Performance Kitesurfing in Tarifa, Spain.

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Keep On Improving Your Kitesurfing

With 7 x World Champion Abel Lago

We caught up with World Champion Kitesurfer, expert wave shredder and all round general nice guy Abel Lago this week at the beach and had a bit of a chat about life, kitesurfing and the passion that drives him.

You have had success in many different disciplines of kitesurfing over the years, do you have a favourite kitesurfing discipline and why?

I just enjoy having the board under my feet, whichever discipline or sport I am practicing. Now I kite in waves because I love to surf and SUP, and kitesurfing on waves is simply the next evolution of all these sports combined.

Did you start out kitesurfing knowing that you wanted to be a world champion kitesurfer or was it something that came to you during your kitesurfing career, ie one day you woke up and thought, “I could really be a world champion if I tried?”

I ride every day and train hard to beat my self, being world champion is simply about being in the right condition in the right moment. Meaning that at that particular point in time you are more ready for the given kite conditions than the others. Being world champion certainly doesn’t mean that you are the best kiter in the world, there are a lot of good people out there, it just means that you are more ready than the others in that given moment.

How do you keep your passion for kitesurfing, what gets you out of bed and into the water each day?

My passion is to be on the water, I just want to be riding every day and still living the dream. Traveling and riding, for me that’s the dream life. I think everybody can be a top rider is just a question of hours on the water. To have this however, you do need to sacrifice a lot of things.

Has kitesurfing ever felt like a job for you…have you ever had to force yourself to go and do it? If yes…what did you do mentally to overcome it…ie. change the way you thought about the sport, gave yourself an incentive?

I have a lot of days that I am very tired or cold or injured and I have to kite because part of my job is to do all the R&D for my kite sponsor and we have specific deadlines to finish the work by, so yes, I have to push myself to do it. However I’m very aware that kiting for a living is not like working in an office job and I am lucky that ultimately I am paid to go out and kitesurf.

So when it gets tougher I focus on the life I am living and remember how lucky I am to be living it and that gets me out there again.

We see many people once they learn to ride they just ride up and down all day never really improving, which while is fine for some people, is really frustrating for others especially if they can’t break the habit…have you ever reached a plateau in your kitesurfing and how did you overcome it?

Of course I often get caught at a level and struggle to improve because for me to improve is not easy because most of the time I have to invent new tricks or movements to keep improving. The solution I find is to go to competitions or now, with the wave kitesurfing, I tend to look a lot at surfing for my inspiration. You always have to reinvent yourself and try to be a better kiter or person.

Many kitesurfers cannot afford to dedicate their lives to kitesurfing in the way that you have, jobs, families and commitments all get in the way. For someone who kites maybe 4 – 5 times a year but really wants to improve their kitesurfing ability what would suggest they focus on to really improve their level in the limited time on the water they have?

Have fun, if you have fun, you learn and you improve, because every day on the water is a gift and if you enjoy as much as you can you will be happy and this is the way to be more open minded, try new tricks and experiment with new things.

Many kitesurfers that we see here in Tarifa are getting more and more into wave riding and kitesurf surf boards are becoming a much more common sight on the water, is this something you’ve seen all over the world and why do you think wave riding is becoming so much more popular?

All over the world kitesurfing in waves is growing really fast. I think it’s everybody’s dream to surf waves and play with the power of the ocean. The hardest thing to do in traditional surfing is to catch the wave, because of the difference in speed between the board and the wave itself. With the speed granted to you by the kite when kitesurfing, this part is easy, so you can really concentrate on being on the wave. The kite also helps you get back out over the waves…which can be really difficult when you have to paddle!

You’re a team rider for Dwarf8 now and we’ve seen them doing some pretty amazing things over the last few years…what do you like about the brand?

Dwarf8 is by far the best team I have ever been involved with. Everybody in the team are the best in his or her sport and all of them have been world champions at some time or another. It is a dream and a privilege to be a part of this team, they are always there to help you and teach you the best way to improve not only as a professional but as a person.

Proud to be a Dwarf8!!!!!

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

How Wakeboarding Can Supercharge Your Kitesurfing

Wakeboarding WILL Improve Your Kitesurfing

One of the reasons that kitesurfing is such an amazing sport is the skills it gives you which then cross over into other sports. Allowing you to easily pick up other sports with no real extra training needed.

In this article we take a look at one of the most popular of these sports – Wakeboarding.

If you can kitesurf it almost goes without saying that you can wakeboard as the skill sets are as near as damn it….the same. In fact at our kitesurf school we often encourage people struggling with their board skills in kitesurfing to have a go at wake boarding as it allows them to get to grips with the board in a much more controlled environment.

Typically we’ve found that wake boarders learn to kitesurf 3-4 days faster than everyone else because as soon as they can handle the kite, using the board is instinctive. That said, it’s not only beginners that can benefit from time spent wake boarding, riders of all levels use wake boarding to improve their skills and nail that latest trick when the wind isn’t blowing.

As an excuse to get up close and personal with the thrills offered by wake boarding (and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it was a girls only camp!) we caught up with the Hula Girls at one of their wakeboard camps to see what it’s all about.

What Is Wakeboarding?

Wakeboarding is a bit like water skiing but instead of being on ski’s you ride a board, (wake boards are very similar to kite boards). You can do it either behind a boat or at a cable park, which is basically a huge horizontal cable car style pulley suspended over a lake with lines and handles dangling from it which you use to pull yourself round.

Flat water is preferred which makes it the perfect no wind alternative for us kite surfers.

The Hula Girls

The Hula Girls wake camp is now in its fifth year. Run by a group of girls excited about wakeboarding who want to share their favourite hobby with other girls in what is still a male dominated discipline.

The idea is to get together girls interested in sports like wakeboarding and wakeskating, to learn together with other girls, have fun and be safe in an environment removed from the macho showboating and high levels of competition often associated with these type of sports.

It’s about getting more girls involved in these sort of activities, and showing them that just because a sport is labelled an extreme sport there’s no reason why girls can’t enjoy it just as much as the men (and often kick the mens backsides in the process…I speak from bitter experience!).

This year the event was held at a cable park by the Terlicko dam, in the north-east of the Czech Republic. Due to the massive demand the Hula Girls now run several of these camps a year…all sell outs. The camp itself is a 3 day gathering, full of action: wakeboarding, wakeskating, landboarding, slack line walking, indo-boarding and of course partying!

The girls are mostly beginners but intermediates and advanced riders are welcome and regardless of their actual level the girls all help each other learn in a fun, relaxed environment. A visit by some local pro’s on the Saturday added some extra “wow” factor and gave the girls an idea of just what was possible, the pro’s then got involved helping the girls perfect their techniques (both wake boarding and later on the dance floor!).

All the girls left having had not only an incredible amount of fun but also having gained new skills and taken a peek into the wider world of extreme sports, which is of course what it’s all about.

[youtube height=”315″ width=”560″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eAMgfH_Plo[/youtube]

Incredible Progression

What struck us most about the camp and wakeboarding in general was the level of progression the girls were getting in such a short time, by the second day many of the girls, who’d never boarded before, were not only up and riding but riding in switch or even attempting their first jumps off the kicker. Compare this with the time spent learning to waterstart and ride those first few metres while kitesurfing and the instant appeal is obvious.

For many of the girls the trickiest part was actually getting going, the waterstart is pretty difficult and this stage often resulted in quite a few face plants. Interestingly the few girls who had kitesurfed before had absolutely no problems at this stage as the waterstart in both sports is pretty much the same.

Once the girls were going however, they were happily spending several hours a day cruising around the lake improving their board skills…this sort of intense, concentrated practice meant skills improved fast. All these skills are 100% transferrable back into kitesurfing so you can start to see why this such a good sport to get into for us kite surfers.

As a final caveat, wake boarding is best done on flat..ie windless, days it means you’ve finally got something to do on those no wind days that can still go towards improving your kitesurfing…which means one less excuse to go the pub…Oh…did I really just say that?

Posted on January 16, 2013January 9, 2016 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Strapless Kitesurfing

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The latest craze hitting the beaches of Tarifa and kitesurfing beaches all over the world is riding surfboards without foot straps. People are either taking their old kite surf surfboards and removing the straps or dusting off their (often even older!) surfboards waxing them up and heading out. If you fancy giving this a try read on….

Riding strapless has many advantages. The first of which is that it gives you a reason to dig that old surfboard out of the garage and get some use out of it. There is no specific size that works best though something around 6’2″ is probably ideal. I use an old Mini Mal board which measures in at an impressive 7’8″ and means I can ride in almost no wind!

For those of you with knee problems the freedom of strapless riding may just give your kitesurfing a new lease of life. Due to the fact that your feet are now free to move around the board as much as you like, rather than being held in one constant position you can relieve the strain on any aching muscles much easier and save those knees from all the jarring they normally take in an average strapped session by being locked into one position.

The sense of freedom you get being able to walk to up and down your board in this fashion makes the actual feel of riding much more akin to windsurfing. As you get good you can even master jumps and all sorts of crazy tricks.

Most people look at strapless riding and wonder how the hell the board stays on your feet. To be honest as long as the waters not too choppy it’s fairly simple. The opposing forces of the kite and the water actually glue the board to your feet, just notice next time your simply riding your twin tip how little you rely on the straps to keep your feet in place when you’re actually riding (on flattish water) and you’ll see what I mean.

The trickiest part (at least until you start tackling waves) is the actual water start, because of the extra volume in front of your feet (as the nose of the surf board extends a lot further in front of you than it does behind) the board has a tendency to screw into wind as your attempting to waterstart, to couter act this you need to really curl your back leg under you while pushing away with your front. Added to this however is the fact that you’re going to lose the board every time a wave hits you while your setting your self up. For this reason you’re better off practicing this initially on calm days. This is made easier if you have a massive board that you can take out when the wind is light and the water pretty flat. Oh…and make sure you wax the board up well!

Posted on January 16, 2013January 23, 2022 by Tantrum — 3 Comments

Should I Wear A Board Leash Whilst Kitesurfing?

Whether to use a board leash or not is something that every aspiring kitesurfer asks at some point. Here I lay out the arguments for and against so you can make up your own mind.

What is it for?

Board leashes were designed to prevent you from losing your board. As a beginner you will be coming off your board and crashing your kite lots. Having a board leash on gives you one less thing to worry about while your struggling to re launch your kite as you don’t have be concerned that your board is disappearing as you go. Leashes however, have several spin off advantages which can be even ore useful to the aspiring kitesurfer than the use for which they were originally intended.

The main advantage to wearing a board leash for the beginner is that while your practicing to board start or enjoying your first runs on the board you won’t have to spend time chasing your board around every time you fall off or let go of it. This can lead to you having much more time to actually practice your board starts/riding skills as opposed to your body dragging skills. This simple piece of equipment can decrease your learning time by hours even days if the water state is pretty rough or the local conditions not ideal.

Added to this is the fact that by using a board leash you have 2 hands free at all times to control the kite. This can be a huge advantage if you’re trying to drag out through big waves or if you’re still not 100% confident on the kite.

Mother Nature is her own Guardian

Having said that however, I firmly believe that Mother Nature sets up her own gateways to entry and that if you are at a stage where you are struggling to either recover your board all the time by body dragging or you can’t get out through the waves while flying the kite one handed you shouldn’t be practicing with a board at all, but should be working on these skills instead.

The major problem here is that we are all human, we all over fixate on getting on the board and riding and will tend to push ahead to master these (cool) skills first, coming back to polish the other (less impressive) skills (such as upwind body dragging…yawn) later in our kitesurfing careers.

This leaves massive gaps in your skill set that WILL come back to bite you later on.

The Cruise Missile of Kitesurfing

When it comes to the down sides of using board leashes the consequences are slightly more scary.

Riding with a board attached to you is not dissimilar to being chased by a guided missile.

If you come off the board at any speed, tension can stack in the line and when the leash reaches it’s elastic limit there is only one way it’s going…straight back at you. This can lead to some very nasty accidents and it for this reason that if you are going to use a board leash you should also have a helmet and impact vest/buoyancy aid to protect your vital parts.

Before you think, “that’ll never happen to me and the advantages sound great, I’m gonna get me one of those,” I would do a quick internet search on “kitesurf board leash injuries” and see if you still want to wear one!

Watch Your Tender Bits

The leash can also be a hindrance when exiting the water. If you dally in the shallows the board has a tendency to get picked up by the waves as they ebb off the beach. The next wave to arrives then picks up the board and slams it into your heels/shins/other tender bits! When exiting the water with a leash in waves do it fast or unattach the board before you try.

The same applies when you have a leash in bigger waves. If the board gets behind you, then the next passing wave can pick the board up and slam it into you.

Of course these things can also happen even if you don’t have a leash but the leash keeps the board closer to you and so increases the likelihood of something like this occurring.

What About Dog Leash Style Leashes (Reel Leash)?

There are some reel leashes that are designed like dog leashes, that extend out to about 30 meters and after they have extended this far release very easily so you never have the problem of slingshotting the board back towards you. Great you may think I’ll go and buy one of those.

Any leash can get wrapped around either you or your bar and lines, with the latter being particularly serious as this effectively strangles your control of the kite often locking the kite onto full steering and sending the kite into a roll with the board dangling around in front of you as you fly down the beach…conveniently enough, the perfect position to wallop you in the kisser.

As these dog style leashes are even longer than normal leashes the likely hood of this happening is even greater…the idea of riding around with potentially 30m of slack line somewhere in my vicinity scares the bejesus out of me just thinking about it anyway.

But I have a fuse line on my leash so it will break if any force is put through it.

Coming off the board at speed with a leash should result in the leash attachment line (or the fuse line) breaking so that the board isn’t damaged. If this line is too strong (and you’ll never know until you use it!) or doesn’t break for some reason (more likely), as well as all the consequences to you, it can result in damage to the board as something has to give. I’ve seen huge chunks torn out of boards because of this.

Dependency & Withdrawal

The other issue attached to wearing leashes is more practical in nature. By becoming dependent on a leash you reduce the time you’re practicing upwind body dragging. This is an essential skill which needs to be mastered early if you are to progress to becoming an independent kitesurfer. Believe me, I spent a year learning this particular skill and the hours of time I wasted and the number of boards I lost because of my stubborn refusal to learn cost me more than I like to think.

The Alternative

Go Joe’s may have a stupid name but these things really work!

The idea is that you fix the Go Joe on to your board under the handle. Now whenever you come off the board the Go Joe causes the board to automatically right itself, the wind catches the Go Joe and pushes it downwind…fast, so it should end up in front of you.

We trialled these for a while and although they work great they did suffer from durability problems as the bladders just kept exploding on us.

What About In Waves?

Ok so this is the only time I would contemplate wearing a board leash. In big waves you’ll often be riding on reef breaks, cliffs or ridiculously remote beaches where to lose your board would mean it gets smashed to pieces on the rocks or it’s a MAJOR ball ache to retrieve it.

In wave spots a lot of riders will be concentrated in the same area (the line up) and having you body dragging through it and a loose board caught in the waves becomes a real pain in the neck and a real danger to others respectively.

These great tips are taken from The Kiteboarder Magazine.

Use a medium length leash: a 6-foot leash will put the board in your face and a 9 to 10 foot leash will cause too much drag. An 8-foot leash seems to work the best.
Use a cord thickness commensurate with the size of your waves -thin leashes snap in double overhead waves, thick leashes cause excessive drag.
The moment you are separated from your board, depower your kite by pushing the bar away from you; this prevents the kite from loading up the board leash.
When in the water separated from your board, bring your kite up to neutral, keeping it depowered as much as possible to prevent the board from becoming a tombstone.
When you are retrieving the board, use the leash – it often helps if the kite is brought to the same side of the wind window as your board.
Try experimenting with a calf leash. Its velcro strap is large enough to attach just below your knee, elevating a good portion of the leash out of the water and reducing drag.
Wear a helmet or chest protector because unless you have a surgeon for a friend or in the family, stitches can be expensive.

PROS OF WEARING A LEASH IN WAVES

In big surf you can go for anything and know that your board is always within arm’s reach.
You won’t spend half your session on a fishing expedition.
Your friends will no longer hate you for the countless times you body dragged through their set while looking for your board.
If you’re headed out and the lip throws right in front of you, you can jump off your board and duck dive into the wave, collecting your board quickly on the other side.
You have a better chance of getting back on your board before the next set wave rolls you.

CONS OF WEARING A LEASH IN WAVES

Bad technique can lead to endless tombstones and whizzing boards.
Leashes inevitably add drag while going upwind or dropping in on light wind days.
Since your board stays in your vicinity you have a better chance of getting whacked in the head.
If both you and your kite go down in turbulent white water, the board and leash can end up threaded through your flying lines making things much worse.

For me, unless I was in a dedicated wave spot which broke onto a reef or was kiting somewhere ridiculously remote I wouldn’t generally bother with a leash. I’d simply accept the fact that I was going to body drag a bit and get on with it.

The Final Word

If this all sounds like a very negative assessment of board leashes …well it is.

We used to use them, 2 smashed noses and a few trips to the hospital later, we vowed never to use them again. As a result of this decision our methods of teaching have had to adapt (and improve) and our students learning times have actually increased dramatically because of the changes we’ve had to make and the higher focus we’ve had to place on basic kite skills.

It also means I’m seeing far less of certain nurses at the local hospital…hmmm…maybe time for a re think!

If you’re just getting started in kitesurfing now’s a great time to grab our free 7 day kitesurfing specific workout. Giving you all the exercises you should be doing to get yourself in shape for your next session. Grab the free workout here >>

Posted on January 14, 2013July 6, 2016 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Kitesurf With A Sexy Chick (In Your Head)

So let pretend for one moment you work for an insurance company selling doctors medical malpractice protection, (what the hell has this to do with kitesurfing I hear you scream…bear with me!). You are asked to discover who amongst the physicians are most likely to be sued.

Where do you start?

Do you anaylse their records, training, credentials, judging them on formal qualifications or past experience or do you listen to very brief snippets of conversation between each doctor and his or her patients?

Unbelievably the second option would be a much more accurate way to go about this. The risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes. There are highly skilled doctors that get sued a lot and many doctors who screw up all the time and never get sued.

In other words lawsuits aren’t filed because patients are harmed in the course of their medical care they are filed because they are harmed and something else happens along the way to convince them that suing is a good option. (bear with me, we’re getting there!)

What came up again and again in these cases is that people sued because of the way they were treated by their doctor, they felt rushed, they were treated poorly, ignored etc. It seems that:

“People just don’t sue people they like.”

To explain this an experiment was set up to investigate further. Recordings were made of doctors talking to their patients. Roughly half of these recording were made by doctors who had been sued several times, the other half by doctors who had never been sued. Upon listening to the tapes it was discovered that the doctors who had never been sued spent a lot longer talking to their patients and engaged much more with them as people asking more personal questions. Interestingly there was no difference in actually quality of care.

Taking this one step further (and if your still with me this is where things get interesting) a further study was then done which took a single 10 second snippet of each of these conversations and removed the high frequency pitches which enable us to determine individual words. What’s left after this is a kind of gobbledy gook message that preserves intonation, pitch and rhythm but erases content.

Judges then rated the voices in the snippets for qualities such as warmth, aggressiveness, dominance, anxiousness etc. From the results of this alone it was possible to predict which doctors would get sued. The more aggressive less compassionate tonalities belonging to the most sued doctors.

Why do you care?

When your learning a new trick or practicing something for the first time, you have a little voice in your head talking to you, asking questions, giving you feed back all the time. Most of us are so used to this voice that we don’t even notice it most of the time. Take a little time to listen to that voice now. How does it speak to you, is it aggressive, encouraging, critical?

The way we talk and more specifically the tone of voice we use to talk to ourselves has a massive effect on our everyday performance, so even discounting the words you use when you mess up a trick do you snarl at yourself, “you idiot” or do you laugh and lightly berate yourself (with the same words) in a way that actually encourages you, like you might to a mate who has just shared a very funny, self depreciating story with you. Try out a few different tones, and monitor your reaction, just like the patients of the doctors in the example above you’ll probably find you have very different reaction to the same event by simply doing this?

I’m not for one moment suggesting here that you need to be all new age with yourself and talk to yourself as if you love yourself all the time, there is a place for anger and that snarling tone of voice as it can push it to greater levels. By being aware and in control of the tone of voice you are using on yourself, you can modify it to serve you rather than being a slave to it.

Still talking about the little voice, who’s voice is it? Most of us have a default voice which is our own. Try playing around with the voice you use. For example when I’m jogging I use the voice a sexy woman encouraging me to just get around the next corner, for me this motivates me much more than adopting a sergeant major snarl and curse approach. But the opposite might be true for you…the options here are limited only by your imagination and you may find that you develop different voices for different occasions, whatever works for you works.

Interested in this?

Check out Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell