Saturday woke up with not enough sleep, and a slight headache. I knew it would be with me for the next couple days, so after dressing, I took an aspirin. Then I went upstairs for breakfast. Someone had made some scrambled eggs, bacon, and English muffins. They also had OJ, and I had brought my own Twinnings tea. A very satisfying breakfast, indeed. Out the dining room window on the 3rd floor, I could see the ocean between the other houses.
After breakfast I quickly set to collecting what I thought I would need on the day's kiteboarding lesson. It was still cold, so I wore my sweatpants and stowed my sweatshirt in my carry bag. Also with me was sunscreen, and change of clothes - I understood Saturday was all land based, but just in case. Finally, my headache was still the same, so the aspirin wasn't working. This meant Tylenol time, and it went into my bag as well. Everybody climbed into the bus, and we were off.
The kiteboarding facility was no more than two miles down the road. Two big empty fields, with an outrig shack on the sound shoreline. The 5 instructors introduced themselves to us, and sat us up on the 2nd floor deck for an initial whiteboard lecture. The day was sunny, but the temperature was still in the upper 50s, and the wind made it biting. After not too long, I had to get my sweatshirt. Shortly after, others followed suite.
After we shivered through the lecture, we were taken out to the field for land-based kite lessons. The kites are measured in terms of square-meter area, and the ones we were set upon were 3.5 meter kites. That's about 37 square feet surface area - roughly the size of a twin mattress.
These land kites are quite sophistocated, and really cool. They are alot like a steerable square-rig parachutte. They lay flat on the ground until the wind fills their veins, then they take on their wing shape and the wind just lifts them into the air. They catch the air very easily, and we had them flying in rather light wind, around 6 to 10 mph. There are basically four lines to it, one tied to each of the (sort of) four corners. There is extra fanout of the control lines at the kite end for extra surface-area control. Back at the handle end, we're left with a 2-ish foot long bar, with the 4 control lines merged to just to lines harnessed to the bar. Tug on the left side, and the kite drifts leftward. Tug on the right, it goes right. Pull hard on the bar, left or right, and the kite will move more dramatically.
So the thing about this is that it's not quite that simple. There is a region of the sky where the kite builds up simply enormous power, and if you're not careful and your kite drifts into that region, you'll endup catapaulting through the air until the kite crashes down. This "power zone" as its called, is, of course, the business end of the whole kiteboarding activity. However, we were just trying to get a feel for control left and right. With your back to the wind, the power zone is about straight in front and perhaps 30 degrees up. We were therefore flying our kites straight up in the air, directly overhead at our zenith. Drifting the kite left or right, even all the way to just above the ground was ok - i.e. no appreciable power. So that's what we did.
Later, we tested dipping into the power-zone a little bit at a time, and then a bit more. Each time getting a feel for how strong it can be, how quickly it can come on, how to lean back on it to maintain control, and how to pull the kite back out of the power-zone.
I took a nice spill at one point. I must have hit the power zone without leaning back hard enough, and found myself being pulled down the field. When it was clear to me I was going down to the ground, I tucked my right shoulder and did a body roll (rather than belly flop into sand-spurs and pricklypears). When I came back up, I remember thinking to myself, "wow, I didn't know I knew how to do that!" :). One or two others had similar tumbles.
We went through several other exercizes, and then broke for lunch. After lunch, they fitted us with body harnesses, and broke out larger kites - 5 meters. Once launched, we each took turns being hooked into the kites, and practiced the same maneuverings we had done in the morning.
This was rather different. With the harness, we didn't have to worry about holding the kite back, it was held back by our bodies. On the otherhand, there was no getting away from it if it took off. However, the control rod was also more sophisticated, and you could push it out away from you, loosen the kite lines, and the kite magically floated up to zenith where there was little force. Very cool kite!
We ended the day at around 4:30. On return to the house, everyone showered and we headed out for a nice dinner at the Windmill Point restaurant, kindly sponsored by TapRoot.
Windmill Point is located immediately adjacent to the kite camp. The theme of the restaurant is the cruise ship United States. Inside it is decoured as the famous 1950s luxury liner. The bar on the second floor is the actual bar off the ship. I am told they had to lower the bar, in tact, into the restaurant through the ceiling. After dinner, we took a short social at the bar. I really enjoyed the piano player's jazz.
Back at the house, most congregated on the third floor to watch some Japanese competition show. I thought I had seen the show before, and thought the English voice over was too stupid to watch. So I stayed down in the rec room and played pool with Mo. We had fun, but after 5 games I think we were done, so we both joined the group upstairs. The show was similar to what I had seen, but the idiotic English voice-over was gone, and instead there was English subtitles that actually seemed to match what was being said. So the show was of lots of women in single time-based physical competion on a Rube Goldberg type obstacle course. It turned out to be entertaining, and inexplicably addictive. We all finally broke up for bed at 12:30.
No comments:
Post a Comment