Words: Weston Thayer
Video: Thomas Leeman

So I finally got myself out of the mountains and down to the warm & windy state of Florida for a week of college spring break mistakes . Me and a few friends poked around the east coast and found places to sleep for 5 nights.

The wind started to pick up when we were in West Palm Beach on Wednesday, so I figured I’d head over to Delray to score a session with that crew. I arrived early to 18 knots and sharks. There were tons and tons of sharks. They said it was the most that they’d ever seen there. Others were out, so I figured I’d rig too. Unfortunately I’d just been fixing a tear in my leading edge, and had forgotten to zip the zipper back up, so of course I popped my main bladder as I was pumping up. Luckily some sail tape provided a temporary fix.
–side note: should I try to patch a 4″ rip, or just get a new bladder?
So I went out, didn’t see any sharks, but saw a lot of 5 foot long mobile coral reef under me. I didn’t realize until I came in that there’s no reef at Delray . Also to be noted, I hit a manowar on every single tack. I have never seen that many manowars in my life. They covered the tide line on the beach. So needless to say, I spent the first half of the day not falling. A few local guys had a kitecam to shoot all the sharks underneath. Thomas Leeman was shooting video too, so here’s his footage of that day. I’m on the beach in this one.

Towards the end of the day, the wind had picked up and I was able to convince myself there were less sharks, so I got in some wakestyle in the shore break. Finished off the day watching people on strapless surfboards being chased by sharks. They were literally jumping out from behind the kiter’s wake. Screw. That.

I also ran into Andy Hurdman giving a lesson. I dunno if anyone here still remembers him, but he’s an LF pro rider who lived in DC for a bit. We would see him at Terrapin occasionally. He’s moved back to Delray now and runs his own lesson shabang. 

Anyway, he told me that he’s really into night kiting now and would I be down for a session tonight? I said hell yes.

So we met up around 9:30 that night and split up cars for a 12 mile downwinder from the Boca Raton pier to Delray beach. I know this seems like a terrible idea with the record amount of sharks and manowar in the water, but this is how we went about it:
For that 12 mile span of beach, the sand meets the ocean at a pretty low angle. So you can actually kite in the little wave slicks on the beach. You can kite really really fast in them. So that’s what we did for the majority of the session. I went finless toeside on my Recoil in about 3″ of water, doing an average of about 16 knots. Andy was a show-off in front of me, he was hitting lips and boosting 25 foot airs, which looks spectacular when outlined by the Boca Raton skyline. We both carried lights to signal to each other any coming dangers (Andy lead since he’s been doing this downwinder for a while).

The coolest thing from the whole experience was when we hit the Boca Raton inlet, they were dredging for beach replenishment. The dredge was anchored about 300 feet outside the inlet and it was a 60 foot long boat, about 30 feet high, lit to no end. There were fluorescent lights projecting from every deck at every angle. The closer we got to it, the more like daylight it was. Me and Andy met on the beach before hand to discuss how to get around it, and the consensus was to go in between it and the inlet, but to watch out for the wind shadow. Andy wanted to go play with it, so I said I’d meet him on the other side.

Well getting out past the shore break, the waves were getting kicked up to head high, but they were nice smooth breaks. I was set to head into the inlet and go around when I noticed a floating wall. They had these 5 foot high floating barriers, I guess to prevent too much silt pollution. While I’m figuring out how to get around these, I’m watching Andy right up next to the boat–boosting huge airs in the lights. I can’t describe what it looked like, only kind of like something out of a sci-fi movie.

So I took a few more tacks and boosted over the barriers, and after a few minutes of wrestling with the current, made it around to the other side. The rush I got from that though was pretty insane

We finished the whole run in about 50 minutes and completely exausted. I went home and passed out for 12 hours, but when I woke up it was blowing 25 with head high waves. Scored a 6m session in head high waves with the local West Palm beach crew.

Every little blue dot on that beach is a dead manowar

And now I’m back in the mountains, sore, doing homework. But it was definitely a crazy week. 

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