Friday 11th - Windsurf **** River Orwell at Levington – mainly cloudy.

Foil – 18.29 knot max, 16.90 knot ave ., 10.78 knot hour, 12.84 knot mile , 33.17 km ., 14.73 knot alpha.

Exocet RF AST 91 with Slingshot Hover Glide 76 with Tushingham Vulcan 6m.

With a good SSE breeze forecast I was keen to get out on the water but with low water on my local river being 11.07 it was not ideal. Sunny start here in Felixstowe so once again did my exercises before heading over to Levington arriving around 11 and quickly set up my foil board and with the cross-on wind gusting over 20 knots I once again took a chance with my 6m which was fine for most of the session, only becoming a bit of a handful as the wind increased and the river chopped up a little, was getting knackerd by then too as had been out for two hours non-stop! I launched easily by the marina entrance and after three tacks was out into deep water and with the wind in this direction and low water levels it turned into a gybe feast, in fact I did 95 in this session which is tiring for a poor old pensioner. I fell in more in the first 5 minutes than the whole of my last session here but soon sorted things out and had great fun doing short runs, under 300m meaning loads of turns which are coming along nicely, well most of the time! My top mile today included 7 gybes as I headed up river towards Pin Mill. The wind went patchy so I decided to head back continuing to gybe on the upwind legs! Sadly, the morning sunshine soon disappeared but it was still fairly mild but had the gloves on. With the wind increasing and the river getting lumpy I decided to call it a day and actually had a little rain while packing up. Two windy days over the weekend but not sure about sailing yet will see in the morning?

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