January 3rd, Tuesday - Bitter End, BVI

       

Kiteboarding is a total gas.  Joe and I took advantage of the instruction available here at the Bitter End Yacht Club, hit up our friends from Jaimie and Cenou to take the kids for the afternoon, and spent three hours beating ourselves up trying to keep our feet in the straps of a board while getting yanked around by a 9 meter kite in 18 to 20 knots of breeze.  Wow!  Joe was a natural, of course, and made it look easy.  I had a few more wipe outs, spectacular as always, but managed to get a great couple of rides in none the less.
 
We had spent a few hours last time we were here learning how to fly the kite, which is what it is all about.  The neutral zone, directly overhead with the wind at your back, is where you have to keep the kite in order to get the board onto your feet.  It is pretty easy to get the kite there, but you have to pay constant attention to it in order to keep it there.  It is attached via four strings to a horizontal bar that is your control and steering mechanism.  A little pull on the left dives the kite down into the power zone on the left and the same on the right.  Between the water and the neutral zone on each side is called the power zone.  Dive the kite down to one side or the other in order to generate the pull to get you out of the water and on top of the board.  The harder you dive the kite, the more power.  It is a pretty fine line between rolling up out of the water on top of the board and getting dragged forward off your feet and onto your face.  Even in the latter event, you want to try to hang onto the kite and keep it in the air because the hardest and most exhausting task in the whole process is getting the kite launched while you are in the water.  We worked on this and got it going a couple of times, but Justin, our instructor, took pity on us and would launch it for us from the dinghy so we saved some strength for the rides.
 
So, you've got the kite overhead in the neutral zone, and the board on your feet. 
Take a deep breath and pull the left side of the bar to dive the kite.  It helped a lot that Joe and I had spent so much time wakeboarding this summer with the Cunards.  We were able to manipulate the board around a little easier because of that experience.  After all the years of water sports, being pulled behind boats, the challenge for us was learning not to lean back against the kite to get up, as you would use a boat to pull you up, but to roll onto the board and stand up while the power of the kite pulls you forward.
 
It is easy to forget about flying the kite while you are concentrating on getting on top of the board, and this led to some pretty spectacular wipeouts.  Every time you dive the kite to the left, you pull it back up to the neutral zone before the next dive.  It is also very easy to pull it back too far so that it starts to power up on the right side.  All of the sudden you are taking off in the other direction with your feet pointed the wrong way and before you know it, you're flying through the air, three feet off the water.  But DON'T LET GO OF THE KITE!  I impressed Justin with one of these maneuvers in my early attempts to get up.  I did manage to hang onto the kite, although I almost lost my bathing suit!
 
Joe made it look easy.  His first attempt had him up and skating away like a pro.  He too had some pretty good wipeouts, but he also got in a dozen good rides.  His last one of the day was particularly great, as a day charter was sailing right by in front of him.  He must of gotten his picture snapped a hundred times as if he were a pro.  He even went so far as to let go of the kite and wave with one hand! 
 
I'm not sure what this all means in our future.  We don't yet have any water sports equipment on the boat, although we have talked a lot about a windsurfer.  Our friend Jean Dunoyer, who visited us this summer in Woods Hole and Boston, is an awesome windsurfer who has taken up kiteboarding in the last couple of years.  He recommended to us that we skip the windsurfer and go straight to kiteboarding.  The equipment is much easier to carry, for one.  The other huge benefit that we have on the boat is the availability of numerous ideal locations.  We also have a dinghy ready and able to provide the support to the guy in the water.  John Martin says that it is definitely a "caddy sport," requiring the presence of a person in a dinghy to help launch the kite when it hits the water and to get both the kite and rider back upwind.  Going upwind is an essential skill, but at first you spend your time working on staying up while going downwind.  It takes a while before you can actually get yourself back upwind to where you started from. 
 
Needless to say, we got back to the boat totally exhausted.  I actually had the kids put me to bed tonight, at about 7:30.  I woke up after a nice three hour nap and figured I would write this up before going back to bed.  The kids had a big day as well.  John and Po and Claude and Rike had the six girls at the pool, the beach, and waterskiing behind John's 25 horsepower dinghy.  Both Cassie and Juliana were bubbling over with excitement, telling us how the got up on skis and Cassie even went outside the wake.  What a life!
Love,
Christy, Joe, Cassie and Juliana
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Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind enough to host the website on his server.

 
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