I know this blog is very hit and miss but its been very busy of late. Rather than blog about every big surfing day, I'll randomly post up stuff that has come out of those sessions and new ideas on big wave surfing in my tiny plastic kayak. for all things other in kayaking go here http://mdactripreport.blogspot.com/
Surfing Data!
Everyone uses Magicseaweed.com and Windguru.cz to get the forecast for coming swells etc and combine it with an amount of local knowledge and current local weather conditions before deciding where and when to gosurfing.
But often its hard to actually put a scale on what the surf was like when you get back in. Well now maybe you can. Introducing Sportstracker! A (currently) free mobile application for your i-phones and other devices. I have the Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic the app is free from the OVI apps store and the app once downloaded runs side by side with their website, where you can set up your own profile and upload your workouts which is what the app is mainly meant for. You can find my profile here
The app is great it works with the phones gps system to track your movements when your out and about on your walk, cycle, hike etc etc. It also measures your altitude, distance travelled, steps taken, pace, max speed, max height etc etc etc it plots a map and gives graphs of distance vs time and altitude vs time etc. Once your finished your workout you an stop it and upload it to the workout or export the file to google earth and .gpx, .
csv, .xml files. this allows you to look at the raw data in all sorts of ways which is great.
So last Friday I hit Bunmahon and used the app on my phone safely tucked away inside my waterproof i-pod case from H2OAudio while I was out. I started the workout from the beach before getting into my boat, at the tide level and then paddled out and stayed out for 50mins, I covered 3.3km and my max speed at any one
point according to the app was 34.2 km/h
Using the exported file .csv file you can open the data in Excel and thrawl through it but be warned there is a lot of it, its seems to take data multiple times per second so you can imagine how much data there is in 50minutes! Any way heres the graph of the Speed against the Altitude over the course of the 50mins
On the graph the peaks in speed seem to match the troughs on the altitude graph which i suppose makes sense because you are likely to be travelling fastest at the bottom of the wave having just shot down the face of the wave?
Now remember the altitude will have been affected by the tide too, which would explain why the troughs seem to get deeper as the tide approached low tide. The altitude at the start on the beach was 61m and at the end having got out of my kayak was 58m so the beach is quiet steep and there was a very high tide last weekend so a nice drop in tide in an hour. The average altitude of the entire session is 54m but the max height was 76m, now I'm sure there is some inherent error in there but that must have been a big wave indecently that was once I whimped out of and then got the beat down and decided to call it quits for the morning session at that stage we did return later but didn't use the sport tracker unfortunately because the surf was massive!
So anyway its interesting to look at, the next idea might be to video a whole surf session and watch the footage back alongside the data and get a real feel for height of some of the waves.
More on this later. The next blog post could be quiet a while, I've sold my playboat and I've gone travelling for a bit talk to you all soon.
Mikef
