Monday, January 5, 2009

Does Christmas mean windsurfing?

Margo's Race Camp Report, she is 14yrs old

Just came back from a 4-day youth race camp in Cocoa Beach, FL. Happy to report that I had a blast! I wasn’t thrilled with the scheduling at first: squeezed between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it’s a time I’d rather be thinking about snow and double diamond stuff. Or at the very least something seasonal like hanging by the chimney, drinking eggnog or getting a group of friends to go prank caroling. But windsurfing?
The camp was run by Karen Marriott, Dominique Vallee and Britt Viehman at Cocoa Beach’s famed Banana River Resort. Ideal location: we just crossed the street every morning to jog on the beach, headed back to the lagoon’s glassy waters for hardcore windsurfing sessions, and back to the beach in the evening for smores and a chat around the fire. Half of those conversations were in French, mind you! Let me see if I can recall where we all came from: Montreal, San Francisco, Martha’s Vineyard and Clearwater. Go ahead, draw those on a map and see what you get. Yep, a sail.
Not just a sail, but a sail in a nasty jibe! Pretty fancy, don’t you think? With all of that good mojo around, we were bound to have a great time. And that we certainly did. Everyone was competitive on the water, the hours were long and loaded with instruction on both the 293 and RS:X olympic class boards, but there was always a spark to light things up. I learned to tighten my jibing, that pumping is an artform, that a stuck mast base can be a good thing and that ‘paté chinois’ has nothing to do with China and everything to do with paté - oh boy...
Great weather, great friends. Who needs caroling?

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