Guess who's back

All the skiers who went to Spain to train got back today. If you are wondering who I am talking about, feel free to read the previous post. The group came back yesterday and some of the diehards were back on the water here today. I mean diehards in more ways than just skiing after an intense week of training. The wind today was also very terrible, which caused very high waves. I'm very glad they got on the water anyway so I could see how well they are all skiing, which was great. Usually coming back from Spain means somewhat of a weather shock, but this weekend, the Netherlands was actually warmer than most other European countries. This made it even better to spend so much time in the boat. However I seriously doubted if I would ski myself. This was mainly because the wind was producing waves with white caps, which was quite off-putting. I ended up skiing, though I will leave slalom for another time, but tricking was very doable. I am extremely happy that I went skiing, because it went extremely well. I only skied once, because I've had an exhausting week, but that one set was great. I did 2 new tricks, one of which the wake 360, which I predicted would come soon in the post As promised..., the other trick was a 540 wake turn, which I was able to put in a sequence with another 540 wake turn. This reminds me of a quote that says: If you wait for the perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done. The only down side of today is that I didn't bring a camera this time and thus none of this was filmed or even photographed. I will hopefully get on the water again soon and film it so I can show you what these tricks are!
And speaking of filming, we have a new toy. My dad bought a 'wake eye' recently. This is a mount for the gopro that can be put on the pole to which the line is attached and it will follow the movement of the line. This is especially useful in slalom, because if the camera doesn't move, you will ski out of the frame frequently. This way the camera will follow the line's movement from side to side and thus film the entire set. Hopefully this will result in cool videos to share, but also good quality videos that I can look back and look carefully at my technique and what I can improve. On Friday, we did a little testing with the camera, since this was the first day after my exam week, I was still beyond tired and I didn't feel fit enough to slalom. We tested the filming with tricks, just to look at the camera positioning. It works well in the sense that it is easy to spot mistakes and thus it's very educational, also I'm amazed at how smoothly the camera follows the line, even with subtle movements in tricks.

However the camera that we are using can't zoom in close enough and thus the film is quite far away. Essentially it's most useful for slalom, so I hope to test it with slaloming soon.
I now have 1.5 more weeks of exams, so I will be skiing to keep my mind clear, but not a lot, because exams are much more tiring than I initially anticipated.
For next week I have some exciting news. There will be a training in Handel, the lake I've already skied a lot this year, for the national team skiers. This is the first in a while, because there have been financial struggles, since water-skiing is not as popular as I think it should be! It's very exciting that things like this can be organized again and I cant wait to tell you about it next week!