We sailed a new spot: Courtyard. Raging gusty wind, See graphs. Rigged down to 4.0 after 2 reaches on the 4.8. 4.0 was still lit at times. Wore my 3.2 suit. Water temp very comfortable mid 60s. Air temp hit 65 F. Nice to have another WSW - W option with warmer water and easy access.


Bloomington


Champaign


Decatur




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WSW is tough at Clinton. Takes you a 1/2 hour of tacking to get up to the main pool's clean wind from the CLSA marina launch in very nasty tricky wind. Once you're up there you'll have the wrong sail on, you're thirsty and you forgot to pee. And the water is colder early spring. No wind protection when rigging. Wooded Beach NW of the swim beach doesn't have a good wind exit with the bluff right behind you. Courtyard has a good exit for the wind, warmer water and wind protection when rigging for cold/cooler days. I drew the WSW wind direction(yellow lines) taken off a perpendicular of my GPS track. New tool. Courtyard would also rock on a straight NE wind coming down from the bridge.



Courtyard is east of the big gap.



Courtyard



Courtyard - Total wind protection and a beach.



Courtyard



Courtyard - The beach has its own break-wall and you can stand up quite a ways out - all sand.












Chris hitting a jump



Chris



Lit!









Courtyard is the small gap on the left.



Our new album just dropped.



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You pretty much covered it all, not a bad launch. It will be good to try it with more steady wind. I liked how I was able to find good swell to launch off of both port and starboard. I was surprised we were able to sail all the way to the corner launch completely fired up with nice ramps.

Hey Chris, it took me a bit of guessing and searching until I found out what model and year your 2006 JP X -Cite Ride 95 is. Back in 2012 I believe I had a 2007 Freestyle Wave 93 from JP , so I got curious about yours. Fortunately JP has a well made and easy to google catalogue going back many years:
jp-australia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019..._English__2006-1.pdf

And this is mine 93 that was too technical for my skill back then but at least I learned waterstarting thanks to it , ha ha.

Cool, thanks Ady! I like it a lot, do you know where yours ended up! Perhaps whomever got it might want to sell it. I assume that John kept the hot chick accessory that came with my board shown in the picture. Did yours come with one? I think it would be hard to sail with her on the front.

Chris wrote:
Nope, the hottie was missing on mine too I sold my board to someone from Wisconsin ,I forgot the name and actually I gave it to a relative of his who lives in Chicago. I remember there was a lot of volume in the middle and front of the board while the tale was thinned out. Quite long also compared to today’s boards in this category.

I believe you would have liked it, kinda your style. I remember I had difficulty to get it going but once on a plane it felt very fast and corky, eager to jump at every opportunity. Very overwhelming for an intermediate ride like me back then. It was always a rodeo and all I could think of was: I hope I won’t crash too rough!

You can get a sense of it somewhat from the this 2 pictures: