Robots are cool

I’ve finally got my new Sony S3XP laptop to the stage where I can use it as my main machine. Although it arrived on Tuesday, it’s taken this long just to get the main components working the way they should under linux. What a hassle – nothing has been easy! Somewhere in there I had a day of mixed emotions:

In the morning I finally resigned myself to the fact that, without the correct driver, my Nvidia graphics card wasn’t going to display widescreen and I would need to wait quite a while until the driver was released. Not cool, I got the laptop for the screen. So I decide to bail and go kitesurfing with Ross because it’s north-westerly and there’s swell. I was obviously far too excited because as we collected our kites from the shop I realised that I’ve forgotten loads of stuff, including my harness. Bugger. Once we’re back at the flat, I suddenly realise that I’ve lost my wallet. After a bit of a think, it dawns on me that I drove away from my flat (the first time) with it on the roof. Cock, cock, cock. I’m pissed off – not just because my wallet is missing, but because this isn’t the first time I’ve driven away with stuff on the roof. We bugger about looking for it for a while, but have to write it off and head back to the shop to cancel my cards (where Stuart wasn’t making the situation much more pleasant by taking the piss – completely fair play, really). Well annoyed, we head to the beach.

Once we’re there, it’s looking great. Small, but nice surf and cross shore wind. Once we launch though, it’s not so good. I’m on a little inflatable and Ross is on a bigger foil. I spend the first five minutes cursing myself for putting up too small a kite, and then spend the next ten minutes watching Ross getting teabagged all over the place as a big squall comes in. Just as well I put up a small kite. Once the squall has passed the wind doesn’t improve and I give serious thought to giving up kitesurfing forever (but that could fill a whole other post). We pack it up and head home, no less pissed off. I’ve had a shite day.

But then things change. I go the police station in Edinburgh, just in case – they’ve got my wallet! I check my email as soon as I get in and have two emails from another Nidia 6200 owner who tells me that the drivers for our cards were released a few hours ago. Woohoo! All of a sudden I’m totally hyper and end up finding it quite a struggle to get to sleep. Although I’m sure it hasn’t come across in this lame prose, it really was a wild day of peaks and troughs. Ross – thanks for putting up with my nonsense :)

Stuart, Andy and I managed up to Aviemore yesterday for some snowkiting, as Stuart has explained. Having been excited about kiting on snow for years, it was great to actually get out and get some done. I had actually been once before, but there was very little snow and very little wind. We got to the car park at Cairngorm and walked along the trail towards Coire an t-Sneachda for ten minutes before we found a spot that looked good and not too rocky. Before we get too into the kite chat, here’s a photo Andy took of me looking camp with pink hair – because some people want to see it.

The wind was amazingly smooth, much better than I expected and even much better than some mountain board sessions I’ve had. The snow was pretty good too. Another couple of heavy snowfalls beforehand would have been nice, but tough to complain too much in Scotland. So, being blessed with pretty damn good conditions, I was all set for a great day. Then came a major surprise – I thought it was a bit boring.

Snowkiting didn’t live up to my expectations which, with hindsight, were unrealistically high. I had a vision of cruising up a hill and slashing my way back down as I picked the most interesting line on the hill. Give this any serious thought at all though, and you’ll realise that this can never really be the case – you’re trapped in the fairly narrow set of rules of what the kite and wind will actually allow you to do. The wind was cross-uphill for us yesterday and getting uphill was easy. Coming down though, the apparent wind made me very powered and I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to go where I wanted on the hill. Having done a reasonable amount of snowboarding before, being restricted to not being able to go too far either upwind or downwind was a chore. Turn too fast and the kite wants to fall out of the sky and if you’re five feet too far downwind to hit that lip you saw – tough shit!

I may have built snowkiting up too much in my mind and was mistakenly under the impression that it would be very different to mountain boarding and kitesurfing – in the end, I didn’t think it was as good as either of them. The terrain doesn’t move around like waves do, and snowkiting doesn’t have that magic X factor (a whole other post) that mountain boarding has always had for me. Ultimately though, the lack of freedom I felt with the kite was the killer blow.

I think the true benefit of snowkiting is the jumping potential and in days gone by I’m sure I would have loved floating down the hill. However, since breaking myself, doing big jumps over land isn’t cool and snowkiting became just another kitesport for me. When I started mountain boarding I could go out sometimes and cruise up and down, just enjoying getting pulled about by a kite. This novelty has worn off for me though and since I’m now not into doing big jumps, snowkiting seemed suddenly quite redundant. Don’t read this as ‘I’m bored of kiting’ – I still have a lot of interest in wave riding, and John and I have been doing something quite new on mountain boards recently. I am still interested in seeing the possibility of using a kite to get me to the top of a big hill where I can wrap it up and snowboard down again, but this needs further research. My feeling is that, on a decent sized hill that you’d actually want to board down, the difference between the wind at the top and the wind at the bottom of the hill would be massive, possibly too big a range for one kite. We’ll see.

In case anyone’s interested – I was flying an 8.5m Blade, which I thought was perfect in those conditions, although softies who don’t like fixed power kites may not like it. In an ideal world, I think it’d be more fun to be on a smaller kite in a stronger wind. I’m aware how negative this post sounds, so don’t get me wrong – I had a nice day and snowkiting was reasonable fun, but there’s plenty of stuff to do in life so I can afford to be critical! I’m glad I’ve had a good day at it, but in snow like that, I’d much rather go proper snowboarding.

This was also posted on the Wind Things team site.

Stuart and I have just got back (read: I’ve just finished writting this) from a few days wave-riding up north, which is one of the best kite trips I’ve been on. The weekend started entertainingly – on arrival at Fraserburgh I realised that I had left my bag with my clothes and camping gear in my flat so after some pasta and a few whiskeys and beers I crashed out in the van in a board bag and loads of Stuart’s warm clothes. We got up early and checked out the waves – they were looking lush, but there was sod all wind. I got changed into a wetsuit to go surfing but (thankfully) Stuart managed to convince me it was picking up so we just ate some crisps instead. The wind was indeed picking up and within 20 minutes it was cranking so we shot to the beach and started pumping.

I had wanted to kitesurf Fraserburgh (cool 3d panorama) for a long time, but that morning was the first time I saw just how good it was. The beach picks up any north swell going and westerly is just slightly offshore, the perfect direction for riding waves, and not too gusty. That morning the waves were nice: head high, maybe overhead in the sets, but dropping off – apparently the previous night some windsurfers were out in mast high (double overhead) (bastards).

Wind Things vs Fraserburgh, round 1

Disobeying the five minute rule (when the wind is changing, wait five minutes to see what it does), we put up 11m and 12m kites and headed out. Right enough, the wind kept picking up, Stuart’s kite ran off over the dunes and I was soon as powered up as a schemie’s car modification magazine. I discovered you can hold down shit loads of power on a 12m Storm III, but it was pretty hopeless for waves being that powered up and getting back upwind was becoming a real mission, so we headed in and got some bacon rolls.

Wind Things vs Fraserburgh, round 2

Back at the beach it looked like the wind had calmed down so back out we went. Never one to make life easy for myself, I rigged the 12m again and soon found I was too powered for waves. Potter was ripping on his 9m so I swapped over to an old 8m and eventually started to be able to enjoy the waves. The difference being able to plane quickly made was immeasurable, I started to remember how to really hit waves with a kite and caught a few really good long left handers. After a couple of wicked hours some of the local boys turned up, but the wind and swell were both dropping fast. Don’t you love being that guy on the beach who can say “You should have been here earlier?”. Great day.

The swell direction had moved to the west, so the north coast was the place to be. We headed up to Thurso (via the rather beautiful Fochabers), which had the added advantage that we could crash at my mate Peter’s house rather than me sleeping in a board bag again (thanks man!).

Storm force 10

The next day we woke to the sound of all the doors in the house rattling. We had already seen the forecast and written the day off as a rest day, but we were both secretly hoping it wouldn’t be as windy as they said. We spent the morning checking out some beaches and cursing the strength of the wind. There was loads of swell about, but it was nuclear windy. We had a look at the BSA surf comp at Thurso East – those guys are amazing surfers. Saw a particuarly huge triple – quadruple overhead set come through and they were still ripping despite the mental wind. Very impressive indeed.

Later on we stood on top of a small bank just to feel the wind. It was some of the strongest wind I’ve ever experienced, something around a sustained Storm force 10. Stuart, Peter and I spent the evening picking wild mushrooms, drinking and talking about all sorts of stuff, including the meaning of sport, hay bales and tautologies – great fun.

Wind Things vs Dunnet beach

The wind was forecast to be much more reasonable the next day, but drop off sometime in the afternoon, so it was another early start. When we got to the beach I wasn’t falling for the 12m trap again and stuck up the 8m straight away, but was immediately underpowered – bugger! The 12m was just how I like it.

Dunnet faces predominantly north-west, but curves quite a lot. The wind was from the west and was pretty onshore, which made getting out past the walls of whitewater a bit of a battle. The waves out back were chunky and I made a couple of big drops onto them, but overall it wasn’t really worth the effort of getting out back and we spent most of the day playing on the reform waves on the inside.

When there are waves, riding them is my focus, so I didn’t bother doing many jumps, but it would have been rude not to see how lifty the new Storm is. I whacked the de-power strap all the way out, and instantly felt super juiced up. The water was butter smooth and as I lined up for the jump I could just tell it was going to be a good one. I flew Wipika AMPs last year, which were excellent, but the acceleration when I popped this jump was unreal and it felt like a pretty huge jump, with enough time to move the kite around to get double lift. A few more jumps confirmed that this is one lifty kite. I might prefer wave-riding, but I’m looking forward to having a good session just jumping this kite at some time soon.

We found ourselves about a km down the beach and Stuart volunteered (sort of) to walk back to the van and pick me up at the caravan park about another 2km down the beach. Thanks mate, the downwinder was fun! :)

Windfarm fun

After ten minutes of the drive home we were already bored so screeched to a halt when Stuart spotted a windfarm that would make some pretty interesting photos. We spent a fun half hour playing on a mountain board with a 4.9m Blade that was on lines just a wee bit too long for comfort! What a great trip.

If you’re still wondering why Force 9 is a tautology, get to know your Beaufort scale.

Some photos will follow as soon as Stuart finds his memory card… :roll:

Comments are closed, but you can comment on the same post at the Wind Things team site.

How I see the/my future of kiteATB.

As you might know, I get a real buzz out of improving at sports. I love it.

Staying injury free is the best way to improve.

The term “powered up” is used a lot in kiting, and should be a pretty easy one to get to grips with, but I’m going to try to put it into words.

There was a recent discussion on a forum about how weight affects one’s ability to ‘edge’ a landboard. The gist of it was someone saying that Blades are better suited to heavy guys because they are able to edge better (I have a feeling we were actually getting our wires crossed, but let’s assume that’s what was meant for the sake of this post). This is wrong. I think the confusion comes from there being a difference between how much power the kite is producing and how much of that is usable power. The amount of usable power is how ‘powered up’ you are.

Three things affect how powered up you are: wind speed, your kite and your weight. The windspeed and the kite combined create a certain amount of power, then your weight affects how much of that power is usable. Obviously, heavier people require more power to jump a certain height than lighter people. So, assuming the wind speed and kite remain the same, but a heavy person is flying the kite, he is less powered up than the light guy. Therefore, when he’s edging a board he’s holding less usable power.

I daresay someone clever could work out a formula a little like this:

poweredupness = (windspeed * kitepower) / weight

Okay, so I’m probably missing a to-the-power-of in there somewhere and I don’t know of a way to measure the power of a kite, but you get the point. Weight is extremely important in kite selection and is in direct relation to how powered up you are. The important distinction is the difference between how powerful a kite is in a given wind and how powered up any idividial rider on that kite is.

This was also posted on the Wind Things team site, but comments are closed there.

It dawned on me the other day that, what with one thing or another, I haven’t been out of central Scotland for about nine months! This is very unlike me, and I’m really hyped to escape up north for a while soon. The real trouble is that I only really go somewhere to do some sport there. I quickly learned that I don’t enjoy holidays, no matter how nice a place is, unless I’m doing something I’m into and now that I’m starting to do more active stuff, I can’t wait to get away again.

While walking to work this morning I reminisced about some past trips that I’ve been on and realised that the best ones have all been climbing trips. It’s a bit of a cliche, but there really was a lot more to these trips than just the climbing. I used to hitch and bivvi a lot around the country for climbing and every trip up north felt like a wee adventure. Sleeping under boats on the beach, under fish crates at the harbour or getting lifts from eccentric old boys in shonky cars was good fun. No, it was better than that – it was absolutely wicked.

When my final exam at uni was over, my coursemates all went out on the piss. I went for a quick pint then headed to bed so that I could get up and go hitching and climbing in the north-west with Alastair for ten days. It was one of the best trips I’ve been on – the weather was great, we had a great laugh, saw some lovely sunsets and even got some trad climbing done.

Since getting into kiting I’ve also been on plenty of trips and they have been great fun, but none of them have captured that adventurous feel of some of the climbing missions. Of course one big difference is that you can’t very easily hitch-hike with four kites and two boards (although I did manage to hitch the four miles to the beach every day in Fuerteventura – very lucky), but there’s more to it than that. With kiting it seems too easy to get sucked into just going to the same beaches every week, just because you know there’s wind and it’s the safe option. Once I’m back into kiting I’m going to focus on getting away from that – find new spots to rides, both on water and land, and recapture some adventure in these things.

Just a wee note to say that John and I from Wind Things/Flexifoil will be at the SPKA event at Stevenston this Saturday to give out some free kiteATB coaching to whoever wants it as well as to judge the freestyle event and offer as much feedback and advice as possible.

We’re bringing along the Wind Things PA system (thanks Pedro!) and a case of Red Bull for some loud entertainment, and of course some of the rest of the team will be there too so come over and have a chat. It’s a totally free and friendly event where everyone’s invited, so get yourselves there.

Let’s hope I have a better day than the last time I was there…

There seems to have been a lot of comments on forums recently that go along the lines of

What are you thinking about? You’re giving our sport a bad name and making it look dangerous!

The comments are usually in response to somebody saying they’ve been tethered flying, flying a 10.5m Blade in 90mph wind or trying a quadruple backloop double kiteloop.

I am as keen as everyone else to see the sport progress well and gain the status and reputation it deserves, but this paranoid approach is not what’s needed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not promoting dangerous kiting, but we need to realise this is a sport where people are going to push it, and sometimes people will get hurt. However, as long as something is only dangerous to whoever is flying, it really isn’t a problem (OK, it could be a big problem for the flyer, but not in the context I’m talking about). I don’t think that either the public or the councils are ignorant of the fact that kiting is dangerous, nor do I think they would differentiate that much between someone breaking their legs in a buggy in 10mph and someone snapping himself doing a quaruple backloop double kiteloop.

Telling people not to try dangerous tricks or fly really powered up is not the answer, it just doesn’t work like that. It’s hard to deny that jumping 20ft (proper 20ft!) on land is very dangerous, but everyone likes to jump so where do we draw the line? 10ft? 5ft? It’s just not happening.

What we should be doing is making sure that everyone knows the risks involved, both to themselves and, importantly, the others around them. This is what’s really important in my mind. Although we’re fortunate enough to live in Scotland where it’s not hard to find plenty of space all to yourself, even some of the popular spots up this way are starting to fill up and, as anyone who’s been to St Andrews on a bank holiday weekend in summer will tell you, it’s starting to get a little scary! Everyone should know to get insurance.

When people are as aware as possible about the dangers they can make educated decisions about their kiting and if they want to be a lemming they can do so without endangering anyone but themselves.

Flying powerful kites, on water or land, can lead to trouble. It’s a dangerous sport – get over it.

This has also been posted on the Wind Things team site. Comments have been disabled on this post, you can comment on the same post on the team site.

It’s been a bit of a web development frenzy recently, and I’m finally getting some time to write something for my site.

I’ve just finished off the Wind Things team site. Basically it’s a Movable Type powered site for the six members of the squad to post their thoughts and ideas abouts kiting and whatever else seems appropriate. I think we’re all quite hyped about it and I don’t think any other kite team has done anything similar as yet – wahay! You also get to find out what those South Park characters from a couple of months ago are all about. Check it out, let me know what you think and tell me if anything seems pretty wrong!

I’m not exactly sure how my kite postings here will interact with the new site as I obviously want kite related stuff on both. Perhaps some fancyness using trackbacks or web services is called for, we’ll see.

Geek stuff: the site should all be valid XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS. Sometimes I’m sure someone will write some invalid code, but I’ll fix that as soon as I notice it. There is one true validation error which I can’t work out because I can’t figure what to do with the Movable Type templates for that situation. No bonus points for finding it! The site isn’t displaying exactly as planned in IE5.0, but is bearable enough and generally degrades not too badly from IE6 downwards.

There will be an image here when I get round to putting it back up!

You don’t see this very often, although having said that, we did just get some squally Force 8 coming through a while ago! Wind in England, well I never…

Image from XCWeather.

I hate the word ‘freeride’. I’ve read an article a while ago in a mountain bike magazine that reminded me of my dislike for it. The guy who wrote it was saying that he thinks that jumping off drops is freeriding, riding rocky and rooted sections is freeriding even kids making jumps in the street is freeriding. Hang on a minute, this is what everyone does on a mountain bike, this is mountain biking. My preference is for doing long rides in the hills on technical singletrack. Is this freeriding? Who cares?

Why it must be labelled like this is beyond me, why can’t you just call it mountain biking? Perhaps it’s all just been invented by companies for commercial gain. On the other hand, perhaps I’m thinking too much.

Freeriding seems to have crept into a lot of adventure sports, including kiting where you can buy so called ‘freeride kites’. What on earth defines a freeride kite? Perhaps if we ever get round to making the Wind Things kiteATB DVD we should have a slogan on the front like “The latest in modern-hardcore-progressive-freeride landboarding”. Hmmm.

Despite many different definitions of the word, one common theme is that you are “free from rules”. Bollocks. What rules are imposed on you when you go biking, snowbarding, kiting or anything like that? The only real rules I can think of, apart from having to get home for your tea, are found when you’re competing. Now for the bit that I’ll bet nobody can understand, a classic oxymoron – there are freeride competitions!

Over the last few months there seem to be more new kite videos posted on sites than ever before. I thought I’d post links to a few of the best ones that I’ve found. If there are any I’ve not mentioned that you really like, let us know please (except ‘the Guerilla video’, I thought it was crap)!

EDIT: Cris Walsh has pointed out this G-ARC video (110 megs), which is much better than the other one. Ta Cris!

• The Geilo Vid, 23.35 long and 120 megs big – easily the best snowkite video I’ve found. Plenty of action and some lifestyle stuff in there too, very cool.
• Col Du Lautaret Jan 04, 10mins and 71 megs – stonking opening jump and some nice kiteloops, but a wee bit ‘samey’.
• Frenzy 04, 4.20 and 65 megs – some nice moves in there.
• Peru wave riding, 3.20 and 26.8 megs – some pro’s riding at a lush looking venue. This is what kitesurfing is about, roll on autumn.
• US KiteATB, 3.20 and 5.5 megs – some nice mountain boarding from the States.
• Colac Bay, NZ, 4.30 and 20.5 megs – lovely wave riding video from some of the folk I met in New Zealand. I didn’t find anything that good there unfortunately. Having trouble finding this one again. I’ve just found another Colac Bay video that is 35megs, but it’s crap, this one is way better.

I’ve also got a Pete Trow and Josh Mulcoy wave riding video from California and Baja, that is really, really good and a neat video from a comp in Portugal (I think) but I can’t remember where I found them.

Last summer kiting was awesome, until I broke my back. Soon I hope to be strong enough to kite again and it’ll be time to think up some new moves again. As I’ve said, the kiteATB scene has, generally, gone for low technical moves rather than big jumps. Having had a long time to think about it, I’ve having to agree that this is the sensible option, but there are a few big air tricks that I haven’t been able to get out of my head, no matter how much I think about my back! Hmmm…

• Blind Date –

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.