Silly Kite Video

There are two basic kinds of jumps in kiteboarding: "pops", where you keep the kite steady but do a quick carve with the board to flick yourself out of the water, and "boosts", where you swoop the kite up past vertical to launch yourself into a soaring leap. You can also blend the two kinds of jumps to varying degrees, and enhance either one by using a wave to initiate it. I had a hard time learning pops because they require a weird sort of timing, but now I like them. They are kind of like windsurfing "chop-hops" in that they can be spontaneous responses to the terrain that don't interrupt your forward momentum.



You can see some mediocre pops and boosts and other attempted show-off moves in this board-mounted video, taken Saturday at Kimberly Bergalis Park in Fort Pierce. The winds are light (10-12 knots) so I'm riding my big 179 cm kiteboard and 14 meter squared kite. The song is by Alice in Chains.

29 May 2010 Kiteboard Board Mount from James Douglass on Vimeo.

The video from the gopro looks grey and dreary but it was actually kind of pretty out there. For the first part of the session I had my camera set to take still shots, accidentally, but that turned out to be ok because I was able to play with them and make them look nice (see slideshow below).