Monday, May 31, 2010

Silly Kite Video

There are two basic kinds of jumps in kiteboarding: "pops", where you keep the kite steady but do a quick carve with the board to flick yourself out of the water, and "boosts", where you swoop the kite up past vertical to launch yourself into a soaring leap. You can also blend the two kinds of jumps to varying degrees, and enhance either one by using a wave to initiate it. I had a hard time learning pops because they require a weird sort of timing, but now I like them. They are kind of like windsurfing "chop-hops" in that they can be spontaneous responses to the terrain that don't interrupt your forward momentum.

You can see some mediocre pops and boosts and other attempted show-off moves in this board-mounted video, taken Saturday at Kimberly Bergalis Park in Fort Pierce. The winds are light (10-12 knots) so I'm riding my big 179 cm kiteboard and 14 meter squared kite. The song is by Alice in Chains.

29 May 2010 Kiteboard Board Mount from James Douglass on Vimeo.


The video from the gopro looks grey and dreary but it was actually kind of pretty out there. For the first part of the session I had my camera set to take still shots, accidentally, but that turned out to be ok because I was able to play with them and make them look nice (see slideshow below).

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3 comments:

  1. UnknownMay 31, 2010 at 4:06 PM

    Thoughts about GoPro fogging up: have you considered placing a small pouch of silica crystals in the viewfinder space at the rear? You can dry them out later in a fan forced oven on low - mine turn from pink to blue when dry. I used an old piece of ribbon and a stapler to make a tube shaped pouch to hold the crystals. So far no fogging, but its winter here in Aus so the air is pretty dry. The real test will come next summer.

    -h

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  2. Boris TJune 1, 2010 at 1:26 PM

    Wow nice video man! What's the image on your board I can't see it well.

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  3. James DouglassJune 1, 2010 at 1:38 PM

    Henry- Thanks for the ideas. Now that it's hot in Florida and I've been putting the camera in the case inside my air-conditioned apartment I haven't had any problem with fogging up. The murky quality of the video is just from the cloudy day and water droplets on the outside of the lense. But I will definitely have to try the silica gel thing for cold water use.

    Boris- Thanks. The image is of an angry fish skeleton. Pretty cool. I think the board was originally red and black but it has faded to orange and brown.

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