Wave clinic 2017

In conjunction with www.windjunkie.co.uk I will be running a wave clinic here on Fuerte next summer from 12th-19th July 2017. Visit the website for a full lowdown and for bookings. It'll be an amazing week but there are limited spaces available so be quick!

Harness mount

Incredibly, the wind is still blowing here on Fuerte, kind of an indian summer I suppose, and we're getting some pretty decent sailing in. I had a second attempt at filming with the K4 harness mount after I videoed mainly my head on the first effort. This time I got the angle better and got some decent footage, although not quite as good as the 'head only' action, typical. I took a couple of grabs from the video too and they came out awesome with people confused over how I got the pics, haha...

I said they were taken by a mini-drone manned by a diminutive Chinese pilot :)

The rest of the footage I edited and compiled this short vid...


Late summer session from Stephen Gibson on Vimeo.

Summer catch-up

It's been a long summer but a good one for sailing and teaching. Unfortunately I haven't kept my blog very up to date (to be honest most of my stuff gets put up on my facebook page these days as it's easier  and it doesn't diminish the video quality like on this page https://www.facebook.com/FuerteWindsurfClinics/ ). Over the next couple of days I will try to catch up as much as possible with the main events of my summer sessions, both freesailing and training.

In July, my good friend Oisin was back in town and he was kind enough to kit me out with a K4 harness mount to try. After a couple of mishaps as I was getting used to it I eventually managed to get a couple of clips- I still need to sort out the camera angle slightly but the footage is quite unique. Here are a couple of clips from that day. First up are a couple of shakas...

And next, a big back loop on my freestyle board!!!

Happy days. I have more pics and photos on my pc which I will put up in the next couple of days. Now, I'm off to Punta as it would appear that summer has not yet breathed its last breath ;)

Push Loop

Push loop filmed at Punta a couple of weeks ago. Looking forward to this weekend for more wind and waves there. My first clinic starts on Thursday so not much freesailing but it looks perfect for the guys...

Getting started again

Looks like summer has started in earnest now, had quite a lot of sailing in the last couple of weeks and starting to get back into it after a lengthy lay-off. My clinics start next week so I'm glad to get a bit of water time under my belt before I get into my 10 hour days :) .

I have quite a bit of video footage and photos to stick up on here as I've struggled with internet again recently so I'll be posting pretty regularly over the next few days, with both new(ish) and old stuff.

For the first instalment, I stuck the GoPro on last Sunday and Punta and had a fairly amazing session so edited it into a short clip which you can watch above....

It's been a while

Understatement of the year perhaps, but it has indeed been a while, both since I posted and since I windsurfed consistently! It has been the worst year in my time here in terms of wind (thanks el nino), and I've literally sailed maybe 10 times in total since the end of last August. Incredible :( . Anyway, summer is almost upon us and the good news (for me) is that the wind is finally kicking in, albeit mainly northerlies and with small or no waves on the east coast. I can hear it howling outside the house as I write this post :) so it'll be off to Glass this afternoon just to get my feet back in some footstraps and try to get sailing fit for when the real conditions arrive.

I managed to get a session in last week one morning before work and Lucy videoed for a bit. Not surprisingly, I sailed a bit below par but still got a few nice takas and backloops so pretty happy really. Looking forward to getting a few days on the bounce to really get back into it though. Here's a pushie from that morning...

And here it comes...

Yup, after the longest wind drought I can remember it looks like the wind is finally back, and for a good while too. Hopefully it´s the start of an epic spring/summer! The last couple of days have been on 4.5 down at Puerto Lajas with smallish surf but still great fun and from today on it´s looking even more promising with the wind due to swing through to NW with the chance of maybe a Lobos sesión! Fingers crossed...
Last weekend was due east and really light (again) at Majanicho so I drove upwind to Rocky Point where it was blowing a steady 25 knots and grabbed a half-decent bump n jump sessión. When I checked through my GoPro snaps I realised that on almost every jump I had Lobos as the backdrop, which looked pretty cool I think. Check them out...

 Anyway, now that the wind is making its presence known hopefully some photographers with 'real cameras' will start to appear and I´ll be able to post up some proper pics (not from Lobos unfortunately) but in the meantime this will have to do :-)

Belated Happy New Year!

Welcome 2016, and good riddance 2015, autumn and early Winter 2015 anyway. Yeah, 2015 was a big letdown from a windsurfing perspective and normally I would start my post by apologising for the lack of updates but there really has been nothing to report at all. I have windsurfed a paltry 4 times since August (new kit still looks nice and new though) and the forecast isn´t looking any better for the next week or so but I´m expecting big things from this coming spring. We are owed a lot of wind! Especially taking into account the amount of wind the UK has had this Winter so far- the tables have been truly turned as I sit in my windless garden looking at photos of my UK Facebook friends flying around on 3.5m sails. Grrrrr. Looks cold though, haha, it´s been 30+ degrees here for the last six months I think. Oh well, every cloud blah blah blah.

Anyway, I did manage a little windsurf sessión at the end of last week and got these shots from my GoPro, so here you are boys n girls, this is the sum total of my windsurfing in the last 4 months and this is what windsurfing in January in the Canaries looks like...