by Todd JB

It’s late January. The five of us are hunkered down in the marginal wind block we created by parking our trucks nose to nose on the beach. We just left a friend’s Virginia beach cottage where snow was falling. I’m wearing a borrowed rubber suit that two men larger than me have previously sweated in profusely due to its lack of ventilation. Yes. We’re going kiteboarding. Three years ago there was a 100% chance that I would be snowboarding on this day. What the hell happened?

I’ve had this article in my mind for four years, since I started kiting. It changes every month, based on new experiences, but it’s always been geared towards the new guy. Hopefully that’s you. This is for the guy or girl reading their first kite articles and wondering if they should invest in learning this crazy sport. You should.

I live in suburban D.C., northwest of the capital. I am closer to mediocre snowboarding and mountain biking than I am to kiteable water. I’ve been flying kites since I was a little kid. That was the treat every summer vacation growing up, running to the kite shop and picking out a new “one liner” for the week. Some time in college somebody handed me a two line stunt kite and I was hooked on those for a few years. Good fun.

The first kiteboarder I saw was in Duck, NC. I think it was 1994. I was finishing up a summer of work at the local sailing center, Nor’Banks, when I saw the craziest thing ever. You know the sight, that’s why you’re here. It’s the first time you see a sport that you did not even know existed. Here in front of me someone had combined all of my favorite sports…sailing, snowboarding, and kite flying. I was amazed.

Fast forward from my boyish enthusiasm to a few years ago. The past Fall I had taken a half day kiteboarding lesson that promised to make me a kite hero in four hours. It didn’t, but it did plant a seed. I’m back in D.C. and when I brought up the sport to sailing friends they all told me it was a ridiculous idea in our area. They preached this for a number of excuses that all centered around me not living at the beach. Not only could I not talk any of my wind or snow sport friends into trying this with me, most tried to convince me not to try it as well. I was about to give in to the posse when I found a local Yahoo group of kiters that won me over. (MAKA)

The local forum crew had been living where I do and loving the sport since the late 90s. All it took was a browse of their posts and a few emails to this group to realize the sport was worth it. Well worth it. In our area it’s an hour drive to marginal kiting conditions, a couple hours to very good conditions, and Hatteras is a half day drive which makes weekend road trips an option. It was finally clear to me, these drives to good wind were no different than those I’d been taking to go snowboarding for years. And since I lived in Maryland, it was a lot easier to get a good wind forecast than a good snow forecast. A LOT easier. I was sold.

So book that trip or sign up for that lesson! It’s not so much where you live as it is how much you want to learn. If you are lucky enough to live near a nice kite beach and you have a lot of time on your hands, you’ll be an intermediate kiter in a month or two. For most of us in the DC area, with beltway traffic between us and a session, it takes most people about a year to be comfortably self sufficient. If you live even further, book yourself a two week vacation to a windy place, kite every day, and go home stoked. If you want to learn, I can guarantee you’ll have more fun learning this sport than any you’ve tried before.

There are of course a few things to know before you pick up this sport.

1) You’re going to swim. A lot.

2) There will be days when your brand new bar with four 60 meter lines will look like a ball of yarn. You will become very good at untangling knots.

3) Until you learn to stay upwind, which takes time, you will spend more time walking back to your car than you actually will kiting.

You won’t care, though, because those 15 minutes of riding will have you smiling for the entire 30 minute walk back to your car and halfway through the hour you’ll spend untangling your bar. This sport is that fun. It is why the sport changes so many lives. If you have that much fun in 15 minutes of getting your ass handed to you under a kite, imagine riding for hours and only coming in when those two sticks of jello you used to call legs have thrown in the towel. And one day, when board short season hasn’t given you enough, you’ll find yourself borrowing a friend’s drysuit.

lens: Todd JB

lens: Todd JB

lens: Todd JB

lens: Todd JB

lens: Todd JB

rider Adam, lens Todd JB

rider: Jason, lens Todd JB

lens Todd JB

lens Todd JB

This brings me back to that freezing cold day in Virginia last January. I was with some of those same local guys who had been kiting since the late 90s who invited me on this daytrip. While I felt honored just to get invited out with this seasoned crew, they were amazed they were able to talk someone else into kiting on this bitter cold January day. (That is “group think”; if all of us want to go, then it must be worth going. Right?) After we methodically all got blown off our own gear, the six us up ended up sharing one 8M demo kite and loving every minute of it. We drove three hours to get there, froze our tails off for three hours on the beach, drove another three hours back home, and I’m still talking about it. We all are. It was a great day.*

I still haven’t managed to talk any of my “pre-kiteboarding” friends into trying this sport. They continue to be a little more tempted, every summer one of them promises that they’ll learn, but there’s always an excuse. They’re good excuses, mind you, and one day I know one of them will join me on the water. I’ve met a lot of new friends to kite with, but once a winter I’m sitting on top of a mountain looking down a fresh powder field with an old friend and I’m asked, “Is kiteboarding better than this?” And I have to honestly explain to them that it is a lot easier to put myself under perfect wind than it is to be sitting above this beautiful untouched powder. And then I try to describe the feeling of kiting a slick and having “fresh tracks” all day long.

So if you want to learn to kite, do it. Now! You’re only getting older sitting there reading this article. Don’t let anyone other than your immediate family talk you out of it (and I have my reservations about their opinions as well.) If you can get to kiteable water within a day, the sport is worth learning. You will love it, you will make some great friends, and you will have more fun than you ever thought possible.

*The local kiters who invited me on their day trip were Adam C, Dave O, Geoff S, Jason M, and Scott L. The 8M demo was a sweet Slingshot Octane loaned to us by Dave Loop, which Adam has since bought. The beach cottage was Scott’s, and the crappy cold day is still epic in my mind, one year later.