We bet most of you are curious about what you REALLY will be doing in order to start riding with a kite and a board! Despite a lot of YouTube videos available, we wanted to make something more personal and share with you some pictures of our students learning the different steps of kite surfing!
Step 1: the trainer kite
The trainer kite is a small but powerful kite which will start giving you a hint of the pull you can get from a bigger kite. During the first 1.5-2 hours you will learn to pilot it on the beach, including launching and landing and the clock system. All the piloting will later be repeated with the bigger kite, but in the water!
You can see below Busy teaching Evan and Jean-Sebastien and getting them to practice the trainer kite.
Step 2: kite control
The next step in learning how to kite surf is based on the piloting of the sail in the water. You will have full gear – the kite which you would use to ride, bar and harness. Just the board is still missing, because first you need to gain full confidence in controlling the kite, including holding it with one hand only to be able to grab the board and wear it with the other hand!
Our students Ania and Michal training control techniques in the water:
Step 3: body-dragging
Once you have gained the desired confidence in piloting the kite, you will do one of the most fun activities of the entire course: body dragging!
Body dragging, as the word itself says, is a technique of piloting the kite which allows you to be physically dragged by it. Body dragging will be practiced both downwind and upwind and it is a safety maneuver which you will use to go back to shore if you lose the board as well as to go look for the board itself. If you are familiar with sailing, you will pretty much apply the same techniques you use in the man overboard exercise, reaching out to the point (the man overboard for a boat or the board when kite surfing) in sequential steps.
You can have a hint of how body dragging works from the picture below:
Now you have reached around 5 hours course and you are approaching the most exciting part of the whole training: the water start!
Keep tuned and wait for our next post, with the first water start attempts which will make you a pro-rider!
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