Kiteschule Ostsee

Last Friday, several of our team members woke early and packed into a rental van to take the 250km drive north to the Baltic Sea, where we had registered for a day of kiteboarding lessons. For those unfamiliar with the sport, kiteboarding (sometimes simply called “kiting”) is a bit different from it’s parent sport, windsurfing. Instead of surfing along the water with a sail attached to a surfboard, kiteboarding entails being pulled along the water on a wakeboard by a giant kite that flies high in the air. Here’s a little taste of what we could have been doing with a few more days on the water

Okay, maybe we wouldn’t have gotten that far, but you can see why we wanted to try it out. Lars took the liberty of documenting our on-land training before we all hit the water. Needless to say, we had to don a bit of interesting attire:

These pictures are mostly from when we were first  trying our luck on the trainer kites, which are smaller kites that we practiced with on land before we graduated to the big kites and the water.  Obviously once we were in the sea there wasn’t much safety for the camera, and we had no one to document the “body dragging” from the shore.

Despite a bit of rain in the morning, it was all-in-all an awesome (and windy!) day at sea for the sociomantic team. In fact, we’ve already started daydreaming about what it would be like to take the snow-kiting lessons this winter…