First session on the Ray 122

47.3 km/h in the last gust!

After a bit of a wind drought, I finally managed to get up to the cottage and score a gusty north wind session.

My first time on the Fanatic Ray 122 was pretty good! I used the 9.0 NP V8 and the wind was ranging from 7 to 15 knots. (It had been much windier earlier in the day, but by the time work emails were done, and with travel time, rigging etc I was just getting the last gasps of the day

.)

The board gets on a plane pretty quickly, but with the 44cm fin I had a very hard time staying upwind. To be fair, I was spending over 1/2 my time slogging, so I'll have to wait to see if the upwind difficulty was due to the board, me, or the lack of wind.

The very short nose on the Ray 122 makes it much easier to ride at speed than the Bic Techno 148 I've been sailing as my big board for the last 5 years. The tail and mid section width is virtually the same, but the lack of nose on the Ray makes the board almost impossible to tack with a 9.0. I'll be working on my heli tacks more on this board!

There is way more foot steering feel when planing and I can tell that once I get used to it I'll definitely be getting some faster top speeds.  I caught a gust on my way back to my launch site and hit 47.3 km/h.  That is in 15 knot (28 km/h) wind or over 165% of the wind speed - or maybe it was a bit more of a gust?  In any case I was pretty excited to get that last bit of planing after 10 minutes of slogging.

Friday the 13th - At least I caught the last bit

I was getting worried that I might not get a chance to use my new board at all this year. The weather was around 14 degrees and sunny, but went down to 2 degrees overnight with frost warnings. While there might technically be one last week of summer, on Friday the 13th, it already felt like fall here.