Beating upwind lines were drawn in, as far as I could remember them, which can often double the actual as the crow flies distance. (If it was good enough for sailing ship mariners in past centuries, it was good enough for me.)

But the single most meaningful (for me) sailing which I've mentioned before was a return to the mainland of Mull from the island of Staffa, (Fingals cave), an 8 mile crossing on a free and easy reach, over a wonderful long smooth swell, 'galumphing' that old Bic longboard at around 10 knots, perfectly driven by a rock steady constant force 3 ish wind.

For the 47 minutes it took I'd never felt so totally at peace, alone with the open sea, and at ease with my existence. On glancing up at the tip of the mast it appeared to be slicing it's way through a light covering of herring bone sky, such was the crystal clear visibility and strange warping of sense of space. (Close to Iona which is noted for its atmospheric effects, and compass variations.)

I miss that past very much nowadays.