The Last Days at Umbagog Pt.2

Man, this transitional part of the season is really flying by. I’ve been busy dealing with bike related stuff and haven’t had time to get this entry squared away and I feel like I’ve been slacking but trying to write this entry has been in the back of my mind constantly. I now finally have a spare moment so here we go.

Welcome to part 2 of “Ski Massacres, Long miles and High Speeds”

As I mentioned before I thought the season was going to be over about a month earlier than it usually is. This crazy winter was a roller coaster of temperatures and precipitation and towards the end we got record amounts of rainfall and warm weather that wiped out a lot of our local riding spots. But Umbagog held up and not only did it hold up it got really good. In the last blog entry we covered the warmer final days on Umbagog. Now I’ll try to describe the days after the cold snap that hit and gave us a few more days of riding.

Jim's RV

Saturday Molly and I got to the lake at about 11:00am and  Jim Cline was already out racking up the miles. He’s often the first rider out as he sleeps in his car and is usually there at sun up and gets the first puffs of wind. His car is all modified for snow kite use. It gets sick gas mileage; he’s removed all but the driver seat and built a sleeping platform (used one seat to build a kite buggy), modified the passenger floor heat and turned it into a boot dryer. He’s mounted two boxes to the roof rack to haul skis and kites in the winter and chainsaws and ropes in the summer when he works.

When I got out of the van I was taken aback by how cold it was. The temp was 14f and the winds were blowing about 17mph. If you do the wind chill math it comes out to FREAKIN” COLD. For the last 2 weeks it rarely got to freezing even at night and now it’s below freezing during the day. Ahhhh, New England. As my hands immediately started to get cold and stiffen in the wind chill I was both happy and a little concerned about the cold snap that we were experiencing. Though it helps conserve the ice, lengthen our season and gives a fast surface, which is what I like there is an increase in the element of risk as well. Sure the ice that was there is “safer” but there are places that had open water the other day that will now have a skim layer of ice on them. Not enough ice to support a kiter but enough that you won’t see it very well until you are right next to it.

Skimmed over

At 50mph or so you may not see it until you’re in it. Fortunately we had no issues.

The wind was supposed to be getting stronger as the day went on and I was rabid to get out and see what speeds I could get. Molly and I made our way out onto the ice, set up and launched.

The ice was hard. Commonly know as “Boilerplate” it’s very hard and very fast.  Not the glass like ice from earlier this season like we found on Long Lake or Winnepesaukee but still hard like cement. The last few sessions were really wet and soft and fat skis ruled the day but now we’re back on the DH boards with the sharpest edges I could produce.

The wind was blowing pretty steady out of the West and we made our way up the small lake to get out to the big lake where the wind is steadiest and you have a lot more room to run. The cut getting to the big lake is pretty punchy wind wise when the wind is west. Its really narrow and the hills and trees kick out a lot of turbulence so you go from no wind at all to all of a sudden nearly getting your ass handed to you. Compound this by the fact that the route is a bit narrow and we are now dealing with open water it can be a little nerve racking. The ice was extremely hard and fairly bumpy until we got out to the big part of Umbagog. There the surface is smoother because there’s a lot less traffic from snowmobiles and ice fishermen. Once again we pass Jim Cline on the way out as he was cruising back and forth racking up the miles on the beat up, crappy, rough ice. I’m shaking my head as I go by.

Jim

The man just isn’t right. He’s not into speed or jumping he just wants to rack up the miles. His top day this season was 130miles in one day. Very impressive but he’s going to be pissed when I tell him a Russian named Stepan Kalichkin did 188 miles in one day. I have confidence Jim could do that kind of mileage but he’s going to have to resign himself to going a little faster to do it instead of poking around at low speeds for hours on end.

Good for Stepan though. He’s lucky he’s got such a big lake to ride. For crying out loud some of his tacks looked to be about 10 miles long! That’s pretty damn impressive.

You can see his GPS tracks at www.stormboarding.com in the speed ranking area.

Randy Berube and Paul Morse

Once we got out to the big lake the winds smoothed out considerably. Steady and strong enough for some really nice cruising we proceeded to rip around the lake. Not long after we got out there Paul Morse and Randy Berube showed up and were cruising around as well. The wind at this point was getting pretty strong and we all headed into the cove area where I got 73.5mph last season. We were all hoping to get some personal bests in there but the wind wasn’t in the right spot and was in fact diminishing. As usual the weather reports were wrong. Friday there was wind mid-day and into the night and there wasn’t supposed to be any wind. So my guess was the front was moving through faster than they thought and we were at the tail end of it. There was wind and we were going fast but we weren’t breaking any records. After a lot of ripping back and forth we all proceeded to head further north up the lake.

The wind was still good enough for lots of long 45-50mph runs back and forth and some really good just all around cruising. Eventually the wind started to pick up now and again and give me a little something extra. I had just started to get my hopes back up that it was going to be a really good speed session day when I noticed something strange was happening to the inside edge of my right ski. 

I couldn’t engage it.

Having a solid, sharp edge out on hard ice is critical. A lot of people still tell me that you can’t ski on solid ice. Fortunately I know a little bit about tuning skis and I can make our skis hold on ice as well as any ice skate out there. If you want to ride safely on the “boiler plate” you have to have the right skis and the right tune. Being without edges is literally like being up a creek without a paddle, you are at the mercy of the wind and the kite. Without edges you can’t control the kite and you can’t direct you’re forward movement.

My first thought is that I must have hit something. When you have an edge that is nearly as sharp as a razor, it takes just the smallest hit to dull it. My second thought it I blew the edge (broke it) out. I pick up my foot and look down and the edge looked fine. There was some minor build up of ice shavings but that’s all I could see. I wiped off the shavings, started riding again and pressured the edge. No good. In fact now it’s worse than when I first noticed it. I reach down without my glove to feel and what to I find?

My base is coming off.

The plastic material that the ski slides on is coming off the ski and is sticking up just a barely a millimeter beyond the bottom of the ski edge. This prevents the edge from actually touching the ice and gives the effect of trying to edge on ball bearings. It’s just a small section but it’s enough to make the whole edge useless.

So now I’m faced with a dilemma. Do I call it quits and head back to shore and call it a day (I didn’t bring another fast ski) or do I just keep on going and just hope I don’t need that edge to ride or get back safely?  It was too windy to take my skis off safely and swap them so I would have 2 good inside edges.

The wind is getting a little punchy now. As I’m trying to decide what to do I get hit by a couple of strong, swirling gusts that beat me up a little and make for a quick tense moment with the lack of one edge. But all went OK and I decide to suck it up and keep heading North and just ride with one less edge.

I start riding, pick up some speed, and lay into a turn only to find what do you know MY OUTSIDE EDGE ON THE LEFT SKI WON’T ENGAGE. Okay now I’m boned.

It wouldn’t do any good to swap skis if I could. Both skis have a blown base and it’s getting worse by the minute. Having one edge on each ski 5 miles out on hard ice in punch winds is not an ideal situation. I’m definitely heading back now before I lose all my edging ability. I take a last look at everyone heading to the far end of the lake as I head back to the cut. On the way back in I pass Mike Elliott as he’s just coming out. He worked that morning and was supposed to pick up Nicole but at the airport but her flight got messed up so she was way late. Sux for her, good for him.

As I made it back through the cut more of the base started to come off and I lost another edge. It made me feel a lot better about my decision to come in when I did.

As I got off the ice Jim Cline comes up to me and tells me that he also has managed to tear the bases off one of his skis and then Molly comes in a short time later with the base coming off her ski as well. At first I think, “What are the chances?” How can it be that all three of us had our skis fail on us? Then you really think about it and it doesn’t seem that improbable.

Looking at what all three pairs of skis have gone through it seems perfectly reasonable that they would come apart. Molly’s skis are one of my old pairs that she inherited. They probably have easily over 4000 miles on them over the last 3 yrs between she and I. They’ve been tuned so much that there is only about 1mm of side edge left. This was going to be the last season on that ski anyway. Jim’s skis were brand new this year but given that he has almost 3500 miles in for the season mostly on hard ice I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise his came apart. And my pair has a couple thousand hard miles on them as well. None of these skis are designed to be used they way we used them. They’re DH racing skis. Not even “everyday drivers” like a lot of skis. These things were never intended to be used like this.

It’s amazing to me that they hold up as well as they do.

So Saturday didn’t turn out nearly as good as I thought it would but we still had fun. It sucks that we killed 3 pairs of DH skis but that’s the way it goes I guess. To be honest it was nice to get off the ice a little early and get home before dark. And I needed the extra time to mount up and tune some fresh skis for Molly and tune Picabo’s for Sunday.

Sunday’s weather report was calling for 14mph winds out of the SW. We get to Umbagog and of course it blowing 17-20mph out of the E/SE. It’s still cold as hell but the sun is out so that takes the bite out of the cold a little bit.

Today it’s the usual suspects again with me, Molly, Jim (slept in his car again), Randy and Paul with the addition of Eric Heath. The surface is still “boilerplate” and the wind is awesome. All I can think about is getting out to the big lake as fast as I can and seeing if maybe today will be the day for beating my fastest speed. Randy took out his Peter Lynn Venom 2 13m without a back up kite; Paul was out on his 12m Psycho 4, Molly was on the new Montana 5 9.5m with her trusty Apex 7.5m on her back and Jim was out on his 7.5m Apex. Eric was on his 8m Outlaw. I took out the 15m Charger with out a back up. The wind was stronger than forecasted and I hoped maybe it would get even stronger. Again I was relying on the huge depower range of the Charger to get me out and back if it got too windy. Besides to get the speeds I’m looking for I have to have a kite that will have me overpowered some or most of the time.

Heath

It was slow getting through the cut. The winds in there are almost useless until you get out to the big lake and then it’s a different world. I headed out first and slowly made my way to the channel between the small and big lake. There was still a lot of open water there and with the cold and the wind a few pressure ridges had developed. Some were filled with water. I crept around the corner of the channel and once I got into the open the fun really began. Dizzying acceleration, sport bike fast acceleration. I went from creeping along in the wind shadow of the east side trees to absolute hauling ass in mere seconds. It was awesome. Randy was out there and I flew by him doing 62mph right out of the gate.

At that point I could tell it was going to be a fun day.

Paul, Randy and I were charging all over that damn lake. The wind was awesome, the surface was awesome, and the kites were awesome. We had a few close calls and near misses (which happens when you find a good channel of wind and you have three idiots all trying to go fast in it) but all in all it was really good. The only problem was there was a lot of open water where the river inlet is and a lot of exposed rock at the north end of the lake where the wind was really whippin’. Almost every speed run was cut short by water or rocks. Yup, frustrating and fun all at once.

Eric

We spent most of our time in the middle section of the lake. At one point when we were at the north end Molly showed up on the Montana 9.5m. It was a lot of kite for her in these winds and in fact Eric (200lbs or so) was out on the big lake briefly and came back in because he was over powered a little. He saw Molly on her way out and tried to warn her off from the high winds. She just kept right on going, which I think is awesome. She would normally be on her 7.5m Apex 2 or the 12m Charger in this kind of wind but she wanted to try the M5 in higher winds.

It’s good to push your limits once and a while. Over the years I’ve made a conscious effort to go out once and a while and practice flying overpowered. It really pays off. My perception of what overpowered really is changed and I found that most of the time I thought I was really overpowered I was just a little overpowered or even powered just right.  You just have to get comfortable with the power. It’s why I’m willing to risk being on a kite “too big” for certain conditions. I’ve practiced and feel that between my experience and the amount of depower my kites have and can get caught in high winds and still be “safe”. The more you get used to it the safer you’ll be when things do go bad and the winds get strong while you’re out.

So Molly cruises out to the center of the big lake on the 9.5m and got out there in no time looking REALLY overpowered. I was having some issues of my own (we’ll get into that in a second) and was too far away to see exactly how she was doing. Eventually I saw her land the kite and set her ice screw and anchor the kite so she could pack it up a switch out to the 7.5 Apex. When I finally got over to her it was too windy to hear each other speak but she gave me a “thumbs up” to let me know she was fine. She packed up the 9.5m M5, launched her 7.5m Apex and proceeded to tack back toward the south end of the lake. It was perfect. She packed up the one kite, set up the backup, pulled her screw and was off in no time.

At the end of the day Molly told me about her trip out on the M5. She was overpowered and did a big down wind leg at 50mph without even trying. Even after she switched to the Apex she still had to work at it. Her mileage getting out to where she switched kites was about 6 miles but tacking back to the launch area she put in 40miles.

Gives you a good idea how hard she had to work to get back.

As I had mentioned, while Molly was wrestling with her kite I was having an issue of my own. I had just finished a speed run and was in the process of stopping. When I stop on the boilerplate at high speed I can’t drive my edges hard like I would on soft snow. That would eventually result in tearing the edge out of the ski. Instead I tend to edge just a bit light and spin my body into a reverse position. This allows me to “feather” my edge as well and positioning me to be able to bring the kite around to a position where it’s at the edge of the window at reduced power. Basically I’m skiing backwards when I stop. I know it sounds retarded. But that’s the best way to describe it.

As I’m doing this stopping backwards thing I’m still doing anywhere from 30-40mph. This is when I caught my edge and things went bad quick. Since I was not longer upright I lost me edge and my body was now sliding in a straight line at the same rate of speed I had fallen at. I had already started to slow the kite so the result is I over shoot the kite and go slightly under it. Now the kite has no tension on the lines and is just blowing along with the wind out of control. To make matters worse the lines are so slack that they are on the ice and being dragged under my skis, my ridiculously sharp skis.

I start flopping around desperately to keep my edges from touching the lines. All they have to do is come into contact and a line will definitely get nicked if not cut clean through. The kite finally comes down and is now on the ice with the leading edge down. The lines go tight as she catches the wind and I franticly inspect them for damage. Not a nick. Somehow I kept my feet up and off the lines.

I’m psyched. I though for sure I was going to be screwed 6 miles out on the big lake but the lines came through unscathed. But now I have a new problem. As the kite is upside down on the ice it’s still pulling me. Not only is it pulling me it’s pulling me towards the open water. I dig in my edges and hold my position and begin trying to relaunch the wing. The wind is strong and pretty steady and for some reason it doesn’t want to relaunch. It’s in what we call “clamshell” and the two wingtips are stuck together. I try all my usual tricks to get it air born but she’s fighting me and dragging me. At one point she bow ties and starts spinning. After some substantial swearing and wrestling I eventually get it squared away.

Here's the video...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R16M6gjpZv0

I started riding again and realized my harness wasn’t on right. When I crashed I broke one of the buckles used to tighten the spreader bar straps. So now my spreader bar (the thing you hook the kite to) is up around my rib cage instead of around my waist. And when I turned to the left my center of gravity would get all screwed up and the leg loops would give me a damn “Super Wedgie”. I was able to rig the straps to keep the spreader in position for the most part but wasn’t quite right.

Shortly after my crash Randy has a really close encounter with the open water. I still can’t believe he did this or that he didn’t go swimming. Again I had just finished a speed run and had stopped at the north end of the open water. I was a little too close for my tastes and was heading back out when Randy goes screaming by. He’s got a good run going and he’s hell bent to ride it out. Unfortunately he rode it right into a small cove just south of where I stopped. Rode right in, on a strip of ice MAYBE 25 feet wide dividing the north end of the open water into two pools. So there he was standing on this ribbon of ice when he realizes what he’s gotten himself into. He gingerly worked his way out and came away dry but if he were any heavier he surely would have gone through.

Birthday Bonnets

Paul and Molly had gone back and Randy and I ripped around for another hour or so. Paul got back first and when Molly showed up he asked her if she was ever so happy to get off her kite. Apparently Paul’s Psycho 4 was beating him up out there. He looked like he was riding smooth but he was pretty tired when he got back. He told Molly that he figured Randy and I were screwed and weren’t going to make it back now that the wind was stronger. Molly rides the Peter Lynns enough to know that they thrive in these conditions. In fact Randy and I didn’t even notice the gusty stuff. It all felt smooth to us so we stayed out there for a few hours more.

I love those damn kites.

Randy, Paul, Molly and Me

Eventually Randy and I headed in. We put on some miles and everyone had fun hauling ass around the lake. My GPS got knocked out when I crashed so my personal best for the season was 67mph. Paul and I think I might have touched 70mph for the day but the GPS didn’t catch it. I didn’t get to my goal of 80mph for the season and I didn’t even get the 70mph barrier recorded but I had fun trying. 

Kite Van Clean Out

It was a pretty good season in spite of the weather and I had fun and learned a lot.  From here on out I'll be doing periodic entries.  It will probably be mostly gear reviews and stuff like that.  If I get on the water I'll have some good stuff to write about I'm sure.  Next week I'm going to do an entry of mostly photos that we took over the season.  Some you may have seen and some you haven't. STAY TUNED!