Hmm where was I . . . oh yea lesson numero uno!

Well that was a fail. Not because I was a fail but because the wind wasn’t there. The instructor was using a 6 meter kite and he couldn’t even keep it afloat so what did I do you ask. Well I am glad that you asked, I went to the beach to work on my tan and get some salt h2o on my skin which I do have to say is pure awesomeness.

Now for those who are not already accustomed to the equipment of Kite Boarding let me fill you in. The kites are sized according to the square meters of space that they take up. They are also classified by the style but since I don’t have a grasp on that I am not going to attempt to confuse you with it either. So for training you are supposed to use a 1.5M or 2M kite until you can grasps turns and overall awesomeness that is Kite Boarding. Then after you get the very basics they bump you up to a 3.5 for more control maneuvers which is primarily single handed operation of the kite with both your left and right hands. Then once you have mastered that you go to a 6M kite for finer tuning and if you are good there then you go to that h2o where I will be tomorrow but that is the next blog I am going to write, since it has yet to happen, so stand by for more information. So at this point if you are able to guide a 6M kite you should be able to guide a 8-12M kite but since you are going to be on the h2o that is why you need another lesson.

So I finally get my lesson on my 2nd day down here in Tarifa, which I do have to say is extremely nice. The weather is very warm. The h2o is nice as well and is salty, just the way I like it, and the people here are extremely friendly. Be it for the fact that I don’t speak Spanish and well since they are a tourist destination they are used to it or for the fact that they are extremely friendly to begin with who knows but I still like it here. So I am on my way to the center and I get a call on my movil, which is pronounced “mobile” as in mobile phone, asking if I can come to the center because there are 2 more students that are going to be starting from the beginning so I can just in with them. This is good two fold. First since the wind yesterday was not cooperating the 45 minutes of lessons that I had has been nullified and second by having more people in the group I get more time allotted for the lesson. Normally the lessons are with groups of 4 people totaling 9 hours being that each pair of persons gets a kite and therefore get 4.5 hours of fly time over the 9 hours. So by having 2 more students instead of 3 more one of us is going to get more fly time and low and behold it is me since the other 2 people are friends who don’t speak English so they are paired up, naturally, and I am off by myself. So while going over the technical stuff that I learned yesterday with the other students I am left to set up the kites which is a learning process for me and one that I enjoy.

So after doing the whole group instruction thing for a while we are let loose to get flying the kites. I crash mine sometimes but overall I am doing much better than person numero dos who doesn’t grasp the “push-pull aspect of steering” the kite. So while Antonio, the awesome instructor, is helping those guys I have managed to learn self-launching of the kite and began the one handed steering all on my own. So after letting person numero tres take over my kite I am shagging downed kites. This is good for me since it gets me a chance to learn the launch windows of the kites which will help if I need to get some random person from the beach to help me launch. It is after shagging downed kites for probably 20 minutes or more we stop using the 2M kites and bust out the 3.5M kite for some more tuning and what would begin the lesson for one handed operations.

Now being that I have an extraordinary amount of time on my hands while at work, I mean after hours of course, I have watched countless YouTube.Com videos so I already have a basic grasp, haha pun intended, on how one handed operations work. So once I have been deemed qualified on the 3.5M kite I do the “truffle shuffle” over the creek to the shop and get the said 6M kite that wouldn’t fly for me yesterday. So once that is inflated I am basically left to myself since Antonio is helping the other two guys. After a couple of crashes Antonio comes over and gives me some pointers and they greatly help with self-launching. Now with the training kites that I was learning on are self-inflated but with the non-training kites they are not self-inflating and this is why I can essentially work autonomously with just a few pointers here and there. The good thing is that the 6M kite is actually starting to pull me a little. At one point towards the end of the session Antonio and I were talking about my progress and where to go for the next session and the kite actually pulled me about 3 meters because I wasn’t paying attention. So I did what I was trained to do and released the bar and the kite lofted for a moment and then tanked, hard. But that let Antonio and I continue our conversation and we decided that it was best to come back in 90 minutes or so and begin the 2nd session since I was progressing faster than the other two, thanks YouTube.com, and that the next session would be on the h2o.

This is all good news to me since I figured that would be retained to the beach for the 2nd session and the 3rd would be on the h2o. So I leave and get some lunch with the plan of rendezvousing 90 minutes from now and be riding confidently on the h2o by the time the shop closed. Although this did not happen because of a scheduling conflict, dang private lesson peoples, I am confident that before the afternoon siesta tomorrow I will be a wave riding-kite surfing machine! Or at least I will be able to get up on the h2o and be able to launch, re-launch, and get from point A to point B with some dignity.

Well it is time for me to work of the “Sun Drunk” hangover that I have, since I slept on the beach for 2.5 hours after finding out about my lesson, and I also have to cook some dinner and rehydrate.

Stay Frosty
-C