Windsurfing Magazine

jdouglass
2010-04-29 16:08:20 | 1387 views | 6 Comments

Saturday, April 24, was perfect for windsports in Fort Pierce, Florida. There was blue sky, blue water, 80-degree sunshine, 20 knots of wind, and a beach shared only with good friends. I got a great windsurf session on a 5.5 Aerotech Charge and 106-liter Exocet Cross. My buddies Brandon and Mike windsurfed, as well, with Brandon dialing in the not-too-shabby Seatrend 272 he got for free at Florida Windfest last weekend, and Mike trying and liking my Starboard Evo 83. My kite buddies Marc and Ben were also there, doing their thing.

We spotted several interesting marine species in the clear, subtropical waters. I accidentally ran through a school of jacks (big, tuna-like gamefish), Ben saw a manta ray, and we all saw loads of green sea turtles. If you look closely and don’t blink, you can see the jacks splashing around in the GoPro camera boom-mount video I took (below).

Right when I was about to leave, two female friends from my work arrived at the beach. I had packed my windsurfing gear away, but I didn’t want the ladies to go un-entertained, so I took out my trainer kite and we did some reckless fooling around with it on the beach and body dragging in the ocean. (Not recommended.) We managed to avoid any serious trouble, until I had to go for that one last show-off run. Of course I lost control of the kite while body dragging through the shorebreak and had to let go of the control bar, which ripped through my hands at an angle such that a line sliced half the skin off my right pinky finger. Ouch! Fortunately, my friend had a first aid kit in her car so we were able to clean and bandage the wound. Looks like I’m gonna have to stay off the water for a while to let this heal. There are pictures of the wound at the bottom of this post, but DON’T SCROLL DOWN IF YOU ARE EASILY GROSSED OUT.

Some of you WINDSURFING readers may be thinking about kiteboarding yourselves, so I’ll share these lessons learned from my stupid accident:

1. A 4m^2 foil kite is no longer a “trainer kite” when its windy — it’s a dangerously powered two-line kite with no safety system.
2. It’s hard to control a kite when you’re body dragging through shorebreak unhooked.
3. If the pads where the lines attach to your control bar are worn through, it puts narrow, tensioned lines near your fingers.
4. Long lines on a trainer kite make it dangerous, because it can loop through the power zone bigger and harder before crashing. After the accident, I realized the lines on my trainer were about 20 feet longer than on my big kites, so I shortened them drastically and added thicker leader lines on the bar that should be less likely to slice fingers.

Here’s the wound from when I was re-dressing it the morning after. Now, four days later, it is improving slightly, but I’ve missed four potentially great days of windsurfing, and I’m sure it will be at least four more before I can go back into the water without it opening up and getting a horrible MRSA infection or something.

Here’s the end of the bar where the thin exposed line sliced me. The sand-covered pork-rind looking thing is actually the skin from my finger. Eww.