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Originally Posted by mocean
googel earth is allway a good one to have a look at to , the bahamas dosent look as prity on GE as it does from the air in a plane but it give's you the lat and long for some rad spots.
a whyle ago I was discussing a possable multi day down winder from Nassau to GT exuma (not cheap)
I think a shorter race might be good from abaco to nassau or visa versa.
or abaco to spanish wells.
I think it would be a good idear to get involved with the races that are allready going on in FL and have some sort of structure allready, and then try and sort it out for here.
like make it an end of the season thing (before the wind runs out)spring would be the best time for wind here, what do you think?
do you have some sort of comitee or contacts that could help us organizie it?
aj
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Hey AJ,
Sounds interesting. I think starting with smaller efforts initially makes good sense. It jump starts the learning curve and builds interest. One thing about the Florida Downwinders at this point, St. Pete, SE Florida and the Lower Keys, is that they all parallel land masses for the most part. If you break down, get tired or have some other problem you can just land, make a call on the cell phone and get back to civilization. This may be less true in the lower Keys mind you but that event is still off a ways. Anyway, there is no need for chase boats or cars although they would help. For a true inter-island run, I think you would need chase boats and enough of them to be sure to cover the fleet from the leaders back to the stragglers. A few islands and small gaps may be different from say the Exumas with a lot of cuts between islands and opportunities to drift off.
You might do something for starters on New Providence. Say in NE or NW frontal winds, between the east end of Hog Island and Lyford Cay. That works out to about 18 miles. If you wanted to be tricky about it you might even make it a roundwinder to increase the difficulty.
As an alternate or another small New Providence event you might even want to ride between Lyford Cay and say the east end of Rose Island.
Down the road so many of your islands have long beaches on the eastern or Atlantic side. Of course there often is rock fringing the beaches to frag inbound kiters too. Still, Eleuthra, Cat Island, Long Island, Abaco and more offer up some long or short downwinder prospects in NE winds. NE over here and perhaps in the western Bahamas may be one for the more reliable, useable winds during frontal season. You could make a weekend or overnighter out of it. I didn't mention Andros, I am still sorting out all those shark stories from the southern end of the island.
Shooting for April or early May winds could work. March may have the Jupiter and Lower Keys events in Florida. I am not sure about Kite4Girls. Early April might be a possibility. I would try to hold one or two smaller events prior to that however. They can involved 10 guys or less, just something to get the buzz and ideas flowing. For the large event, you could setup a time window for an outisland event. Say, 2 to 4 weeks for a given venue. You could give one week, 72, 48 and 24 hour notifications depending on how solid the forecast looks. These things aren't that hard to put on, although if you are looking for sponsorhip, prize money, etc. these can definitely complicate things.
There are some basic precautions riders should employ, signalling gear, camel paks, power bars, riding in teams, etc. Still it isn't rocket science and can be fun. Pre-races like we have run here make good sense for the organizers. It can start casual, just a bunch of guys getting together to do something different.
What do you guys think?