I saw a post recently about gybing and I just want to list a couple of things that help me and hopefully help newer riders. This is not an in-depth discussion just a broad brush list of things that could help someone starting out. In other words, the checklist that I use out on the water to make sure I have the best chance of staying dry. There are only 4 of them so not so hard to remember.
1. Speed in equals speed out. Pretty obvious really. Try and get as much speed going into the gybe as you can.
2. Get low. Bend the knees, you hear this all the time. If you think you are low enough going for the gybe, get a bit lower. This especially applies in rougher water and let's face it, that is where most of us have to do it. We all can't have a nice sandbar to turn behind.
3. Keep distance from the sail. Don't choke it, give yourself some room Just makes it all come together better.
4. Look where you want to go. Sounds simple and it is. What it does is get your body in better positions.
OK, That is it. I use this checklist every time I turn the corner and even though I don't always plane out, I have given myself the best chance to do so. Finally, have fun. This is a great sport and a good day on the water is priceless.
Good list of important points. Regarding point 1, speed out is about 40% in a decent jibe and 50% in a very good jibe. Planing threshold is about 8-10 knots, maybe a bit lower on big gear. So you got to go into the turn with at least 20 knots to have a chance to plane out at 8 knots. In chop on freeride gear, it's pretty common to go less than 20 knots, so planing through a jibe gets harder, unless you pick up some extra speed going into the jibe.
If it's windy enough, or you can use swell to re-accelerate after the jibe, speed can briefly drop down to 6 knots without the board fully coming of the plane.
Flat water rules for jibing since it's easy to pick up speed, and to keep the speed in the jibe. Going into jibes at 30 knots at places like Albany is worth a long trip! But if you mostly sail on flat water, it's very easy to forget about point 2, since you can get away with not bending your knees if there's no chop. But that will bite you next time you jibe in chop, so bend those knees (more!) even on flat water.
2 and 3 are my main failings with fin jibes.
When I've been lucky to have enough wind to fin lately, I've really tried to exaggerate bending my knees and getting forward to what felt like a silly amount to me.
It wasn't. The board glides much further, about 3/4 thru and if my sail handling was better (point 3) I would come out planing.
Foiling is much more forgiving because you can see and feel what is going on, and even step and flip pretty ugly and still come out the other side with speed.
Got you covered John 340. By keeping the sail away you are extending your front arm. When you turn to face where you are heading you are automatically pulling in on the back hand and easing the front hand. In this position you are getting close to a good stance for a lay-down.
Step 1. Don't follow forum advice on how to gybe 'correctly'.
(However well-intentioned it may be!)
In my experience, I got very, very confused learning to gybe over the last year partly from all the advice in multiple threads already on this forum.
Everyone is different. Every gybe is different. And there are many, many different ways to skin a cat.
For example: One frequently given *important* piece of advice is to 'get your weight forward'. Only when I went for some actual gybe coaching on the water - and catapaulted over the front mid-gybe at one point - my instructor informed me I was actually stalling the board on chop mid-gybe because I had my weight TOO far forward. I'd completly over-cooked the 'weight forward' thing. Had he not told me though I would genuinely have thought the problem was STILL me not getting my weight forward enough!
I can't recommend gybe coaching enough.
My only advice to a newbie would be stick at it - and don't expect to suddenly become Bjorn Dunkerbeck in a month or two practice. I began learning the carve gybe approximately one year ago. Some 3000 kms windsurfing later and maybe 1000s of gybe attempts - and only in the last few months have my gybes become mostly dry. I've managed to land a massive total of three fully-planing gybes - in the last few months also. Perhaps I'm just naturally quite crap!
I think any tips and forum advice can still be very useful but not everyone is great at self learning. Obviously if something doesn't work or doesn't feel like it makes a difference than drop it or adjust.
When you're self learning, focus on one thing at a time, make sure you have videos of yourself and be self-critical. Seeing yourself in action is key. You think you're low while in reality you're barely bending your knees.
Coaching and clinics can certainly help to speed up the process (not every good windsurfer is a good coach though) but it can be done without for sure.
Some fin tips from me:
When sailing powered in open ocean sea / large chop - you actually want to slow down just a touch and try and time your gybe exit on a downward slope - come out of the gybe surfing a wave or chop trough across the wind on the new tack (or slightly downwind)
Obviously racers dont have this luxury which is part of what makes PWA slalom so impressive / dangerous.
In flat water - go hard and do what you like - you can have all the bad habits in the world and the flat water will disguise them! Here is one tip that took me 35 years to learn - as well as carving pressure with the back foot, using your front foot to lift the rail is a super magic trick that makes good things (a sudden release of drag and accelerating sensation from the engaged rail ) happen (particularly useful on boards 65cm plus wide) - at least it does on my Windtech Silver Bullet 70.
5 min of mostly learning jibing with the free-race gear (my favourite jibe is at 01:42 in the first clip), and then using these new skills in the slalom competition some 15 days later (and doing so many mistakes there because of no comp experience).
It is difficult to see how the board behaves in those videos, to me, but one thing to work on is the hand movement. Boom to boom is the way to go, and once you get a good flip of the sail, then it is very easy to go boom to boom. The advantage is that you can then immediately drop down for a good pump and get up to speed much quicker on the new side.
I eventually got rid of the habit of grabbing the mast mid jibe, I only did it on one tack anyway. But sometimes, especially in some choppy conditions, the amount of time you'd loose (by grabbing the mast) is outweighed by the amount of control you'd gain by doing so.
I give myself every chance to do a gybe. All i do is think about gybing. All day all night, gybe gybe gybe. And i've done about a dozen now. A dozen out of more than a thousand attempts have been fully planing, that's it.
I get one, and i think, 'righto, got em now' Nope. Wrong.
So tricky.
Lately i am feeling something different with the hanging down upon entry after unhooking. I was hanging, but feeling like it was doing nothing. So lately i've been hanging, but really hanging, trying to hold the sail back as it goes into the turn. Something is working there, i think. Not sure. Not sure i understand the hanging thing...
On this gybe, i have no idea what happened, but it was much different to the others in that i got a big burst of downwind speed around foot change time (where i usually bog it) and found i had a very easy opportunity to effortlessly flip.
I just watched Taty u turn vid. He doesn't hang down like me. Do like Taty, not me
Maybe it is about trying to hang down, but not really hanging down..
As mentioned above, every gybe is different. Keep its simple and have fun I guess.
Bumping this because I am just a moment from finally doing a full planing jibe after lots of struggle.
Was out with my older JP Xcite 120 (think it's 69cm wide), decent overpower with a 7.5 gator, and some things started to click. I had another session the other week with that board and a 6.7 and I was close, but this was even closer due to how flat the location was.
I realized that I was not continuing to carve with heel pressure once stepping to the new side, still planing. I remedied that and had some power still planing, clew first, on the new side. I was only falling off during the flip. If I did it a little bit quicker I would have been fully planing. I could taste it.
I had a very similar problem with foiling jibes where I would not continue carving on the new side, and that's what helped me realize what I was doing wrong. I can kind of tell now what I'm doing wrong. It took so many attempts to get there without having a clue what had failed. Overpower definitely helped, as well as figuring out how to get properly sped up and sheeted in on the downwind leg before the jibe.
Now I'm wondering how that would feel with a wider board like my Blast 145, as it tends to glide with a little more speed, but I'm liking the feeling of knowing what is going wrong.
Planing through a clew-first jibe is a lot harder than planing through a jibe where you flip earlier. The sail is a lot less efficient when you are clew first, and it's harder to get a flip where the sail rotates neutrally around it's axis, without disturbing the board trim. ABK teaches the clew-first exit while learning a planing jibe to re-gain control if you loose too much speed. If you still have plenty of speed, flip earlier. You always loose speed during the flip since you don't have power in the sail, so if you do it earlier at higher speed, changes that you remain planing are better.
Windfoiling is quite different here, since you have a lot less drag on the foil. So foiling out clue-first can be a bit easier, since you need less drive from the sail.