Winter Winging at the Launch Pad

Winging in the winter is one of the best ways to learn how to use a wing. You can learn wing handling easily whether you are on skiis, skates or a snow/skate board. The actions of flipping the wing, sheeting in and getting underway are all super simple if you aren't also worried about falling in the water!

I started my winging journey 5 years ago. Jibing and tacking on snow/ice is much easier than on a foilboard and the few times I've been able to use skates on ice has been awesome.

This winter we had a lot of snow so it didn't present good surface for skates. I got a bubba board which is basically a skateboard mounted on a snowboard. It worked great in the deep snow. I was impressed with how I could ride it toeside and then do smooth jibes. Then after a melt and refreeze my old 200cm GS skis worked pretty well too. Top speed was 46 km/h on some nice crusty snow on a -4c day. Tacking on skis is good practice especially for how far you need to move your hand (throw a spear) over into the direction you are going. Skates were a bust this winter - no good smooth ice patches.

The ice was over 60 cm thick. And stretched a good 10km out past Key Harbour. One nice sunny day had good snow but a 10cm layer of slush under the ice which became obvious when stepping off the board. A good number of the days I was up there had solid wind. I had fun going around to visit neighbours and up and over islands that I normally have to surf around.

My last session was my first using the Waterspeed App on my Garmin watch. Waterspeed is a partner with Northstar SailGP team so I’m happy to use that app and all of its cool features like counting tacks and jibes.

Here are some random photos from my 5 sessions.

And my video is on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm2VSY5Zmuw