Sunday 20 January 2013

Lesson 2

Almost but not quite-------

Well had my second lesson down at Point Henry and to cut a long story short,, i wasn't able to get up . However i was very happy with the lesson because of the confidence it gave me with my kite. 2011 LF Havoc 12mtr

First off i set up my kite.
This was great as id never had it out of the back yard. We got it ready to put up and noticed that one of the lines were switched about (pigtails) . Center to back and visa versa. However that was only on one side, i changed all of the tails around but didn't realise than one side was right Instructor laughed a bit as he was going to put up the kite first time and check it out. Asked if i wanted him to be looped out into the bay. My reply was  "better you than me Joel" 

So up it went, comment from Joel was "she's a big girl" and "there's some power up there"  and probably the most important was , "It's a good looking kite" .  So he handed it over to run some body drags and i found it really easy. I went higher up wind than i could go in my first lesson and went a lot quicker whilst doing that.

Then all of a sudden PFSSSSHHH , a big rush of air. Landed it in the water and found that one of the tubes connecting the LE to the strut valves let go, he pushed it back in and  we pulled it back in and checked it out. Couldn't see why but reseated the valve anyway and pumped it back up.
Then OMG the tangles in the lines were amazing. Seaweed and crap were in them as it was my turn to launch the kite. There was a mass tangle in the middle as some seaweed hooked it all together. I walked to the knot and fiddled a bit and to my surprise it all just released and untangled. Also one line had half hitched itself around a pigtail, something he said he hadn't seen before.

So up it went , almost, the wind dropped. Sheeted in and I kept it up and was warned to be ready for it to pull hard and yep damn it was about to pull hard but i was able to keep it under control. We then did a drift launch and i commented that it was exactly like a relaunch only that you mean to have the kite on the water, that worked pretty well and i was surprised how easy that was.

So it was time to try get on the board.
We were in water just over waist deep. I just couldn't get the hang of keeping the kite at 12 with one hand , grabbing the board with the other, putting it on my feet and keeping everything square. The water was deep enough that i was fully floating. Damn that was hard, all this new stuff to think about all at once. I had a tendency to grab the bar from under instead of over the top.

Needless to say the kite hit the water a lot, yep a lot.

 I re-launched it a lot and most of the time rather easily and the kite didn't spring a leak again , so that was fixed good.
By this time i was well and truly stuffed. So Mr instructor went for a cruise with it while i regained some energy. I guess we had about 20 minutes left when i tried again.

This time i was able to keep the kite at 12 with my left hand and i was able to get the board on and keep squared up. I managed to get the power stroke where it needed to be quite a few times and got up for a bout 2-3 seconds each time.

I kept turning the board to far up wind and would drop back in whilst pulling the bar to the left and down it came. I got up once and dug the front of the board in and went over. He told me if i hadn't have done that i probably would have kept going as everything looked under control.

Plenty of power , just not straightening up properly, once i thought screw it and i went over the front, splat!!!! After a few of these i managed to keep the kite up even though i went under water. I think he wanted to keep going even though the lesson was about to finish, i was just to stuffed though.

Yep i was a bit underwhelmed about not getting up , but in a way i am glad i didn't. I had the feeling that i was able to fluke it and get up early, what happened when i crashed it, how did i get the kite up and get the board on etc.

I spent plenty of time learning the kite ( not sure im a fan of the under bar depower, hard to pull when the kite has power) and in the and was able to get it to do what i wanted ( mostly) , not what it wanted me to do. I crashed and got it up again over and over. Kept it up after id went under over and over and did that near the end without needing to think about it.

I really spent about 35-40 minutes trying to get up and most of that was trying to get the damn board on and be able to keep everything controllable

Really happy with what i learned
Good stuff

2 comments:

  1. Well done Peter. This is such a great period in your learning. There is rarely a comparable sense of achieve as when you get up and planing on the board. There is an avalanche of new neural connections going off in your head when you learn something as multifaceted as kiting, its like smoking 20 cigarettes at the same time ( or so I hear:)

    Really savour it because in no time it will all become automatic.

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    1. Thanks and you are right . I was thinking about everything at once but as soon as i was able to tick one thing off at a time other things became easier like getting the damn board even near my feet. Mind you, the whole time i was laughing my head off. Didnt once get frustrated which is not like me.

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