I just arrived in Malmö, I’m staying here for a week. The flight was okay, it’s only an hour. I flew to Kastrup airport (Copenhagen) and then took a taxi over the bridge to Sweden. The taxi was horrible. First of all, the guy didn’t know how to spell Sweden (he even went so far as to type ‘Swiden’). After I told him, maybe he should try Sverige (I don’t know any Danish at all, but it sounded quite right ), it still took him 5 minutes to find the right address on the GPS. Then–well in Sweden–he missed an exit on the highway. Once in town, twice he took a wrong turn, but eventually he did manage to bring me to the hotel, so it wasn’t all bad

Nothing could really ruin my day however. The beginning of the weekend wasn’t so good. I had to travel back from Malta to Amsterdam and because of the storm that raged over North-West Europe last weekend, inbound flights to Amsterdam were delayed. I spent my time on Malta airport talking with Jeroen, a pilot for the Libyan oil company (he flies personnel back and forth from Tripoli to the oil rigs). The flight in the end was delayed for about two hours. The sights I got from the Dutch coast were amazing though. It was blowing force 10 at times, but there no cloud cover, so we could see the coast line very well. I had never seen such white patches (swells and waves) before from that high up. Great to see.

We had a rough landing with loads of turbulence and touched down at about 1pm. I had an appointment with Sjoerd, to do some kiting in the afternoon, but apparently, he still had to pick up his wetsuit so that meant: no kiting for him. I did a short session at Muiderberg, but the conditions were just too freaking gusty to have the slightest bit of fun. I got off the water after about 90 minutes.

Sunday I also had planned to go kiting. We ended up at Oostvoorne, which was the wrong decision, as weather reports later on proved. At Oostvoorne, the wind was good for about half an hour, but then quickly dropped. I did get to take out my 14sqm though, which was a first. All-in-all, we could have better gone up North more. Winds at IJmuiden were reported to have exceeded 30 knots!

Today, I also went (click on the graph for more details about the wind today). This time to IJmuiden and I had an amazing session! The waves were great (better than what they normally are at least). Big waves with ots of clean flat water in between. The wind was directly onshore so going out was a little bit hard, but still a lot of fun, using all the waves that were almost breaking as ramps to do some jumping.

The session didn’t end very well, though. Somehow, my quick release activated, and immediately after that, my release chord broke as well (at least, I found out about that later on). I was out quite far, so I couldn’t stand anymore. I didn’t really panic, but I still had to swim quite hard to get to shore. Fortunately Sjoerd was there too, and after a few minutes he noticed my kite was too for up the beach for it to be put there on purpose by me, so something must have gone wrong he thought and he came to me.

Well, everything ended well at least… I am going to buy a life vest though, for the colder months of the year.

Okay, so here I am, in Malmö, my legs and arms hurting a bit, not bothered at all about the taxi driver, just thinking back of those awesome waves that I was riding in the afternoon…