The dark side of the kite

Let me ask a simple question…How do you think kitesurfing is? Fun, boring, joy, struggle, good time, bad time…Actually I think that the most of the answers would be that kiting is cool and fun. But that would be because most of the people know kitesurfing only from YouTube videos, where you can find really and only cool stuff. But the real thing is not that simple L

I started kiting two months ago and I since then spend every at least a bit promising weekend on the beach. As I remember well I had one really good day, when it was really fun, like three OK days and the rest were more struggle and frustration than excitement. Usually is because the forecast shows something around 10 knots. You go the beach, pump the kite, set up the lines and then you realize that there is no wind to fly. It still blows the hair into the face but it isn’t enough. “One more knot and we can go” always says Ahmed, The Optimist. Then we measure it, there is actually one knot more, so you go in to the water, try diving up and down, drowning, swearing…then the wind dies again. And at the end you easily spend two afternoons on the beach without actually even riding 20 meters. This is not fun L

Like today. It was a bit different story, but with the same effect. Forecast was excellent. Only the wind was offshore, which we wanted to compensate with driving two hours to Abu Dhabi beach.

I arrived at 10am. Visibility zero, because of all the sand blown from the desert. Wind around 25 knots, which construction limit of my kite. “We have 25 plus wind with gusts of above 30!! I wouldn’t go with this kite. It’s too big for this wind” said to me an experienced instructor passing by and disappeared with his 9m² in the sandy fog. So I waited for the wind to drop a bit.

Two hours passed when Rune and others arrived. We measured and it seemed a bit less. I tried to launch, but things got wild in this wind and I almost let the wind take my kite to Kuwait, because safety release got jammed and I also accidentally released the harness release, so was holding it with my bare hands.

 I got a lesson this time and escaped only with few small rips in the kite. So my day was over. But the others didn’t have better luck at all. Around 3pm wind died from 25 to zero knots in half an hour!!! No kiting this time boys L

The fact that around 4:30pm sea breeze started to blow was more bad than good, because it was so gusty that we were in one moment struggling to keep the kite in the air and in the second later struggling to not to fly away. It’s was not much fun!!

 At the end we were wasted, with salt and fine sand everywhere, burned from the sun and sad, angry, pissed off… that we spend another day in the beach without even riding 20 meters.

But as always when you like something so much as we do kitesurfing, after one hour of silent ride home we already agreed that: NEXT TIME  IT WILL BE PERFECT J