Kona Review

This is me on the Kona. The water is about 60ºF now, so I don't need the big suit of blubber you see me wearing in this picture.

Since I'm not getting out anytime soon, I'll post my long-coming, incomplete, Kona review.

The Kona One is a nice looking board. The hibiscus flowers aren't the most masculine colors, I suppose, but I'm not in this sport to be Arnold. I'm out on the water, partially, to be with nature, so the flowers fit into that. The padded surface does bruise easily. It accumulated several nicks on its first outing. I'm sure the beach would be a kinder, gentler place for a Kona, but, alas, this is the Hudson, Baby. Only the strong survive, and nothing survives without a few bruises.

The Kona is the easiest board I've ever sailed. I think my biggest and best observation is that I don't notice it much. I don't notice its width or length. It basically does what I want without any lip. (Sorry, the correct term should be “rail”.) It's remarkably easy to sail. It jibes very easily, you just push yourself past the wind direction and flip the sail around. The Kona isn't tough to tack either. It's the first board I've sailed where it felt like an extension of me. I'm not just sailing it, it's almost like a tool that responds underneath me.

My big beef is with the daggerboard. That system with the two rubber gaskets just doesn't work so well. The daggerboard gets stuck between the gaskets and there isn't much you can do about it except keep moving it up and down. I'm also not in love with the daggerboard post. it doesn't lend itself well to getting flipped bak and forth with one's feet. The system on my old F2 Strato was much better. It was easy to push down and pull up with ever using one's hands. The slot also didn't have any rubber gaskets. Now I hear the lack of gaskets allows water to spray up through the slot at higher speeds, but I never noticed that happening.

All this sailing has been done in flatwater, mostly non-planing conditions. I only got the Kona up to a plane once with my 7.0 sail. I've been holding off using my 8.5 Sailworks Retro, but I think the time has come. Yeah, I'm a little conservative with my new equipment I want to try one thing, then another, then another. Next low-wind session I break out the new sail.

I actually got out briefly last Tuesday. My wife was in the hospital with the newborns, so I decided to get out for a few. It didn't work out well. The weather was warning of storms, but around Peekskill the sky was quite nice. As i sailed out from the jetty a storm rolled over Dunderberg Mountain. I zipped back to the cove and waited. I enjoyed a pleasant showed talking to Lorraine, one of the older people who tend the boat landing. She was under her umbrella but I got rained on. Heck, I was already wet. After about fifteen minutes the rain went away. I uphauled, did a couple of tacks to get out of the cove, then, “Boom!” Thunder!

That ended that. The good part is that the river is now warm enough for my thin wetsuit, which is half of a two-piece diving suit. I wear the farmer john part, which is like a pair of overalls, and my arms are nice and free.

Babies!

The girls have arrived. They were due on the 29th, but complications arose. We had to rush to the hospital last Saturday night. The girls were born at 11:37 and 11:40 on May 24. Their names are Guinevere Abigayl Berger and Miranda Sarah Berger. Kirsten is doing fine and will be home with the girls on Wednesday.

Miranda is on the left and Guinevere is on the right, with her eyes slightly open. These are clearly fraternal twins. Miranda looks like Kirsten's mother's family, and Guinevere looks more like me, Gabriel and my mother's family.

Names:

Guinevere was a name my wife has always loved. Guinevere, of course, was the wife of King Arthur. Abigayl is the name of my godmother Abigayl Sperber. Abigayl was very generous to me during difficult times during my life. We spelled Abigayl this way instead of the standard Abigail because this is the way my godmother did. For many years my godmother went by “Gay”, which is a beautiful name but has some rather obvious baggage. Around 1980 my godmother stopped trying to explain herself after introducing herself to strangers, “Hi, I'm Gay,” so she changed her name to Abigayl. The “Gay” is hidden within the spelling.To me, she was always Gay. Abigayl died suddenly last year of liver cancer, and I wanted to remember her.

Miranda comes from Shakespeare. Miranda was always one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite plays. I love classical names like that. Sarah is a Berger family name. Sarah Berger was my great-grandmother who was born in the Old Country, Hungary. She had a thick Hungarian/Yiddish accent and would often mix words of both languages into her English. She died when I was nine, but I still remember her fondly.

Got My Letter Published

I got a letter published in the latest article of Windsurfing magazine! I commented on their last issue, which had an article on sailing in New York, but no mention of the upper Hudson, just a focus on Long Island and New York harbor. There's a picture of me too, sailing on my Kona Board, with Bear Mountain in the background. Sweet! There may be more to come too, but I'll stay mum about this for now.

So what's the best phone for a windsurfer? Sounds like a stupid question, but maybe it isn't. Many windsurfers carry a phone with them in case they get into trouble. I've had a Palm Treo 650 for a while, but that's a had a host of problems. First of all, it's too big to fit into most waterproof cases. Secondly, the reception is lousy. My wife constantly complains about it. It also seems to get cut off easier than other phones I've had. The worst problem I had with it was that it crashed a lot. I used it to run a grading program(Easy Grade Pro) which I synced to my Mac laptop. This made the odious process of grading and calculating grades much easier. Unfortunately, the Treo would crash unpredictably when I used the grading program. I though the Palm OS was tougher than that, but these Treos are very flakey beasts.

Last week I upgraded the phone. Perhaps this was a downgrade. I bought the cheapest Palm OS PDA I could find to run my grading program. Then I bought from Verizon the Casio G'zOne, which is about the dorkiest name I've ever heard for a phone (www.casiogzone.com). The great advantage of this phone is that it's seriously waterproof. A part of this phone's websites describes its military specifications, including an immersion test and a salt fog test. Apparently this phone was submerged for half an hour in one meter of water, and when it was removed it worked fine.

Now that's a phone for a windsurfer. Too bad you can't actually talk on it while in the water. I could see making an emergency call while floating in the waves with a broken mast. Please leave a comment if you have a special phone you take out windsurfing. I'm curious about what people do with their phones.

Here are some pictures of my phone. It comes in silver and blue too, but I got suckered in by the red and gold. It is a coincidence that this came out just as Iron Man was released?

I am Iron Phone! (And go see the movie; it's pretty good.)

Been A While

I haven't written any recent entries for one small reason: my wife is expecting twins. Soon. Real soon. She's on complete bed rest right now, which means I am doing just about everything around the house: cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, carrying meals up and down the stairs. So I'm not getting in much windsurfing.

The good news is the girls are fine. They're scheduled to come out May 29. That's soon.

Beginner Boards

My friend Scott just ordered a new board. He did some windsurfing in the 1990s in Florida and has wanted to get into it again. I had given him my hand-me-down F2 Lightning Race, but it wasn't working too well. It's a narrow board and Scott's a pretty big guy (220 lbs). Even worse, the mast base has been failing, and the mast was getting the annoying habit of popping out of the track. Not good.

Scott was originally thinking about a Naish Kailua large, which would have been fine. At 220 liters of volume, that would have been fine for his size. I had an odd prejudice against the board. The 2007 model is a bit ugly: it's too wide and it tapers strangely. Then he thought about the Starboard Rio. I like Starboard boards. I like their bright colors and commitment to beginners' boards. (Too bad they don't have a good all-around longboard like the Kona.) So Scott eventually got the Rio large.

The beast, and a board of about 220 liters of volume and a 90 cm width is a beast, is coming soon. After that, we're going to party. I want us to to do a point-to-point sail, starting somewhere like Cold Spring and sailing all the way to Peekskill. That would be neat.

It's the weekend, but I don't think I'll get out this weekend. I've got too much to school paperwork and too much work to at home. The twins are coming in about a month. Yeeeesh!