KITESURFING.COM.AU

ABOUT US:

Kitesurfing.com.au is the (almost) daily chronicle of a tribe of Sydney kitesurfers.

The group evolves constantly but I’d guess the total number would be over 50 now.  We kite together, (sometimes) travel together, party together, experiment with all variety of silly stuff, and often just hang together enjoying each other’s company.

For thousands of year, when we humans were still scarce on this planet, we tended to live together in tribes of 10’s to dozens of people. And for perhaps millions of years before, the neural circuitry of our primitive ancestors evolved to accommodate this tribal culture. Tribe members worked together, hunted together, ate together and socialised together. Those who adapted to the tribe survived; those who failed didn’t, and the survivors prospered and helped the tribe grow stronger.

Over hundreds of thousands of years as the survival techniques of the tribes proved successful, tribes grew into villages, then villages quickly grew into towns, then to territories and ultimately into countries. For all but a miniscule moment in the very recent history of humankind we’ve lived in tribal environments and it’s only in very recent years that cities, and the accompanying crowds, uncertainty, competitiveness, alienation and social isolation has been with us--far too short a time for us to have evolved biological adaptive mechanisms for coping effectively with the environments in which most of us actually live today.

I suspect that the prevalence of social ills in our society today--ranging from stress to unhappiness to depression to suicide--should come as no surprise, as our biological and psychological mechanisms struggle to cope with environmental and social situations for which we are ill-prepared biologically.

I personally think this is why kitesurfers feel so happy when we find ourselves in this re-created neo-tribal environment—it re-kindles our genetic memory and puts us back into a social microcosm of how most of our ancestors lived and adapted to for hundreds of thousands of years.The tribal culture of kitesurfing give us an opportunity to re-experience that environment we’ve been designed to live in--to lose--at least temporarily--the ills of modern life in the big city. ( But our ancestors could only dream about all those big airs…) ;-)

HOW IT ALL BEGAN:

For most of us on the Northern Beaches, it all started sometime in early 2000 when Chris, who I knew through inline skating from our weekly forays to CitySkate (http://www.sydneybladers.org) saw a kitesurfer on late-night TV. He was so taken by it he decided to buy one himself. Dang. Couldn’t find anyone in Australia who actually sold em, so he ordered one by mail from Hawaii. No one that we knew of around Sydney had tried it. (Though we later learned that our mate Steve M had been doing it for years on land with buggies and powerkites; and JB and couple of guys up Palm Beach way had also been at it for 6 mo or so and some of the windsurfers had also tried it with varying degrees of success.Years later we learned that Ian Y in Perth held the distinction of being the first kitesurfer in Australia) 

Consequently, Chris had no idea how to fly the thing and at the time didn’t know anyone who could teach him.

After a few false starts of trial and error, the wind came up pretty strong one day and Chris decided that was the day to learn. As the story goes, it got windy—REALLY windy. Chris says nearly 40 knots. A gust came along and he flew alright – out of the water and more than 50 metres through the air across the beach and crashed hard against a tree. Really hard. Chris reckons he smashed his back up so badly that he couldn’t stand, so he crawled back to his car, somehow managed to operate the controls with his hands to get himself home, crawled into bed and couldn’t walk for four days afterwards.

Undeterred, after he recovered, Chris got stuck right back into it again straight away, this time albeit with a tad more caution. Shortly afterwards, Tom, another Cityskater and friend of Chris since school,also got sucked in. By then, the windsurf shops had started to stock kites and Tom bought one. Chris’s first kite had been 8 sq metres. Tom boldly bought an 11 sq metre kite -- the largest available at the time.

In 2001 Tom and Chris were giggling like two schoolgirls at CitySkate one night about how much fun they were having with kitesurfing. I’d seen a primitive version of it in Hawaii in 1998 using a rigid frame kite and thought it looked pretty lame. Using a kite to drag you back and forth along the water on a surfboard. “Ho hum.  Not much fun in that” I thought.

JohnnyBGood and I overheard their enthusiasm and I’d actually seen Tom kiting and doing some fun-looking little jumps while surfing at Butterbox a few weeks before (not realising that it was him) so I asked and he offered to let me have a go of his kite.  We met up the next week and after only 10 minutes with the kite I was hooked. I bought my own kite the next week. A 12 Sq metre one. Meanwhile, JohnnyBGood managed to find a second hand one and we were off and running. My life would never be the same again.

The first few months were nerve-wrecking. Back then, no one gave lessons and there were no trainer kites around so we just stood on the beach trying to get the hang of how it all worked.  I managed to sprain my ankle after getting lofted off the sand by a gust that tossed me in the air a couple metres, inelegantly dumping me back onto the beach. Nothing serious and I was back at it 10 days later.  It took about two months of persistent weekly effort to get the hang of it but once you’re up and riding the rest comes pretty easily.  Over a few months we discovered others who’d caught the kite bug and we made friends with Mark, Darren, MarkyMark, Dave, Grant, Anthony, Troy, JB, Michael, Andy, Sal, Beau, Scotty, and a host of others.

There are some photos of the early days at: http://www.smallwood.com.au/index2.htm

Today, there’re probably several hundred or more kiters in Sydney; there are kite schools, instructors, certifications, liability insurance policies, etc etc. It’s gone fully mainstream with tens of thousands of kiters worldwide.

Dozens more have joined the crew; we go away together often on weekends to uncrowded stretches of beach at Port Stephens, Jervis Bay, and other idyllic locales.

If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re flying above the ground, floating freely, gliding, cruising frictionless through the air—that’s about as close as what I describe for you is what it’s like when you’re kitesurfing. There’s nothing quite like it.

In essence, it’s one of the most exciting and socially satisfying experiences I’ve had. Everyone in the crew looks after each other, helps in any situation of need and we all really like each other. People come and go with the group; spouses, partners and kids come and go and life goes on. Couples have babies, the little ones come along to the beach, some folks even bring their parents along on trips and everyone comes home with a smile.

It’s all about friends and fun.

And while kitesurfing is the prime focus of this site, it’s not everything. It’s also about parties, socialising, travel—planned and spur-of the moment and anything else anyone can think of worth trying, from surfing to snowboarding, rock climbing, tow surfing behind a 4WD on the beach, gymnastics, hiking, diving, and of course skating.

So, if you wanna join us, come along. On any windy day, there’s always someone out there on the beach, having found a good reason not to be sitting in a office in the city, gliding across the sea with a  huge smile. There’s just nothing like it.

Cheers,

Rob

November 2006