One of the competitors getting his kite out of a tree...
Due to a kite surf competition here we had the weekend off before continuing the course on Monday.
But before getting to that, a couple of words about the competition. It was really interesting, lots of great tricks, some drama and spectacular crashes. These guys did jumps, flips, and spins which were incredible, but they also crashed, lost their kites, and fell getting up, had to do supermans to get their boards, got their kites tangled together, and one even got his kite tangled in a coconut palm. Making me wonder if this isn't a lot harder than it looks!
A couple of other competitors getting tangled up...
For some human drama; apparently one hot-shot got disqualified, and then went out on the course during the following heat and disrupted the proceeding to a point where they had to cancel the heat and call in the police! Once he finally came back in, he was running around trying to get away from the security people who were trying to keep him off the competition grounds. The whole time he was followed by a bunch of kids and hangers-on, all wondering what he was going to do next! By the time the police showed up he had run off somewhere, and the competition could continue.
After all these fancy tricks I was really looking forward to the next lesson and finally trying to get up on the board. Once I got my gear on and the kite up, Alex went through the explanation and some demonstrations of how it was done.
The first thing is position. You have to position yourself and the board correctly so that you are facing downwind, with the board facing the direction that your kite will be pulling you. Ok, this is pretty straight forward (at least on the beach).
Next, you move the kite to 12 and control it with one hand while holding the board with the other and putting it on your feet. Again this works fine on the beach.
Now, with the board on your feet, and with you and the board in the right position, the next thing is to get the kite to pull you up and move you on your way. Sounds simple (and looked really simple during the weekend competition), for the beach exercise you sit on the ground and move the kite slowly to one side and then back to the other and slowly let the kite pull you up. The trick is to move the kite enough that you get enough wind to pull you to your feet, and not too much that you go flying uncontrollably down the beach, or little that you just sit there. The key is control. You are basically looking to put the kite in the position where it catches enough wind to haul you up but not too much so that you are out of control. This "sweet" point turned out to be a lot more elusive for me than I would have thought possible. Nevertheless, after a while practicing this on the beach, Alex announced that it was time for me to try it in the water.
A water start turned out to be much, much more complicated that it looked. The first problem was just getting the board on my feet, with the waves (we were beyond the break zone, but I still had to deal with the swells), and kite moving, both keeping me off balance, made this a lot more difficult than it looked. Then once the board was on my feet, I had to make my move before I got out of position, which would happen very quickly. Alex showed my how to hold position with the board, something about moving your legs and pointing the board in the particular direction that you wanted to be in. Something I didn't really understand and didn't quite managed. Once the board was on my feet that was it, I had to start in that position or abort and take the board off an move around until I was in the right position before trying again.
Crash, getting dragged along by the kite (I have some experience in this...)
Nevertheless, after a couple of attempts, a few aborted attempts, some plain disasters, I did manage to stand up and get pulled around 5 meters downwind. Then I ran into my next problem, after the initial pull, I would loose momentum and sink. I was not moving the kite enough, or fast enough to keep a steady pull. When I moved too quickly the kite would rip me from the board and I would land 10 meters downwind with the board swimming gaily 10 meters behind me. So I got to do plenty of supermans to retrieve my board and try again. By the time the lesson was over I had stood or partly stood a half dozen times, but never really surfed! I had done maybe 20 supermans and swallowed half the Atlantic in the process. Additionally, I had a kite from another student come down on top of me when it crashed into the water (something which can be very painful, and very, very dangerous). In order to keep from getting tangled or hit, I dove under the kite, when I came up for air the kite was still on top of me so down again and when I finally came up I was clear of the kite. The miracle is that during all this, my own kite was in the air the whole time. As a matter of fact, to date I have yet to crash my kite, either on land or in the water. This doesn't do me much good, but I think it is pretty cool.
One of the competitors doing a superman to get back to his board...
While attempting to stand you are getting constantly pulled downwind, so after a few attempts, aborted, crashed or otherwise, I had to get out of the water and walk the kite and board back up the beach, this was to avoid getting too far downwind and into a zone where there was a lot of traffic. A couple of times of this and you get pretty tired, so although I was ready for another attempt, I was kind of relieved that the lesson was over for the day.
In the end I think one of the problems was that I was doing this with a 9 sq meter kite and this is not only too small for me, but as the lesson went on there was less and less wind. Now a pro would have no problem, but for me a small kite meant that I had to do a lot more work with the kite in order to get the required amount of pull. This meant that the kite had to be moved a lot more and a lot faster, required a much larger degree of control, which I don't yet have. So I was either getting too little pull or too much, I couldn't find and keep enough wind in the kite to get surfing, but tomorrow is another day...
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