Playa Encuentro, Dominican Republic Download PDF

Head a scant three miles downwind of Cabarete’s renowned Kite Beach to ride the uncrowded breaks at one of the Caribbean’s premier surf spots.

Playa Encuentro is a miraculous kite spot I discovered almost by accident. Three years ago, I had arrived in Cabarete, the famed kite mecca of the Dominican Republic, with a spanking-new directional board and no clue how to ride it. A local kite instructor, whose name is Francis Gil and teaches at Laurel Eastman Kiteboarding, had watched me struggle my entire session to stay upwind in waist-high surf.

Cabarete is situated on the verdant North Coast of the Dominican Republic, where easterly trades blow year-round but peak in summer, when blistering thermals convect off the country’s interior mountains, boosting wind speeds by 10-plus knots. The mountains also shield the North Coast from the brunt of hurricanes that, once offshore, deliver world-class swell to Cabarete and neighboring surf spots. Continue reading →

Surf’s Up, Finally Download PDF

The world’s first kite competition exclusively for wave-riders debuts.

It wasn’t long ago—perhaps 10 years—when the idea of surfing a wave with a kite was ludicrous. Kites pulled like deranged cruise missiles. Depower was laughable. Getting onto a wave was easy; staying on it was another story. The early generations of kites would stall at low speeds. To keep them aloft, riders needed gobs of speed, which made it impossible to stay on the face of a wave unless the surf was insanely huge (the bigger the swell, the faster it travels). The physics to execute classic moves—bottom turns, off-the-lip carves, and getting barreled—simply didn’t compute. Those who claimed to kite waves were really just outrunning them. Meanwhile, surfers scoffed at the lameness of it all.

But as kiting moved from infancy into adolescence, the desire to catch waves fueled innovation. First came bow kites, in 2005, with hybrid-and delta-shaped sails to follow. The advances led to kites that hovered patiently while a rider dawdled in the surf. Today, kiters are not only shredding the world’s legendary breaks, but doing things paddle-and-wait surfers can only dream of: cherry-picking the sweetest waves in a set—or riding them all—on ordinary surfboards, even strapless. Continue reading →

I, Kiter Download PDF

Riders convene in the British Virgin Islands for the second annual BVI Kite Jam. Amidst steady wind, world-class waves and boundless flat water, jammers rediscover the kindred bonds that give our sport its soul.

Horseshoe reef, the fourth largest on Earth, meanders for 18 miles around Anegada, an atoll perched at the northern frontier of the British Virgin Islands. The reef encloses an electric blue lagoon fringed with frothy ribbons of surf. its thriving coral heads have trashed hundreds of laden vessels, spilling their cargoes onto Anegada’s pearly beaches. Scavenging these shipwrecks provided islanders with their primary income source for several centuries. now tourism fuels Anegada’s economy. The atoll has long been a far-flung hideout for sailors, who believe the island exudes a quiet energy that lulls visitors into a rhapsodic bliss. Perhaps that is why on a very windy day at Anegada’s cow Wreck Beach there are at least 50 kiteboarders in varying states of repose, loafing in the sand. “It was really weird to see,” Charlie Smith says. “There was a lot of chatting going on and not much kiteboarding.” Continue reading →

Board Silly Download PDF

It’s rare to find a pro surfer on a production board. Now kites are discovering the magic of a custom ride.

To witness Stephen Schank build me a custom-designed, handmade twin-tip kiteboard is like watching one of those articulated high-speed assembly line robots at a modern automotive Plant. Somewhere, embedded deep inside his brain, the neural equivalent to software code is dispatching parsed instructions to his body, which moves in sync to a silent beat. His actions are premeditated, precise and blindingly fast, conforming to a series of discrete steps he’s honed over eight years of shaping. It takes Schank, who is 37, less than 20 minutes to cut, bevel and sand my board’s core. It’s carved from a single piece of very expensive and ultralight closed-cell foam endowed with unique flex and dampening properties.

While Schank is quick, he is by no means hasty. When I visit his tiny shop, located inside an aluminum Quonset hut in Buxton, North Carolina, he spends two hours interrogating me about what I hope to get from a handbuilt board. He makes notes in a leather-bound black notebook, punches figures into a calculator and finally announces a size: 132 centimeters by 40.5 centimeters. I had wanted something slightly longer, but Schank, a former professional kiteboarder and windsurfer (he’s also competed in mountain biking, skiing, ice climbing and hang gliding, among other sports), has a vision and won’t budge. For my board, he selects every feasible feature—outline, tip flex, core materials, rail thickness—to accommodate my riding style. Schank orders fiberglass specially woven for him in different weights and weaves; for me, he chooses a combination to suit chop and surf, the conditions I kite in most often. He measures the width of my shoulders and hips to determine my optimal foot stance. He even tunes each fin individually (they’re lettered for accurate placement) and sets them slightly inward because I expressed a pet peeve about face spray. Continue reading →

A Cuban Odyssey Download PDF

Six kiters embark on a 1,300-mile trip across the Caribbean’s best-kept secret to explore what could be the largest untapped flat-water playground on Earth.

Last summer, I began studying the north coast of Cuba with Google Earth, and what I saw was electrifying. An aquatic labyrinth of mangrove cays and sapphire lagoons emerged 80 miles from Havana in the Archipiélago de Sabana and ended in the east near Baracoa, where, on Oct. 27, 1492, Christopher Columbus ?rst spotted the island from the deck of his carrack. Satellite imagery revealed a wide coral shelf paralleling the shore. Between the reef and the mainland is an enormous inland sound sprinkled with hundreds of tiny cays. From almost every cay extends snow-white sandbars that enclose aquamarine pools. All told, Cuba’s northern coastal waters harbor a 6,500-square-mile slick—large enough to encompass the ?ats at South Padre Island some 25 times over.

For a wind check, I called Scott Stripling, a fellow kiter based in Puerto Rico who is a meteorologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Stripling has contacts at Cuba’s Instituto de Meteorología (Institute of Meteorology), renowned for its forecasting prowess. (Fidel Castro pumps gobs of cash into the national sciences.) Stripling managed to obtain climate records from his colleagues in Havana. The data was intoxicating: In an e-mail, Stripling said the north coast gets slammed with consistent 20-knot winds from November through April. Continue reading →

Living La Vida Roques Download PDF

Do you dream of escaping your cubical for a kiting Shangri-La where sessions never stop? Meet Elias Percales and Lieselotte Vieweg—they fled conventional jobs for Los Roques to live every kiter’s fantasy.

Elias Pernales unfurls a map on his living room floor. “This is where we’ll launch our kites for the downwinder,” he says, pointing to a landless splotch of blue. I crouch next to him for closer scrutiny. We’re looking at a map of Los Roques, a Caribbean atoll that’s part of Venezuela. I arrived here four days ago. “There’s nothing there but open sea,” I inform him. “How do you expect us to rig?”

“The map is wrong,” Pernales scoffs. “Don’t worry. We’ll find an island. Everything will be fine.” Continue reading →

The Desert Downwinder Download PDF

A Brazilian surf champ, a former New York internet marketing exec and a wave rookie from Colorado make the trip of a lifetime along 200 Miles of Brazilian coastline.

I just stepped off a red-eye flight from Miami to Fortaleza, Brazil’s fourth largest city, and I need to crash hard. But my guides, Dave and Jessie Hassell—an American couple who ditched their Manhattan cubicles to become kiteboarding outfitters in Brazil—are determined to get me on the water. “This is the hammock capital of the country,” Jessie, 27, informs me as I haul my gear onto the beach in Cumbuco, a dusty burg 30 minutes from the airport and 1,700 miles from the throngs of Rio de Janeiro. “They call them rede, pronounced ‘hedgy.’” “I could really use a hedgy,” I confess, about to wimp out in favor of a nap when a flash of red and blue whooshes past. It’s a kiteboarder racing downwind. Watching him shred through the South Atlantic surf gets me fired up to ride. I live in Colorado, where my riding is confined to reservoirs and where, as you might guess, we don’t get many waves. Ever since I started kiteboarding four years ago, I’ve fantasized about riding real, ass-kicking ocean waves, as opposed to the puny speed bumps spit out the back of a ski boat. Continue reading →