warm and windyyyyyy photofest

With all the freezing weather over the start of this month, we were all pretty excited to see the forecast for mild temperatures in double figures, and wind speeds in the PURPLE range for last weekend !

With such strong winds for Saturday, I was dying to try out a speed spot in Wexford to see if it had record breaking potential.  We were greeted with winds in the 30-45 knot range.  Pretty windy... so time to rig the 5.5m and throw all the lead into my weight jacket !

The course was certainly flat, like this for the entire run - 1600m end to end.  Unfortunately it proved to be just too square on the course to go downwind enough to be "fast-fast".
As they say though:  "If you don't go... you won't know"  and it was still definitely worth it to go to try out this wind direction.. and now we are more prepared for the next time.

My good friend and Team-mate Noelle Doran came down to try and beat her personal records.  She has been multiple Irish Wave and Freestyle Champion, but injury forced her to stop competing in waves.  Speed-sailing in a straight line though... how hard can that be on the body?   Yep.. she is Speed Champion too !

At around 55kgs, Noelle is not exactly built like your 'typical' speed-sailor.  Neither am I for that matter and with 10kgs in my weight jacket -  I still was pretty maxed out on the 5.5m.  I have got to say I was impressed that Noelle still managed to hang on to her 5.0m in 40 knots, and she certainly showed some of the boys how it should be done !

Good to see Keith Gorman also made the trip, and dragged down Big Brendan Meaney, who should have been in Keith's house fitting a kitchen for him.  That's what I call a nice Boss !

Anyway... Saturday flat water mission done and dusted... so Sunday could only mean one thing.... time to hit the West Coast and find some waves :-)
I could tell you where this is... but I'd have to kill you !

Colin from Surfdock loving the conditions and sunshine lighting up his baby blue NP ATLAS.

Tibo getting one of the best sets of the day, and probably the prize for best picture too.  He lost his kit twice, and swam after it for 20 minutes, but still came in smiling.

Andreas was also on form, falling more and more in love with his JP Quad on every wave.

There's Tibo in the water watching Andreas and screaming his approval. If only we had given him a GoPro to take some shots from there!

Quads = turns like this...

This shot of Paula, sums up how we all felt after this session ! 

Hope you got out somewhere too :-)

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