I’d like to share with you our afternoon’s entertainment from yesterday.

 

So, Jim and I like to sit on Bozo Beach with our dogs and check out what’s up – normally when there’s not very good wind, we get ourselves in a comfortable position and watch the ‘Idiots’  When I use the term Idiots, I am referring to a very particular bunch of ‘would-be’ kiteboaders.  These are a real ‘type’; almost always in their late 20′s to early 40′s, probably ex-windsurfers, who look at kiters and think ‘ Can’t be that difficult, can it?’   So, then the thought process goes like this; ‘hmmmm. I just need to get myself a kite and a board and hey, definitely don’t need any lessons, do I?’  Rhetorical question of course.

 

So, then they turn up on the beach with their kite and you can spot them a mile off – they’re the ones who get the kite out of the bag and kind of stare at it for a while, scratching their heads.  Then they take about half an hour to pump up the kite; never putting enough air in, by the way.  The laying out of the kite lines then take another half an hour.  I’m not even going to go into how long it take them to put the right connections together.

After that, with their harness on, they ask their buddy (who is equally clueless) to launch them; this is where the real fun starts (for us).  Please remember if you don’t know about kiting, that the power of one of these kites is enormous – potentially, they are deadly.  The Idiot normally has a kite that is big – too big, because he’s told whoever sold it to him that he can kite already, so they look at his size and weight and sell him one that he can use in lighter winds.  The truth is that he has no clue of course so in reality, he’s just been sold something that in the blink of an eye can render him paralized or dead.

 

So, back to the launch.  Of course as someone with ‘all the gear, no idea’ he has not the slightest clue where to stand when launching.  It is one of the first things he would have learnt in a proper lesson; how the wind works.  You see you have to launch the kite on the edge of the ‘wind window’ where the power of the wind is passing through the kite just enough to give it the lift you need to gently put it in the air – and I mean gently.  But no, Idiot thinks that he can launch the kite right in the power-zone.  He does not realize that the fact that his buddy is being dragged along the beach with a mouth full of sand, and the kite is bending in half with the force of the wind passing through it, means that he just might be in the wrong position.

No, so let me tell you what happens next if he is not corrected.  When his buddy, who can no longer hang onto to the kite, lets go, the kite tries to find the edge of the window (almost as though the kite has more brain cells than Idiot).  This means that the kite flies wildly to the side and then at great speed, races into the air.  At this point, Idiot, at the end of 23 metres of taught kite lines, is also well, launched.  How high does he go?  Depends on the size of the kite, but often Idiot gets quite some airtime and covers a fairly decent distance before landing unceremoniously with his face in the sand,  incredibly, often without serious injury.  My personal view is that it all happens so quickly that Idiot does not have time to tense up.  Don’t get me wrong though, we have seen broken limbs and many back injuries too, not to mention the fact that landing into the side of a building (as a few people have done here) normally results in a serious head injury.  You see Idiot is just toooooo cool to wear a helmet.

So, back to yesterday, I couldn’t help myself…..it wasn’t that I wanted to really help Idiot.  The wicked part of my personality lets me enjoy watching people who have been so stupid in the first place, hurting themselves.  But the trouble was that to Idiot’s kite’s immediate right were a group of innocent sunbathers.  If we had let Idiot launch in that position, the lines of the kite would have gone through the tanning skin of the sunbathers like a knife through butter.  We stopped him.  At the same time, another person showed him where to stand and the kite eventually went up in the air without incident.

Then comes the next part, Bozo Beach can have quite a shore break (big waves breaking on the beach).  Idiot should be kiting on Kite Beach or in the next bay, where the water is flatter at this time of year.  But no, ‘cos he know it all, he goes for his first attempt to enter the water.  

Time and time again, he is slammed by wave after wave after wave.  His board is on a leash so he does not lose it, but for 45 minutes he tried to get past the waves.  Had he had a lesson, his Instructor would have told him ”don’t worry about the board as you have a leash – just body-drag quickly through the waves for about 50 metres and then start to ride”.   So, back to our Friend……….Realizing he couldn’t get through the waves off the board, he decides to do a water start in about 2 inches of water.  Well, Dominicans do at all the time don’t they, so why not Idiot?  Once or twice, he nearly got up, only to do a ‘Superman’ (which is incidentally our favourite beginner move and involves flying over the front of the board) or just getting hit by those annoying waves that just kept coming and coming.

After another 15 minutes, he gave up and came back to the beach – deflated and demoralised.

 

10 minutes later, clueless Buddy of Idiot repeats all of the above………………..

If you want to kiteboard, don’t be an Idiot – take lessons from a real Instructor; what you save by not doing so in the first instance may either cost you your life, bodily injury and/or hours and hours of frustration.

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