Sooo the date is set, I’ll be going under the knife on the 21st November. It means I’m technically not allowed to windsurf for 6 weeks but who ever let that stop them…

To be honest considering the year I have had I feel like this is a small price to pay. With this kicking off in Egypt where I cut my head open and had 4 stitches in the local hospital, then started off the issues with the foot by crashing a ponch. Then Fuerte where I visited the doctor/hospital about 4 times in total; with a suspected broken leg (crashed clew first backloop), suspected ruptured appendix (crashed pushloop), a deep cut across my shin (fin across the shin after getting worked by a foot high wave…….) and further foot issues…then in the UK I had even more problems at events with my foot.

Soo the plan for Dec/Jan is to spend some time in Austria and hit up the ski slopes a bit, I figured a ski boot will be solid enough… then Cape Town is booked for all of February to train up for the following season. It’s a bit annoying though because the rate freestyle windsurfing is moving on it won’t take long to fall behind!

In the meantime I’ve got a few weeks before the Op so this weekend there is a kids freestyle camp at West Witterings which I will be demoing/working at… so come along and get involved if you want to learn a few moves… the forecast looks awesome….or head to BWA Cornwall for the epic forecast that the Wave sailors are heading to!

Dominque from the EFPT put this unique interview together when I met up with him Vienna a week or so ago.

Pretty different style to the traditional interview format, cool though. Have a read here….

http://www.efpt.net/newsdetails.php?n_id=451

Pics:
- Hanna Poschinger
- getwindsurfing.com

So I’m sure quite a few people know already that I have had ongoing problems with my foot. In particular my left big toe. Now although this is a small part of the body it’s become quite obvious that it is fairly useful when it comes to common day activities like standing/balancing/walking/etc… so when I’m trying to bust out the odd freestyle move here and there it doesn’t really help that I have no tendon holding my big toe to the rest of my body anymore. It also doesn’t help that the bone inside the joint has compressed so hard on a number of occasions that there are now floating bits of bone in the toe/foot…niiice!

So after 10 x-rays of the foot and a MRI scan the doctors have concluded that I will need an operation to clear the bits of bone and to part the joint a bit, they will also scrape inside the joint and drill holes in the bone (inside the joint) to promote growth and recovery. Should this fail, quite likely, then a second operation will be required to stop any movement in that toe forever, but that would be far off when I really can’t stand the pain anymore. I suppose I should be a bit disappointed about this as it will take me off the water for a bit and could affect my windsurfing, except I spoke to Steven VB at EFPT Sardinia and he had some issue which meant he cannot bend his big toe at the same joint I may not be able to, and for anyone who has been hiding in a small hole in a Scottish mountain in the last year or so, he just became World Champion.

So all is not lost, but there are the details for those who might want to know… yum yum! First operation will be mid-November.

That said, I had an epic sail last week and got some decent snaps, which I’ll throw up here as soon as I can convert these retarded .cr2 files that my mac is not liking…

So I made this video recently from that epic session we had at West Witterings a couple of weeks ago. It’s only a minute long but the session was so full power everyone just wanted to sail and also I think the camera battery ran out… so here it is.. 50 knots of full power freestyle windsurfing!

Thanks to Bubble for the camera and the others for filming: