Out on the sea for some windsurfing action this afternoon. In a change from her recent practice of hanging around the club with her girlfriends and creating crap nail designs, she who must obeyed joined me on the water and behaved perfectly by not trying to overtake me.
There was a huge black storm on the horizon which always has the same outcome. The sky will get blacker and blacker and the wind will ease slightly, then the hand of the wind god will turn the wind tap fully open and the wind will scream for several minutes before the heavens open and rain descends by the bucketload.
The trick is to keep sailing until just before the wind screaming starts, and then get on the beach before you are flattened. Today I failed and at one point I could see a line of furious water rushing towards me, and then seconds later I was in the water with my sail flattened against the sea and me flattened against the sail. Luckily I was close enough to shore to swim a little and then carry my equipment onto the beach; aided by my wife who was quick to tell me that she had shouted to me to come back in before the wind arrived. That’s what I love about windsurfing, on the water you can’t hear your wife screaming at you (or you can pretend you can’t).
One of the lunatic kite surfers was less lucky, the wind gust lifted him off the beach, and then dumped him down again, cracking his shoulder. In no time at all (about 30 minutes) an ambulance arrived to collect him and his credit card. We heard later that the bill came to around 8,000 baht, no doubt including an item for “extended use of ambulance siren.”
