Poor Man's Helicopter

Tuesday after work I met my windsurf buddy Brandon at the beach. He had been having a good session on his 6.0 Ezzy sail and 114 liter Seatrend board until stepping on something weird in the shorebreak, dropping the sail, and breaking a batten. While Brandon re-rigged to the blue 6.6 I recently sold him, I tried to decide between rigging my 6.8 sail or my 12.0 kite. The onshore direction and apparently fading strength of the wind, combined with the imposing, seaweed-filled shorebreak, convinced me to go with the kite. In other words, I chickened out.



At first it seemed like the kite was a good choice, because I was only lightly powered on my big kiteboard and there wasn't enough wind for Brandon to get off the beach. But then the skies cleared and the wind picked up enough that I would have been well-powered on the 6.8. Oh, well. I got some ok footage with my "straddle mount" kite camera until a drop of saltwater got on the lens in exactly the right spot to blur me out, obscuring my awesome back loop and (unintentional) kiteloop crashes. Even though I was just a blob after that, the camera still worked to get some good "helicopter shots" of Brandon windsurfing. When Brandon was dialed in he was too fast for me to keep up with on the kite, but he crashed and fell off plane regularly enough that it wasn't too hard to get him in the shot again. Anyway, here's the video. The annoying techno song is "Fire" by Ferry Corsten, and the vocals are Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran.

Poor Man's Helicopter from James Douglass on Vimeo.

The seaweedy shorebreak definitely makes things interesting. All kinds of live and dead marine plants and animals collect in it when we get several days of onshore winds like this. I think I got stung by a chunk of Portuguese Man O' War jellyfish sometime during the Tuesday session because I now have itchy bumps in a tentacle pattern on my belly.