I promised some pictures from my kite boarding session from last Sunday. Marc just zipped them up for me today, so I can finally put them online! As I told earlier, Sunday we had a really good session at Wijk aan Zee, which is a little North-West of Amsterdam.

The direction of the wind was perfect. With SSW it was almost completely sideshore (a little onshore even). The wind was about 25 knots (which is about 6 Beaufort I guess). This is good enough for my 8sqm Gaastra Jekyll. I was quite happy to be able to use my smaller kite, not only because it’s a lot more fun to fly, but also because the bigger one I have currently is out of order a little bit. In a little accident I had at Workum beach (Friesland) the weekend before, I lost my chicken loop. This is the part (see below) that you use to connect your kite (or the bar and its steering lines) to your harness so that you don’t loose your kite. Loosing it is a little stupid, because that normally shouldn’t happen. I guess I just pulled safety and unhooked my chicken loop or so. Anyway, I can’t use the Cabrinha until I have a new chicken loop, so that’s another reason I was really happy that it was blowing about 25 knots.

I had also never really been in such heavy surf. Especially near the end of the day there were waves of about 1.5 meter (I think they were even bigger, but hey, let’s not exaggerate huh). Getting out to more quiet waters was hard, but riding back in, towards the beach is great fun, overtaking the waves, putting the kite in the air and while depowering it a little bit, simply enjoying the power of the waves for a while.

I almost got to enjoy a very short session today but there was a heavy traffic jam in between me and the kite boarding spot I wanted to go, so that was a bit of a pity. I’m hoping for some good winds this weekend, but so far I guess I’m out of luck. The predictions so far are not so good–just about no wind at all on Saturday and about 10 to 13 knots on Sunday. When things get a little better, I might be able to do a small session on Sunday, but then I really have to have my 12sqm fixed and I have to leave for Denmark around 5′ish, so it won’t be a long one.

I’ll keep you up-to-date.