PETER HART MASTERCLASS
108 AUGUST 2019
ATTITUDE TO ...THE SAILING AREA AND THE INTENSITY
A windsurfing pilot made the comparison between flying and wave sailing.
Flying along, like just sailing along, he said, is mostly pretty boring. The
exciting, intense times are taking off and landing. In wave sailing that means
staying in the surf zone. The further you sail out, the harder it is to spot the
swells. The moment you sail far beyond the last breaking wave, you’re no
longer wave sailing. Horizon hunters need not apply. If you need a rest, the
best place to do that is on the beach.
ATTITUDE TO... SPEED
For dyed-in-the-wool speedsters, to be overtaken is to be castrated. Slowing
down deliberately is a cardinal sin. In waves, it’s absolutely OK, in fact often
essential, to slow down – and even stop. At slow speeds you’re more able to lift
the head, take in the surroundings and make smart tactical decisions. You’re
constantly regulating your speed to hit waves at just the right moment or to
let them catch up. And it’s the going from stationary to full tilt as you drop
into a swell that really gets the juices flowing. And just when you thought the
news couldn’t get any worse, some of the best sessions will be non planing.
IN WAVES, IF A PLANING REACH LASTS LONGER
THAN 20 SECONDS, YOU’RE PROBABLY TOO
FAR O U T.
ATTITUDE TO POWER ... UNDER IS BETTER
I knew no one would obey the advice when I told them that for this particular
session, if they planed on the way out, they’d be way over-powered riding
the wave. As expected, they all ignored me and rigged big - their one priority
being to blast out between the sets and not get caught in the impact zone.
But with the wind slightly offshore, that meant as they rode back in towards
the wind, the wind speed across the sail effectively doubled and they could do
nothing but hang on.
ATTITUDE TO POWER... AND CARVING
When your aim is to plane out of a gybe on a freeride board, you look to be as
powered up as possible, set the rail gently and then let the rig pull you around
a long arc. It’s fundamentally the rig that’s providing all the drive.
But on a wave, it’s the wave itself that provides most of the drive (surfers don’t
use a sail) – as long as you stay in the right place. A common mistake is to rig
too big. A big rig not only forces you into a long arc, and therefore outrun
the wave, it also drives the rails too deep and makes them catch. And if you’re
always fully powered all you can do is resist that power which locks you into
one, defensive position. By reducing the power (but increasing volume) you
can tilt and stretch to extreme angles without getting heaved off-balance.
A 4.5, cross-onshore day on the UK’s south coast. For the best it’s just another set of
conditions to be exploited. For the less experienced it’s a wind-driven random mess.
Lots of fun, but mostly it’s not so much wave sailing, as screaming in and out.ATTITUDE TO POWER... SHEETING OUT AS MUCH AS YOU
SHEET IN
Climbing up through the ranks, the advice that rings in your ear in order to
stop heading up, plane early and then overtake your mates, is “commit to the
harness, keep the power on, sheet in!” And in the gybe, it’s when you sheet out
by mistake that you stall and the rail catches. But in waves, the act of deliberately
sheeting out at the right moment is as important as sheeting in because it’s
by sheeting out that you allow the board to release in critical situations. You
power up to start a jump, but then sheet out and release it as you fly off the
lip. And when riding, it’s by sheeting out that you allow the nose to rise and
the board to transition easily from edge to edge.THE KIT
No excuses here. You control the kit issue. To have a go at waves with big,
chunky freeride kit is like saying, “I don’t think I’m going to like it and am
going to prove myself right.” Of course you can take a ride on (or usually in
front of ) a small sloping wave on any board, but it’s when you actually want to
do something interesting on the wave that the big freeride design stumbles. A
big board doesn’t fly naturally and comes down with a helluva clunk. The flat
rocker (for speed and early planing) sticks into the curved wave face. The low
nose is likely to dive and pearl if you catch a wave late and take a steep drop.
That only has to happen once to encourage corrosive, defensive habits. Yes
certain freeride boards carve sweetly – but they demand a wide gradual entry
to the arc, which in a surf context would mean outrunning the wave. And the
big upright fin doesn’t help forcing you to wade out to launch and increasing
the risk of grounding as water sucks up in front of the wave. Some of the most
fun riding takes place in a metre of water.
To exploit and enjoy waves you benefit hugely from the specialist tool –
namely a board with ‘wave’ somewhere in its title – wave or freestyle wave.
And by getting one you invest emotionally in the pursuit and therefore are
more likely to stick at it ... just to get your money’s worth.HOW BIG?
I ask people to reveal their quivers before coming on wave courses. The typical
answer is, “Freeride 120 which I use most of the time; a 95 fsw for when it’s
really windy and an old 85 ... which I use once a year when its nuclear.” What
they’re saying is that wave sailing, for them, is always a powered up windy
pursuit, which in some places it is - but as we’ve mentioned, often isn’t - and
it’s often better when it isn’t because the waves are less confused and you learn
more about the tactics and techniques of wave riding.
If someone could only have one board on which to gather the essential
wave sailing skills, I would suggest a freestyle wave with 20-25 litres of reserve
volume. For a 75 kg adult, that means a board around 95-100 litres. It’s usea-
ble as an early planing practice tool for flat water – but also easily ‘uphaulable’
and therefore safe on the non-planing wave riding days (aka ‘bog and ride’).To the wind obsessed, this looked like a nothing day on Windguru – just one star –
but that one star was a 15 knot side-off wind, accompanied by a 1.5m refracting swell
with a 14 second period – wave riding heaven.