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Monday, 24 July 2006 12:00 |
 My friend Jon has been bugging me for about 3 yrs to get into kite surfing because he thinks I'd love it. I finally succumbed to his constant invites and decided to give it a whirl.
I took the day off on Monday only to wake up at 4:00 AM and sit in the car for 3 hours. That doesn't sound like the beginning of a fun day off now does it?
What I didn't realize is that kite surfing is nothing like, say, surfing.
 Surfing you can get out in small waves on your first day and do your best to paddle like hell in hopes to actually catch a wave. You can usually get half way decent at that in a day and if you have a little coordination, balance, and balls you might even be able to stand up. Here's me in Puerto Rico on a smaller board than usual and bigger waves than I was used to - just barely standing up:
...and this is me about 5 minutes after crashing into those rocks you can see at the bottom of that picture. I thought I might actually drown or seriously injure myself, so in this picture I was doing my best to hide the fact that I had just cried and wanted to bawl my eyes out b/c I was embarrassed and in a ton of pain.
 Sea urchins in my foot, bloody arms and legs and a totally wrecked board:
I believe that the things most regretted in life are the risks not taken... so I took the risk of riding bigger waves and crashed... so kite boarding can't be much worse, can it?
... oh, it can, but I wasn't allowed to even try.
We drove all the way up to Little Sable Point in Michigan and I learned the basics - the parts of a kite, how to launch and land a kite and what not to do.
 Like I mentioned above, the one thing I didn't realize is that kiting isn't a sport you pick up in a day. You need to take lessons and progress little by little before you're even ready to get on the water at all. My friend did a great job of showing me the basic things, but I'll need much more work to get me up and running. One of the first things you need to know is how to fly a kite... not just any ordinary kite either. The kind of kite that will drag you on the beach and through parking lots if you're not careful.
Luckily someone had a trainer kite (about 5 times smaller than a real kite), so I spent the day trying to become a pro at that. Here's a pic of me playing with it in the wind for a bit.
After you understand how a kite works and how to control it, you then learn how to get enough wind power to get you from sitting or lying down to standing up. Here's a short video of me getting a little toooo much wind and taking a quick face plant into the sand. You can see I take the kite over to the right and then figure 8 it down to the left and it launches me off the ground, into the sand and then my kite crashes hard in the far left corner of the screen. The more you watch it, the funnier it gets.
That's about as far as I got today because these guys didn't a) have enough equipment to get me to the next level and b) none of them felt comfortable letting me try "body dragging" with a big kite and with the wind as strong as it was.
So, I'm heading off to Fiji to learn :) As long as there is some sort of internet connection, I'll be blogging the entire trip.
Will keep you posted! | ">
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