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Ett litet kåseri om väder. Det finns alternativ
Foul weather
This article is not going to be about windsurfing as a sport nor is it about the feeling you get from being able to effortlessly skim across the water barely leaving a ripple to show your passage as you shoot by a multi horse powered motorboat leaving them all to feel embarrassed in your wake, oh sorry that was what I was not going to tell you about.
The longer I have been involved with this sport the clearer it has become. What a perverse bunch we windsurfers are! I mean choosing- quite voluntarily I should add- to involve ourselves in a sport so utterly and totally dependent on the whim of the weather! The one thing that is really completely and utterly uncontrollable. No one else seem to suffer this problem. When was the last time you heard someone say ”I am playing squash on Sunday if the weather is ok”, or ”I have got a round of golf at the weekend if the low pressure over the U.K comes in and gives us a south-western. Otherwise I am staying in to watch Nick Faldo videos.” It is not going to happen is it! Other people are free to plan and get on with their lives.
You would be amazed at the effort we put in finding the right wind and wave conditions. We have our summer house nearby a decent surfing beach and I know a few people who drives 90Km to surf there, sometimes they can not even surf there due to a lack of wind. I also know this fellow who every weekend packs his family and surfing gear into a caravan in Borås and heads for Varberg and surroundings. Sometimes we end up driving around different surf spots for half a day just to find where the conditions are best. The longer you have been off the water the poorer your judgement becomes. Occasionally you feel more like a wind finder than a windsurfer. The wind really is a changing part and the only way of knowing we(a)ther or not it is blowing is to sit at the beach. However one cannot spend his or hers life sitting on a beach. All of us have some sort of commitment be it work or something else, so we try to plan our life around windsurfing i.e we work when it is calm and surf when it is not. However the trouble is that you do not know when it is going to blow. Heard in the hospital ”no unfortunately we can not give you that heart transplantation today but if the wind drops the doc will come tomorrow” that would be something wouldn’t it.
So the fools we are we try to predict the weather by listening to the weather forecast. The weather forecast is in its own ballpark. I am going to admit it, it is a difficult task but no one can be satisfied with the weather nor the forecast. The trouble is that they are crowd pleasers trying to produce a weather forecast that give high viewing ratings. Different programs have different viewers therefor the prognosis differs too. I also find it very interesting to see that the technique empathised to delude the public varies.
For example Rapport they try to make it as complicated as possible, a middle aged man in a tweed jacket and a reassuring manner is showing all sorts of satellite sequences, colourful graphics and statistics. In vain you try to distinguish the ozone ratings from the isobars. They do not have the faintest idea of what the heck the weather is going to be like so they tell you what they do know. Basically they are saying we have a hell of a lot of information but do not know what the hell to do with it. Why do we need meteorologist for then?
TV three and four have taken a different approach they are concentrating on half the audience i.e the male sex. The charts are saying rain but the weathergirl´s face is saying sunshine.
But no one beats Nordnytt they are always right. The producer at Nordnytt must be very clever! I reckon that the economy was quite strict so they could only afford one weather chart and the genius said lets make suns behind clouds then we would always be right. Either it is cloudy or it is sunny, right!
No matter which weather report (and believe me I watch them all) we windsurfers are always on the wrong side of the fence. No one but us want low pressures and wind. When they for once is forecasting wind it is usually as a warning for dinghy boat sailors, hence there is also a huge tendency to exaggerate the wind strength out of safety reasons. I am telling you I could bet my board shorts that things would have been different if the vast majority had been windsurfers but then the waves would get very crowded indeed. So by and large I am happy that not everybody is surfing.
Since I always watch the weather forecast people often ask me what the weather is going to be like ”it could get windy in the afternoon if that low pressure comes here! No is it going to rain or what? Oh sorry I do not remember. But you just watched it!”. The only way to get some sympathy is to turn to one equal minded. My so called ”foul weather friends”. Everyone can see that it is important to have family and friends but windsurfing friends differ. Sometimes you do not see each other for months and yet when the wind returns we meet up at some preferred beach having independently made the same assessment of the wind and tide predictions. After a short chit chat we all rig our sails in a frenzy wearing a smile that reaches from ear to ear. It is almost as we share a secret that the rest of the world do not know about. If a friend is defined as someone you can trust then your surfing buddies are the best of friends. No matter what, they always seem to find the time to go surfing when the wind is up. For example I went to a desert village on Gran-Canaria. There is not even a hotel in the village. Believe it or not but I stumbled over a surfing friend from home. We had apparently made the same decision were the surfing would be best.
But lets not change the subject of the day, how to get around the problem that it never is windy enough often enough. Some clans is solemnly worshipping the wind God Eric, dancing the wind dance and all sort of blasphemy stuff. I would not venture in to that. However I have found a way of beating the system. If you can not beat them go with them, instead of getting hostile towards the weather girl I have made it a hobby trying to predict the weather. And really, I have found a few alternate ways of interpreting the weather. Let me elucidate this. Not only do I watch cloud formations, I also have a record for what I had for breakfast, how many dogs passed our building and what TV programs were shown on the day before. I have not had my major breakthrough yet but persistency always pays. This might sound strange to you but the truth is never what you expect it to be. When a butterfly fly in Brazil it might very well be the cause of foul weather in Sweden.
Health warning: Do yourself a favour do not get involved with this aggravating sport cause there is no way out of it, not to mention the expensive psychiatrist bills. If you manage to stay clear of it life will be a broad reach (J)!
broad reach = the easiest and fastest angle to the wind (slightly off wind ) for a planning vesselPer Larsson Engelska C 99-05-05
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