I could see the instructor waving her arms at me, but I couldn’t clearly see what she was doing. Monica was a few hundred yards away on the beach and I had salt water sheeting down the outside of my sunglasses. It was also in my ears and nose, but that was of lesser importance. I looked harder at her standing on the beach, trying to remember what each hand signal meant and trying to match the signals to what she appeared to be doing, when suddenly my view was completely blocked as my kite crashed to the surface of the water. I guess she was trying to tell me to pay attention to my kite because it was coming down. Oops.
Four friends and I decided that we needed to go on a guys’ trip, and we decided to go to Costa Rica to kiteboard for a few days. After a little research, we settled on Costa Kite, a small outfit in the northwest corner of Costa Rica, just across the bay from Nicaragua near a town called Guanacaste. As we planned our trip, I made a mental note to keep a copy of my passport in my swimsuit in case a strong gust took me across the border. As it turned out, my paranoia was completely unfounded, since we never got as far as actually standing on the board, and you’d have to do a whole lot of things wrong to cover the 15 mile bay by accident. While I did plenty of things wrong, my mistakes mostly involved falling down in place as opposed to being carried off against my will.
I’ve taken surfing classes before, and I even owned a surfboard for a short time (although that was more to impress female houseguests than to actually surf on.) Learning to surf takes about an hour of instruction, small waves, and a bit of practice. Within the first hour, you can stand on the board and ride for a few feet. With a few more hours of practice, you start to get the feel of what it means to hang 10. I expected kiteboarding to be a little more difficult, but I hadn’t appreciated how much harder it was until we got started.
Costa Kite offers a Zero To Hero course which consists of 3 hours of group instruction each day for 3 days. The 5 of us were split into two groups; Al and I with Monica, while Glenn, Dean, and Salil were being instructed by Greg. Monica and Greg were a married couple from Poland who had been teaching at Costa Kite for 7 weeks. They traveled the world, working as kiteboarding instructors on their vacations, enjoying new countries and meeting new people, while making a few bucks doing what they loved.
The first kiteboarding class was spent almost entirely on the beach. We got a small kite and Monica showed us how to set it up, what each of the lines connected to, how the harness was secured on our bodies, and where the safety equipment was. A kiteboarding kite is rectangular in shape, with control lines attached to all four corners that come down to the rider. The edge closest to the wind, called the leading edge, may have an inflatable tube that, when fully inflated, gives the kite an airfoil shape. The control lines that are attached to the leading edge corners are attached to the rider’s harness. The lines attached to the trailing edge corners are attached to a horizontal control bar that the rider holds in his hands. By pulling one side of the bar, the other, or the entire bar as a unit, the rider can control what direction he wants to go and at what speed.
Once Monica explained the parts of the kite and got it in the air, we spent some time maneuvering the kite, getting a feel for how hard it could pull. We were starting with a 2 meter kite, so it wasn’t going to pull hard in the wind, but it could move very quickly as we soon discovered.
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Al and I learning how to move a kite. |
About 2 1/2 hours into class, Monica had us set up a 9 meter kite and we got in the water. We started with Monica holding the control bar, with Al hanging onto the handle on the back of her harness, and me hanging off of Al. None of us had boards, since we were still learning a technique called ‘body dragging’ which is used to get away from shallow water and to get to your board in case you lose it since, unlike a surfboard, it’s not leashed to you. As the kite pulled us out into the bay, the three of us were slowly dragged behind, looking like a mother duck and her two ducklings. Monica then proceeded to steer the kite to the right and left to let us feel how much it could pull. There were several reasons why we were hanging onto each other like that, the first of which was that it made it very easy for us to stay together so she could provide instruction without yelling over the noise of the waves. We also got to feel how the kite’s movements were delayed from the time the control bar was moved, which is an important piece of information. If you move the bar and it takes 2 seconds for the kite to respond, that means that you need to start the movement 2 seconds earlier than when you want the kite to start moving, otherwise the kite will move late and you could find yourself in trouble. Different kite sizes will react at different speeds, and the length of the lines between the rider and the kite will also play a role in the delay. The third reason why we were hanging onto each other as we were dragged through the water was that we were ballast. With an additional 450 lbs hanging off of her back, Monica was able to control a kite that would likely have been too large for her to handle safely.
After Monica showed us how to move the kite around in the water, she got out of the water and Al and I took turns being dragged through the water with the kite, with the other person holding on for dear life. Since we had little experience with the kite itself, our movements were too fast, too slow, too early, or too late, and sometimes all of the above at the same time. As I made one particularly hard left turn, I felt my body being pulled upward, out of the water. I stopped, suspended with the water a little below waist level, balanced between the upward pull of the kite and the downward pull of Al the Ballast Man who was hanging off of my harness. In the same moment that I realized that I was halfway out of the water, I felt myself slingshot forward until I was completely out of the water. Apparently my ballast had lost his grip and the kite had won the game of tug-o-war. Although my feet were only apparently an inch or two above the surface, I still felt like I was flying, soaring with the eagles, the wind carrying me and the water seemingly miles below my feet. Then, just as fast as the kite had won its battle with Al, gravity won its battle with the wind and I crashed back to the surface. As I sputtered to the surface, I could hear Al behind me as he laughed out an apology.
We switched positions, and I held onto Al as hard as I could. (It’s not that I was afraid of falling off or being left behind, its more that I wanted to give him a hard time later for not being able to hold his own weight.) As he ducked the kite left and right, I bodysurfed behind him, laughing like a child. It was a lot of fun to be pulled through the water like that, especially since Al had the control bar and had to worry about which line to pull and when. All I had to do was hold on and enjoy the ride.
| Me being pulled halfway out of the water by the kite. |  |
The second class was more of the same, learning more details about body dragging and controlling the kite. We also worked on ‘power strikes’ which are figure 8 patterns that are done rapidly and in succession to generate speed in the water. While this was a lot of fun, we found that controlling the kite was a lot harder when you were being dragged through the water at speed and you can’t quite see what the kite’s doing. You really need to ‘feel’ the movement and position of the kite to be able to control it well. It was during this exercise that I crashed the kite while trying to see what Monica was trying to tell me. Fortunately, the kite came down gently enough that there was no damage to it. I relaunched it and went back to shore. Towards the end of the second class, we were finally given boards and we practiced body dragging with the board held in your hand, which is how you get out to a safe distance from the shore before you start surfing.
The third class was taught by Fernando, one of the guys who runs Costa Kite, since Monica and Greg were apparently off for the day. Fernando and Sebastian, both Spaniards from Seville, spend 6 months out of the year in Costa Rica, running the Costa Kite school. The rest of the year finds them in Cadiz, Spain, where their other school is. I don’t know if they have business partners who help run the schools when they’re not around or if the school closes during their off season, but it’s a pretty sweet deal. 6 months in Costa Rica and 6 months in Spain, hanging out and kite surfing. That’s not a bad way to live.
Fernando had us show him what we’d learned, starting with basic body dragging without someone hanging off of your back and without the board. Al went first and did well. I hooked the kite to my harness and started to drift out into the water. The kite was sitting vertically on the surface on its right edge, with the leading edge of the kite pointed to the wind. From here, I was supposed to pull the left control line gently to get the kite to lift off the surface. Once it got a few feet off the surface, I would switch my grip to help keep it steady in the air. That was the theory, at least. In reality, I gently pulled on the left control line to launch the kite, but I didn’t switch my grip as the kite climbed higher. As it reached the peak of its arc, I continued holding the left handle, and the kite then turned hard to the left and crashed into the water. Since I wasn’t far from the shore, the water where it hit was probably only a few inches deep. As I looked at the kite, I saw that it had broken in two places on impact. I’d been in the water for less than 30 seconds, and I’d broken the kite. The damage would require a few days in the repair shop to fix.
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Yup, that’s broken. You can see the split in the kite near Fernando’s knee. |
I sheepishly started to swim back to the shore, where Fernando simply asked, “What happened?” I told him what I thought I did wrong, he agreed that both, yes, what I said was indeed what I had done and that yes, what I had done was wrong. We set up another kite, and proceeded with the lesson. We even got as far as trying to put the board on our feet in the water before the third and final class ended. Al managed to get both feet into the stirrups on the board, while I only got one foot in. I should probably try to lose some of my beer gut before I try again, since Fernando’s instruction of “just pull your knees to your shoulders” was more fantasy than anything I could accomplish given my current girth. Before I knew it, the third class was over and we had to start putting everything away.
| Dean completely out of the water. His kite is behind him, which is not a good thing. |  |
Based on what I learned from a kiteboarding Dutch couple who were staying at the Costa Kite villa with us, it takes about 10 hours of instruction to get up on a kiteboard. We’d had about 9 hours, so another class may have been necessary to get us to actually ride for a short distance. As with sports like surfing and skiing, when you’re bad, it’s exhausting. You’re constantly treading water, swimming, pulling this line or moving the control bar in that direction. When you’re good, it’s effortless. At one point, we saw 20 other kiteboarders on the water, cruising around, just having fun, often for an hour or more without stopping. The five of us, however, were beat. After class, we would go back to the villa to clean up, and inevitably, we’d sit down and relax for a while to recover. But the classes were fantastic, with great instruction and patient and competent teachers. If you go, I highly recommend going with friends. Partly because a private 3 hour lesson would likely be too tiring and you get a bit of a break to catch your breath when you’re learning in a group. But it’s also because it’s a lot of fun laughing at each other when you screw up and go flying out of the water. And there’s nothing better than trading kiteboarding failure stories over a cold beer after class.
* This story took place in January, 2018. I just didn’t get around to publishing the post until now.
