Road trip down to Colac this weekend.

Heading down from Chch on Friday (back Mon/Tues)... McCrostie, Irish, Neil, Linda, Fiona, Pete, Aaron, Kane, and Steve with Cookie and Bob umming and ahhing, and Nick and Woody on their way from Qtown. How about the Dunedin crew?

It looks harsh, with Buoyweather.com showing cold hail laden precipitive winds off the iceshelf at up to 48 knots and a good size roll in the strait. Either there'll be offshores/waves at Colac for Firebirds or jumpin' stuff and sliding logs on FLX's in the glassy Te Wae wae lagoon if it's too southerly.

did ya's get out at all on the trip back north? looked a bit mean out my kitchen window sunday afternoon

1/2 an hour at monkey is. was enough for me on sunday, brrrrrrrrr :shock:
te waewae looked seriously windy

I'll have to head back there on a slightly more sane weather pattern methinks.........



:twisted:
Craig

reported from the deep south: bad news for aaron smith - he only got to ride one immense wave, got tripped on the way back out and rotated with one foot out of his board, resulting in severe knee damage (blown cruciate ligament etc).

the current national champ = had to sit the rest of the weekend out in 40 knot hailsqualls and now faces a long road to recovery and no kiting for a long time.

best of luck dude!

did anyone get any video footage of the incident or any heavy wave riding and rag-dolling action?

Some pics at
homepages.paradise.net.nz/~ndb/colac/

and some down the line goodness from Steve at:
homepages.paradise.net.nz/~ndb/colac/steve.avi

nice work, i couldn't play the vid though - my computer received the information and had the timeline at the bottom but no screen action.

seeing those images of the boys with jackets, hats and gloves on in march made me remember why i moved north. it looks cold enough to freeze the brass bell off a fire-breathing dragon's dong down there.

[quote="Shaan Soul Surfer"]nice work, i couldn't play the vid though - my computer received the information and had the timeline at the bottom but no screen action.

You'll need the DivX codec. I'll try and put something longer up in a day or two.

www.divx.com

yeah it was a cold weekend even by dunedin crew standards

last night out until 7pm in the semi-dark halfway between dunedin and taieri mouth, didn't even get any numb bits, nice 13m breeze. a crowd of 2 out

but today is brewing up to be the first nice 20 knot northerly for weeks and weeks and it's SUNNY!!!




craig

What's with all the coloured rashies? Looks like there where heats going on.

Chris

Nice bit of wave riding,
Took longer to down load the DivX player then to watch the VID.
:twisted: :roll: :twisted:

You know how it is Chris, if you change rashies and kites every half hour it makes it look like there's a lot more riders.

Doofus, after we saw you guys that windy morning then split for Dunnas (because Id suggested St Kilda cause Aaron looked like he'd be happy to make a move North)

... we got ten clicks down the road when Aaron pipes up from the back about his WAP saying it was 50 knots in Dunedin and we should just go back to the mellow 30-35+ or whatever it was at Colac. So Steve and I had a coupla hours there, me on the red 6 R4 decked out like the Michelin man in a blue Fuerte rashy and Steve on the blue 4.9 Wipi.

It was nippy but the wind was solid and it was fun to go reali fast and do the odd one hit wonder. Way too onshore to do much with the choppy waves. Colac is best in 45 off - Westerly to WNW. Also the swell was from the west, must be SW to wrap into the bay. I could see it was not going to be the right setup back about thursday but still went down and had a bunch of fun waves on the Saturday anyway. Colac hasn't let me down yet. Weird to wrap up the kite full of hailstones, the beach was white. But the water is toasty, clean and blue, warm current from Oz comes through the strait. Every trip I've had to Colac has seen a fair dumping of hailstones. I wonder how big the stones have to be before they'd start to bullet hole my kite? Can't wait till October and the start of the spring season, got a whole lotta board ideas until then.

On the drive home we pulled off to St Kilda... and it was massive. The reef by White island threw up a huge set. The wind was humming side shore/Right but we were too shagged to go out (honest). Irish and Mc Crostie had stopped for a look earlier. Irish said you'd want a few jokers you could trust out there to make it safer.

By the time you guys turned around to go back to Colac, we had bunked out to mOnkey Island, where it was cross on from the left. Dunedin Pete was the test dummy, going out at the carpark end of the beach. By this stage the wing was coming in from far around the coast, and so he was getting turbulence from monkey island, and also the headland futher east. It made for good spectacle though, he performed some amazingly ballsy moves in the waves....and everyone drove further along the beach to reach the smoother wind.

It was about 25-30 knots bewteen the squalls, but the squalls were coming through more frequently than the day before, and they were big.

I just have to mention....when the last squall came through and the dunedin lads came in it was freezing sideways wind, and I had real trouble standing up. Serious hypothermia material, and so I look over my shoulder and there's dunedin pete, grinning, wandering back out toward the water, oblivious to the apocalyptic weather raging around him. I thought we were clearly seeing a case of hypothermia in action, and wondering how to intervene without getting out of the car, and then he turns around, and slowly walks out of the sea.....'just looking at the sealife' (marine biologist instincts overcame him) In 50 knots!!!!! Even the sealife was looking at him strangely.

They are a hardy, hardy breed down there. If i still had a hat, it would be off to them.

Just whipped up a 3 min vid of the trip..
Quality is average to keep the size down, unless anyone has somewhere to host a larger file. 10meg at the moment.

homepages.paradise.net.nz/~ndb/colac_small.avi