Imagine you have grown a new umbilical cord. Now imagine you're being dragged into the waves by your umbilical cord. That's lesson 2.
Learning to kite-board has been on my back burner for seven years or so - dating from my time in San Francisco. My first sighting of kite surfers was more than ten years ago along the coast just north of Santa Cruz. Later I moved to San Francisco, and witnessed a shift on the bay from sailboards to kite-boards. While sailboarding looked fun, my apartment didn't have room for that kind of equipment. After I got a decent, stable job, taking kite-surfing lessons in Alameda entered my summer to-do list. This wasn't the only to-do item waylaid by two years of dating across the Pacific.
Lesson 1 was fairly low-key - completely on the beach learning to set up and control the kite.
Lesson 2 I thought I was going to drown several times. Upwind body drag? As you might imagine, going downwind is easy. But upwind is an essential skill, unless you are willing to abandon a dropped board and drifting to shore. After awhile in the water you might realize you should have learned to go upwind to retrieve your board. So as I mentioned the umbilical cord, the kite is attached to a hook near your navel. Seriously. Near center of gravity. On a good day, you would be happy to have the kite pull you up out of the water and ski along the surface. You might even pop into the air. But you also might lose your board. Hence the upwind body drag.
The whole idea is to make your body into a plank, extend one arm forward so your plank becomes a keel, while your other arm controls the kite. Part of the trick is getting your body on its side while balancing the forces of the water pushing against you and the kite pulling you on an angle from your belly button. Add to this equation an instructor who is tethered to you and the kite as well, giving you advice as your head starts plowing into and under waves. Because if you're going into the wind, you're heading into the waves. Real-life, you're not actually going straight into the wind - just like a sail boat, there's an optimal angle. Your natural reaction is to try to swim, to keep your head above water. But the goal is to not swim, but use the force of the water on your outstretched hand, along with the lift of the kite to keep your head up. We did three rounds out into the water and back to the shore. The first round, on the way back we had drifted too close to some posts holding up a shark net, so the instructor had to take the kite while I swam back to shore. As you might imagine, I was exhausted. The second round, things fell into place, and somehow I pulled it off. We got back to shore not too far from where we had left it - not upwind, but definitely not much downwind (technically, the wind was at an angle to the shore, so maybe we really did land upwind). The third round, I thought I was going to drown again. The kite hook was pressing into my solar plexus and it was like the movie where the Aztecs thrust their hand into someone's chest and pull out their heart. All of that dragging in the water had loosened my harness. So we stopped and I tightened that up. Then I got a cramp in my leg. But then, I somehow managed to body drag back to shore in good form. In hindsight, we enter the water near a breakwater - things were not so complicated without waves. But add waves, even smallish ones, and there's the issue of your head going under them. I'm exaggerating. At no time was my head more than three inches below water. But water boarding is a real thing. The breakwater and waves are the reason my third round ended on a good note - returning to shore is traveling with the waves, rather than against them. We also practiced figure-eights - the power stroke used to pull you up on your board. But we didn't have a board yet. Having the kite pull you up out of the water is fun; a huge contrast to having it drag your head into waves. But that takes you downwind; not upwind. Next lesson... the board!
Note: I posted on social media, after Lesson 2 I felt like I had dislocated my liver. The leg that had cramped was sore, probably from trying to swim and rotate my body against the force of the kite. Parts of my spine not normally sore were. Two days later I was still re-stretching the odd inner-calf muscle that had cramped, and my other leg also needed exercise to get back to normal. But my liver was feeling back in place, and I was feeling like a survivor, ready for Lesson 3 !
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