Having taken part in just about every format of windsurf competition, GPS speed was a new and very different experience. Unlike waves or freestyle which are subjective, speed events are very clear with who beat who, with the best 2x 250m runs counting over each hour long round. The only problem is that you have no idea how you are doing compared to the others. You have your machine on your arm and can check it every run, but you have no idea if you are 2 kts quicker or 2 kts slower than the rest of the competition. That makes for a really interesting moment when at the end of the session everyone is checking with everyone else “what speeds did you get?” to try to gauge your success. At the end of the day, you hand in your SD card and wait to find out if you are fast or slow!
Day 2 –I arrived in the morning desperate to know how it had gone, only to see my name missing from all the results. The guys told me there was a problem, that they had lost my card. There was only one other possibility, and sure enough when we checked my machine, they had forgotten to take it out the day before. So after checking the data, I jumped up to 6th in the euros and 2nd in the Canaries. Very happy for the first day. Bjorn was in a league of his own, with speeds over 2kts quicker than the next. Bjorn is one of, if not the fastest sailor in the world, and in these lighter, more slalom orientated conditions, that advantage seemed to be multiplied.