4 firsts in a day!

A whole bunch of new stuff this cold sunny windy day. After all the melted slush froze up, there were some nice flat icy parts in the river. We luckily brought skates with us so it was time to try wind skating. #1

What a blast! I spent an hour on the skates learning even more about how the wing works. With the skates it is easy to turn upwind and so I did my first tacks with the wing #2. I'm curious if I'll be able to tack the foil, but somehow it seems like it will be easier than jibing? Downwind was fun too, but you can actually get so much speed and apparent wind on the skates, that the wing pushes back and slows you down in the jibe. Is there a laydown jibe option? I wound up sometimes spinning the wing in the other direction in the jibe. Lots to learn there - you can tell from the video below.

My first wing skating adventure

A spaghetti of fun skating jibes and tacks

Moving well most of the time with the wing and skates

Max speed was 33.4 km/h - total 11.8 km in 53 very fun minutes.

After the wing skating, I took out my 2 metre Slingshot B2 (open cell) trainer kite. While I did get going eventually #3, I was amazed at how frustrating I found getting the kite flying (by myself - as it doesn't have an inflatable leading edge). A big part of that was that I was looking at the bar and somehow had red on the right - whereas the red part of the handle should be port / left. I won't forget that anytime soon. I had one fall on the ice trying to coax the kite into the air. I managed to eventually get good again at controlling the kite. I sat on the ground at the end and enjoyed flying the kite with my eyes closed. I even took my skates off with one hand while flying the kite with the other. But the wing easily wins the ease of use and fun contest.

Minimal kite action

Not a lot of controlled motion with the kite - just 3 good runs.

Later I headed out to the Launch Pad to try the wing again on skis. It was super windy, I'm guessing 25 knots. I hit a new speed record, 48.3 km/h #4, fully 20% faster than my Monday session. It was fun to be going up and over islands instead of having to jibe when approaching shore. No photos but a fun GPS track and speed chart. And 4 firsts!

Fun in the NW wind!
Fastest speed was in the SW corner just before I jibed

New record speed wind wing skiing! 48.3 km/h