The wind came up this afternoon, and I was able to continue with my
kitesurf lesson... This time, literally getting my feet wet. It was
quite exciting!
I jumped into a wetsuit, we assembled the gear on the beach, and after
a quick explanation of launching and landing the kite, it was up in
the air attached to julia. We walked up the beach while she explained
the basics of flying the kite. ane were I the water. She told me to
grab the handle on the back of her harness... We picked our feet up,
and the kite dragged us offshore for a bit. The water is less than 5
feet deep for at least a 1/4mile out. Once we were out to a shallower
sand bar, we continued to walk into the wind to give ourselves as much
space to practice as possible.
Finally in a place we could both stand, with plenty of space all
around, julia switched the kite over to my harness... And it took me
less than a minute to crash the thing. Oopse. Couple more tries, and I
started to get the hang of keeping it directly overhead (12
o'clock)... And learned to make little movements to 11o'clock,
1o'clock and back again. First instinct is to hold I to the "bar" for
dear life, but in playing with the movements of the kite, it was
really a finesse thing that could be done with a few fingers. After
crashing a few more times, we moved onto dragging ourselves with a
motion of moving the kite horizon to horizon (3o'clock to 9o'clock). I
was a little nervous, but got the hang of it, and then crashed the
kite again.
This is where we ran into difficulties. We needed to move back upwind,
and back onto the sandbar. We had floated quite a bit, and were in an
unusually high tide, making it deeper than usual. Walking in chest
deep water didn't work so well. We tried to drag ourselves in using
the kite... With me driving, and were successful in spurts, but the
kite came down again, in deeper water (harder to launch again)... So
we decided to trade the kite back to julia harness. Doing fine, doing
fine, and crash again... Just when we were trading off the kite line.
Crashed inverted. Crash and burn. We had to take in the lines, and
swim to shore to sort them out.
After a good swim, we sorted the kite and lines out on shore, and
started the walk back up the beach again. Doesn't sound like much, but
a good amount of water walking, adrenalin, head back watching the
kite, swimming... N I was already ticketed out. We decided to to out
for one more round.
All the way up the beach, we were about to head back into the water
for another drag to the sandbar... The kite hit a wind pocket, lost
it's float, and crashed hate to the edge of the beach in a seaweed
bed. In about 10 seconds, the kite lines were tangled up, covered in
heavy seaweed, and my short kitesurfing career came to an end. It
took us about 20+ minutes to get the lines de-weeded, untangled. In
the meantime, the wind came up in full force, and the beach was
instantly full of kites being inflated and launched.
