Robots are cool

A water post for a change this time, a gusty wind land kiting post will follow at some point when I’ve thought more about it. There are loads of advantages that kitesurfing has over windsurfing – need much less wind, don’t really need waves to have fun and the kit is easier to lug around. While I can’t see all that many people taking up windsurfing over kitesurfing in this country, sticking a pole on a board does have benefits over kiting in certain conditions. I’ve never windsurfed so this is just the impressions I get from watching and what others have told me – please correct me if this is wrong.

When I was in South Africa a few of drove up from Scarborough to Eland’s Bay, an excellent and semi-remote village a few hours north of Cape Town. It is home to a very famous left-hand point break and is loved by surfers. When we arrived it was nice and windy so a couple of us tried to go kiting despite being only a few hundred metres downwind of a tall cliff. Predictably it was a gusty nightmare and it was almost impossible to keep the kites in the sky nevermind get in the water. However there were a fair few windsurfers riding the break very sucessfully (and seriously pissing the surfers off because they could catch the wave so much further out!).

When I was in New Zealand I headed to a famous windsurfing area called Taranaki. This place isn’t all that popular with kiters, probably because of the very rocky beaches and big swells. The week that I spent there saw only ESE/SE winds which meant riding at a break called Kina Road in fairly offshore conditions. Although there weren’t any large cliffs around, the wind was very gusty and riding upwind was extremely difficult. The windsurfers were really struggling to get out past the initial breakers as there was a pocket of light wind. Once they got out back though, none of them had any bother at all while I was getting ripped off the water every few feet just trying to ride along.

The reasons why they were succeeding where we couldn’t are fairly obvious – bigger, floatier boards and their sails simply don’t feel the effects of gusty winds as much as they aren’t on the end of 30m lines (kite can shoot about in the window showing the effects of gusts and lulls more). Actually, as I’ve never windsurfed, this second point is guesswork as much as anything else but seems sound enough. In situations like Eland’s Bay with it’s very tall cliff upwind the commonly proposed solution to gusty winds, using longer lines, may actually make matters worse as it gives the kite more space to play and the air is still turbulent higher up anyway. Perhaps the solution in these situations is actually to use much shorter lines and put up a bigger kite, thereby emulating the sail effect of windsurfing a little.

This is really only a massive problem at wave-riding spots where you’d like a little bit of offshore and sometimes the lie of the land isn’t overly friendly. Unfortunately wave-riding is the best part of the sport in my opinion. Gusty winds are the bane of kiting and are why windsurfing will not die.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to test any of this out until my back’s better. Comments encouraged, the more info I can find about this the better.