Steven S. Ross

...Unless you want to spend a bunch of money on an addiction that will have you watching weather bouys and wind forecasts every time you mind starts wandering from whatever it is you should be doing.

Yep, I have been out on the water probably 6-8 times since my last post. I now have 2 kites and one board. Actually I should keep track of the number of times I have ridden but, who cares, the only thing you’ll ever remember when you aren’t kiteboarding is that you need to find wind so that you can feed that need once again. I feel like I am addicted to crack or something. Seriously, its that bad.

My progression is going well, I can “upwind” well now (that means when you leave your launch spot on the beach you aren’t blown so far downwind that you have to stop riding and walk back up the beach to where you launched in the first place). I have also mastered catching some air off some waves and throwing in a few grabs while I’m at it. This is probably more due to the fact that I have done a bunch of board sports before (skimboarding, wakeboarding, surfing etc.) Now around my second or third time I decided I would try to boost a nice big floaty air by using the kite to send me up into the stratosphere.

This amounts to turning the kite upward very quickly and all that power is then translated from a horizontal plane to a vertical one and it sends you flying (literally) into the air anywhere from 10-40ft (depending on the wind speed and your skill). So I see an approaching wave and decide I’m going to send it and boom up I go into the air probably 15-18ft off the water. Now I had no idea what I was doing and knew I was going to crash when I came down (I didn’t crash hard so that was good). I came up grinning and looking for my board. As if I needed anything more in this sport that was the icing on the cake and the addiction was fed with even more adrenaline.

It turns out in order to land one of these big airs you have to keep flying the kite and after you send it vertical you have to pull it back down so that you don’t catch up with the velocity of the kite and send it flying backward through the air only to leave you and the kite down in the water. So that needs some practice on my part and from the looks of it this week would have been the perfect wind to give it another shot in. However I am on a job site this week while looking at the weather report back home.

Oh well hopefully we’ll still have the wind when I get back in town this Saturday.