Two weekends ago, Arnie Cleveland put on a very successful inaugural running of the St Croix River on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota, dubbed the Tour da Croix. He also just posted some very nice pictures to the photo section of the Yahoo Group page. I also posted some screen grabs of my gps track overlaid on a google earth map. FYI, wind was nominally out of the southwest, but we experienced shifts from every point of the compass along the way, ranging in speed from 0-15 mph.

 

In the zoomed-in picture of the top portion of the course ( http://sports.ph.groups.yahoo.com/group/mowind/photos/view/d14c?b=30&m=f&o=0 ) you can see a relatively straight section of my path running from north to south along the eastern bank as we made the return to Point Douglas. During that time I was able to avoid having to tack back to the middle by getting fortunate lifts every time I got near shore. Up until that point, Peter, Blaise, Adam, and I kept trading places in the challenging wind shifts. You can see that most times I went towards the middle of the river on port tack prior to that, my course is nearly back upriver, over 90-degrees from the path of the previous tack, rather than the 45-60 degrees you expect for a longboard tacking upwind in steady wind. So, once I was able to avoid tacking by playing the shoreline shifts I was able to put distance between me and the rest of the guys stuck tacking in the middle.

 

Other info from the gps are:

* Total distance of 15.47 miles sailed

* 161 minutes of recorded sailing time (~5.8 mph average)

* Max runs of 19.5 mph (2-sec) and 18.1 mph (10-sec) during the 1st half of the downwind/upriver.

 

Overall the event was a great time, and I hope more people show up next year.

 

Later,

Arden