This was the shakedown test of the new Weed Speed fin I have been working on for a while. I did not have my "speed" board with me, just the Falcon 102 I had in my car because I was intending to give back to Peter. As it was a very late session I just went with that board rather than delaying an already late session to get another board.

I met Japanese speed sailor Hajime Nakajima in the parking lot as he was packing up. A very nice guy who is a very keen sailor. He had been sailing all day but had had trouble with the chop with a tide of almost 2 feet. I was hoping things would improve as the tide started to drop.

When I first got to the beach I thought I had missed it as the wind was backing off. I rigged the 6.6 and figured it would be enough with the big board. Initially I was a bit underpowered and the course was quite choppy with a tide near 2 feet.  Unusually there was not much cloud over the West Maui mountains so to compound the problems I could not see anything going down the course due to sun glare.

I was surprised to come back to the beach with a 33.8knot peak speed showing on the GPS considering the lack of wind. I did a couple more runs and finally started to find the groove and the odd gust, the GPS peak bumped up to 35.4. I decided to take a break and wait for the sun to go down as i really could not see anything!

As the sun slid behind the West Maui's I took to the water to find a freshening breeze and a dropping tide. I intended to do just 2 more runs as it was getting quite late, but the conditions were just too good to stop. I ended up doing 5 runs in the last stint before retiring to the beach exhausted but very happy! Out of my 5 best runs 4 came in that last late stint.

I have to say the fin exceeded all expectations and proved to be very stable at speed. I did spin out once in the heavy chop leading into a run but I got the fin back almost immediately. The nice thing about a lot of rake is that the fin does not let go dramatically when you cock it up, it just kind of slides out without completely loosing grip.

This is the fastest I have ever gone on a board over 100 liters by a large margin!