Hey Rick,

I was on a 15 meter waroo with a 159 Door. The wind was pretty light probably 10-12mph. Lake Waccamaw, N.C. shallow and no stumps and you can walk out several hundred yards in most places.

Tom

Kiting and yoga in Cuba.

Ho yes, what a wonderful week it was. I think we had something like 10 days on 10 of pure kite (actually I did not count the days there, it could have been 7 days or 12, I'm not sure, but one thing I know is that it felt like a long and beautiful dream)

First, like you know, I had the chance to meet an old friend, Angela Peral from North. That was a good start of the week. We went shopping and eating in town (Montreal) before leaving. Than we meet with our kiters group. It seems the week was fantastic for them to, as they all reach their goals and learned new tricks! (The camp was offer to advanced riders, witch makes it very interesting for us as well). I made sure to bring more than enough CORE kite gear and extra CARVED special edition boards so everyone had a try... having proper equipment also help to improve your skills :), so I shared part of my secrets...


In between fiesta-looking around Cuba-kiting and the lessons- we had *Fantastic Dominic* the cameramen-following us around to catch some of the good action and meaningful moments there. So over all, already missing Cuba, kiting, new friends and my sweet Angelita.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-yOz4YDlOFA...ntage+cuba.jpg
http://mariloulavallee.blogspot.com/

Damo gives a look at:

"What It Feels Like To Race

A in depth view from the kite on an actual Slalom race with Pro Rider Damien LeRoy. The North American Continentals 2011 was held in Puerto Rico.

Thanks To my Sponsors: Cabrinha Kites, Alex Aguera boards, The Black Dog, Rista Fins Npx, Lynch Associates, GoPro and Corner Five Surf Company."

http://www.fksa.org/albums/album579/43_G.jpg
Damo planning in light breeze in Miami at the Olympic kiteboarding demonstration in January this year.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net..._4581283_n.jpg

Working on a new project from the islands. Preparing a photo illustrated writeup of a day of diving and kiting in some beautiful fairly extreme conditions. First scooter free diving the windward dropoff of Klein Curacao looking for caves and other unusual features. Next some high wind kiting around this small barren island. Started by launching (getting yarded initially offshore!) in strong winds off the leeward shore in flat calm deep blue water and tacking around the island to the windward face.

Then running down in ten foot seas to shoot some shipwrecks being disintegrated on the rocks in pounding surf against the surreal barren rock back drop of the island and stark lighthouse. Shot both sessions with GoPro cameras, with one on the kite during the wind session. This is the wreck of the Maria Bianca Guidesman, a Venezuelan tanker almost half eaten by the sea. There is a lot of history to this small island too, strange that some of the details seem to have been largely forgotten. It should be an interesting story once completed.

Oso Berny checks out windsurfing. It isn't as easy as it looks!

Thanks
 

Great Photos, and the windsurfing
video is pretty funny. Thanks for posting

HRP, III

Impressive close terrain wingsuit video clip from Norway. You may find yourself asking where is he going to land? They found a spot, a small one shared with moving cars with tight tree cover.

http://cdn.baysider.com/companies/81..._958413292.jpg
http://www.baysider.com/business/view/81017

Just saw this and don't quite know what to make of it. A tethered man-lifting concession? Seems to have some injury potential but no one got messed up in this video.



More in French at: http://www.sky-fly.com/

These guys are set up in Leucate, FR, no shortage of wind throughout the year there. They say it was invented in 1995 on their website. It sounds like they use this in their kiting school? A big hazard with tethered manlifting is uneven kite pull and stalling resulting in the guy being dropped or pulled earthward fast. The pendulum tether seems to deal with part of the problem outside of wind extremes.


Tethered manlifting conventionally approached, has killed and badly injured a number of folks in recent times around the world. Usually they tie off to a stationary object and then get locked out, the kite stalls and slams them to death against the ground. I understand a guy in South Africa did this tying off the a park bench which broke. He was flown into the side of a high rise building.

There is a lot of history to this practice going back over a 1000 years.

"The first records of man-lifting kites come from China. The (636) Book of Sui records that the tyrant Gao Yang, Emperor Wenxuan of Northern Qi (r. 550-559), executed prisoners by making them fly with bird-shaped kite wings (see ornithopter). For his Buddhist initiation ritual at the capital Ye, the emperor parodied the Buddhist ceremonial fangsheng 放生 "releasing caged animals (usually birds and fish)".
On one occasion the emperor visited the Tower of the Golden Phoenix to receive Buddhist ordination. He caused many prisoners condemned to death to be brought forward, had them harnessed with great bamboo mats [quchu 籧篨] as wings, and ordered them to fly down to the ground (from the top of the tower). This was called a 'liberation of living creatures'. All the prisoners died, but the emperor contemplated the spectacle with enjoyment and much laughter.[1]
The (1044) Zizhi Tongjian records that in 559, all the condemned kite test pilots died except for Eastern Wei prince Yuan Huangtou.
Gao Yang made Yuan Huangtou [Yuan Huang-Thou] and other prisoners take off from the Tower of the Phoenix attached to paper (kites in the form of) owls. Yuan Huangtou was the only one who succeeded in flying as far as the Purple Way, and there he came to earth.[2]
The Purple Way (紫陌) road was 2.5 kilometers from the approximately 33-meter Golden Phoenix Tower (金凰台). These early manned kite flights presumably "required manhandling on the ground with considerable skill, and with the intention of keeping the kites flying as long and as far as possible."[3]
In a story about the Japanese thief Ishikawa Goemon (1558–1594), he used a man-lifting kite to allow him to steal the golden scales from a pair of ornamental fish images which were mounted on the top of Nagoya Castle. His men manoeuvered him into the air on a trapeze attached to the tail of a giant kite. He flew to the rooftop where he stole the scales, and was then lowered and escaped. In the 17th century, Japanese architect Kawamura Zuiken used kites to lift his workmen during construction. George Po****, who invented a kite-drawn buggy in 1822, had previously used kites as a method of lifting men to inaccessible cliff tops, but it was not until around the 1880s that there was serious interest in developing man-lifting kites."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-lifting_kite

John Modica does some fine strapless riding in nice wind and waves off Maui!

A rare opportunity to laugh at a hurricane or more accurately the sensationalized spectacle some in the media may make of it.