Rochester area. Good wind sport destination?

[Windydoug]

Hey all, I received an e mail today (1/15/10) from a gentleman considering relocation to Rochester. The body of the e mail is below. Help a brother out by adding your five cents with a reply.

Thanks!
WD

Sir or Madam:

First all, thanks for the site..it's definitely useful to help discover the area...
I'm currently evaluating a professional re-location to Rochester from San Francisco. I've been windsurfing for the last 20 years and kitesailing for 5+ years - bump&jump + wave sailing on the coast.

Could you let me know what type of conditions you have up there ? is there a wind season or you just sail when a front hits the region ? Otherwise any area where you're better off living in order to take advantage of good wind conditions when they arise ?

Thank you for your time !!!

[rider1200]

...I assume everyone else is waiting for Mikey Z to field this one?! Didn't he relocate from Rochester to San Fran?

[mikeyz]

Ok I'll give him the news.

So I need to start out by describing the San Francisco Bay for the other guys on the forum. SF Bay is one of the windiest places in the US and in this area there are a lot of options in terms of wind strength and water surface conditions. Basically you can have it all within a 1 hour drive EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE WEEK during the summer. Lets face it if you live here, you live in a windsport enthusiast's heaven. I just moved here and I've only gotten out twice, but people say that if I want to sail 5.0 every single day then I can do it. And I have met a guy that did over 90 continuous days of 5.2 or lower in a row, NO BREAKS. Sound awesome? There are definite downsides. I live in Berkeley and you can't buy a crappy 1-bdrm condo for cheaper than 350-400K. Houses are at least 650K. Unreal. You can try and say "oh the property taxes are only 1%, it isn't that bad, I'll just get a mortgage" But still that is a huge amount when your house is a million bucks. And keep in mind this is quite a bit cheaper than the city of San Francisco which is 12 miles away.

Ok, now for Rochester. Rochester gets wind when a front moves through (like most wind on the East coast). Sometimes a front moves through and you don't get wind ... In my field of work I wasn't going to get much vacation so if I took an afternoon off to go windsurfing it was going to be a big deal and if I got skunked I would probably have ended up pretty frustrated. So the guys that get to sail most often in Rochester are graduate students (like I was), they own their own businesses so they can take off whenever they feel like it (Ken, Bill, I'm still jealous), and those guys that put in years of hard work and are now retired.

The wind can be anywhere in the range of 9.0 - 3.8m. Doug will probably agree with me that if you weigh around 180lbs a 115L board will be your most used piece of equipment. And sail sizes between 5.5 and 7.5 will be the norm.

The good thing about Rochester is that the lakes are much deeper than SF Bay. So the swell can get really huge. At Thanksgiving I was standing on the edge of the pier in Berkeley. The wind was easily 4.0. I know it is hard to gauge what the swell was like but I seriously doubt it was more than chest high. Those same wind conditions would easily produce logo high waves on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. I would say that 7.0 conditions on Lake Ontario would be analogous to 5.0 type conditions in Berkeley.

The other good thing about Rochester is that even though the winds are frontal and can blow from a lot of different angles there are many places to launch from at any given wind direction. If it is blowing crazy SW you can go to Lake Erie or you can stay back in Rochester at Long Pond.

In the spring and fall you can drive 13 hours to Hatteras (last two weeks of October and the last two weeks of April are historically the best according to the charts on iwindsurf). And you will sail at least 10 out of 14 days on 7.0 or smaller.

So yea I really like it there. I haven't been doing this sport for that long but I'd have to say that out of all the places I've windsurfed (Roskilde Fjord in Denmark, Hatteras, Cocoa Beach, Coyote Point, Berkeley Marina) Durand Beach in Rochester on a 6.0 day is my favorite. Hamburg Beach in Buffalo on a 5.0 day is my second favorite. The only problem is that you can't set your watch by the wind, which you can do here in SF at 3pm everyday during the summer.

In addition to this Rochester is a very inexpensive place to live. You can buy a really nice house for 100K in numerous nice neighborhoods in the city and suburbs. The $600K you spent on a shack in Berkeley will buy you an enormous house in a good neighborhood in Rochester. If you have kids I think it is a pretty good place to raise them. I've had numerous friends that grew up in the area and they were really nice people. Also all the windsport people are cool too. Definitely a good post session atmosphere.

I think the only other place you could look would be Boston. And if you look there try to live south of the city so you are close to Cape Cod.

I hope this helps,
- mike

[mikeyz]

I have to augment last night's post with some humor. Check this:
www.trademe.co.nz/Sports/Windsurfing/Boards/auction-265974105.htm