I hate to generalize, but a catamaran will never go that fast, not with a crew in control of it.

"From what I had heard from Pascal, Christophe, Michel and Thierry the Mistral was a hard wind and hard to go fast in so 50-knots would probably have to wait. What arrived was beyond my wildest dreams and everyone else’s for that matter. There were stretches of wind that were almost hurricane strength with a bright blue sky! We had gotten the real Mistral, the true French wind that is so famous worldwide.

I was sharing the van with Erik and when we arrived at the beach at 9am on Saturday it was clear that it was going to be a good day. When we opened at 10am I went down the run with my big board (37.5 w/ 24 fin) and my 5.4. The time was 43.5 but I could already feel that this course was much harder than the SE and I wanted to get on smaller stuff immediately. I had to work so much more and the little gusts all the way down coming over the land were super tough. They are invisible basically so it is just a feeling and a hard-core one at that. The power surging that I felt last December 3rd when I beat 46-knots for the first time was tiddly-winks compared to this rugged North wind.

I switched down quickly to my 5.0 and tiny board (33) after several more runs that were between 43 and 44.5. I just wanted to get rid of as much surface area as I could because it was simply easier to hold down. Erik helped make a key change happen for me with my fins as I had too small of a fin in my little board that became nervous sometimes so we put a 24 in the 5.0 setup and instantly I gained directional stability and smoother average speeds.

For the first time I wore a GPS unit in my runs which was exciting and very useful to learn what was happening with my top speeds versus my average speeds. My times will be posted on www.gps-speedsurfing.com.

For those who are curious I have set a new unofficial GPS world record with a top speed of 49.3 knots!!! When I saw that and after Roger of gps-speedsurfing.com analyzed my run it was clear that I actually was averaging 48-49 knots for 400 meters of the run and I had a dip of 100 meters where I went down to 45 knots. As Erik puts it that is the ‘Mistral dip’ that happens just after the midpoint of the run so that is why my run ended up at 46.82. It was technically faster than that but that is the hard part of the ‘average’ speed calculations. One must maintain it over the full 500 meters...

It was pure gladiator fighting, the type of caveman uga-uga stuff that is hard on the mind and body. Our biggest problem was getting to the beginning of the run as there was a manageable 40-45 knots on the run but the start was freakin’ blowing 50-60…….it was insane. That is the only word that describes it. It was so hard to get up, even to get the feet in the straps, even to get the sail out of the water without it knocking you on the head super hard. The Canal was smoking with spray everywhere. It was incredible and unrideable with the gear I had. I tried pretty hard but I was tired already after the record run, which drained so much energy. I had a huge crash just before the start late in the afternoon and I got my bell rung mashing my body into the rig pretty hard. My GPS speed at the crash was 48-knots! After this I was more careful as I knew I had already broken the WR and I wanted to live to fight another day..."