Little heli vid from Leighton

awesome. you certainly had the speed over the kites on that day!

Nice, awesome footage!! you smoked those kiters....

Awesome footage of the helicopter filming so close to you.

The footage of the front runners has 50 kiters trying to chase them down in the background.

See here also:


An experienced windsurfer racing an experienced kiter in the open ocean may well be faster, but double the speed?

To keep things in perspective. The fastest kiter made it in just under 25 mins. This was done by Alex the Frenchman. He was the only one with a specialised board for the racing conditions.

i heard the WS record was about 19min.

Great stuff Chris - nice little video. I absolutely love open ocean speed sailing (I don't have much of a choice up here) and from reading your GPSTC posts you tend to do too. You looked like you were really fanging it - did you get close to that 30 knot open ocean Nm on that run?

It's funny you should say that because, although it may look fast, I really wasn't going that quick - maybe 25 knots or so.

Here is the GPSTC session from that day;
gpsteamchallenge.com.au/sailor_session/show?date=2010-12-11&team=10

You tend to sail faster at Leighton on the port tack (opposite of this vid), as you can follow the troughs and you don't have to sail up the back of swells.

As far as the kiters, the guy who won the race did so by several km, but he was still pretty easy to catch. No doubt kite-race-board design has a long way to go compared to windsurfing race gear, but it remains to be seen whether they will ever be as quick as us.

Personally I think the fact that we ride our boards flat and use a deep fin to generate lateral resistance gives us a big advantage to keep our speed constant in rough water. Kiters have so much more board in the water and so rough water would have to make it much more difficult to keep an efficient trim.

The windsurf record for the crossing is definitely 19 minutes, back in about 90/91 by Anders Bringdal. I'd be pretty confident that the likes of Jesper / Slowy / Volwater could slice a couple of minutes off that these days.

I tell you what; just for a laugh I may have a crack at it myself this week!