Broken trees on the road, cars and houses crushed by trees and many traffic jams. Although we were stupid enough to drive during a codeRED weather warming, these daredevils were just too enthusiastic to check out a new place, a lake/(wide)channel we found on google earth and ABWB water maps. The place looked promising for North-Westerly wind, ten beaufort, no wind obstructions for a long distance over channel in this wind direction and sudden rapid depth slope which may could cause some little waves. The place named Aardappelengat (translated to English: potato hole) was more than an hour drive.
On our way we experienced the damage of Mother Nature ourself. Branches of trees on the road everywhere, car crashes with traffic jams and the news on the radio kept warning people not to go on the road if not necessarily. I got to wonder what we got ourselves into. Maybe it wasn't such a good plan?
But we were were lucky. We passed the traffic jams everywhere around us, bridges closed for trucks and drove to a farm landscape with almost no cars on the road.
When we eventually found the place we had in mind for our windsurf adventure, we came to the conclusion that is wan't as easy to reach as we thought. There was a private dirt road of a farm 300 meters further and you had to climb over shock wire with to reach the shore. With a tractor somewhere else on the field we thought we better asked before climbing over, so we asked the farmer of the private road if were allowed to launch at his farm. A surprised look, but accompanied with a warm welcome smile gave us a GO. I think he didn’t even know what windsurfing was exactly.
Ready with all the gear we climbed over the shock wire fence, but we did pull it down first with the surfboards to avoid a shock into the ... with stepping over. Eric tried to pull the shock wire a little extra down, but he was so 'handy' use his mastextension as a tool for it, and noticed directly the full power shock. He made my day already :p.
When we reached the water we were stunned: waves on a lake!!
It was a challenge to rig my gear in this nuclear wind. I got blown down and dragged over the grass with my gear in the cowpie. Eric had to catch me. Never experienced this strong wind before! I did try to windsurf, but was pure surviving! Even a gibe, waterstart/beachstart was hard to hold on. A 3.0m sail wasn't small enough anymore! It was good to test my limit and I fully reached my LIMIT this time! I was more than fun, but never again. For Eric more of a succes!
Thanks motion for the coverage!
Check out the 2 pages in the Motion windsurf Magazine