The White Air Extreme Sports Festival was held in Brighton last year. There were dozens of displays that interested me, but the ones I liked enough to consider trying were made up of weird combinations.
Brush boarding, for example, is surfing on a conventional surf board — but without ever getting wet. They had this high technology bank of brushes (designed by the air force apparently) that exactly simulate wave action. We more or less got the hang of this in a couple of tries but then, we are experienced surfers.
After this there was the roller skiing! This weird combination of ski and bike looks great when the experts do it. James was with us for the morning and he managed to get a nasty cut on his foot when he simultaneously crashed and lost his boots in a freaky collision.
The land yachting was fun to watch — but you need lots of money to get into this. The “yachts” were made of high tech, lightweight metals or carbon fibre. They all have 3 wheels and are constructed so low to the ground that the pilot is almost lying down. The wind that day was a modest 10 knots (5 m/s) but they were achieving amazing bursts of acceleration in all directions around the course.
We all did the Aquathlon early that morning — which was fairly easy to be honest. A 400 metre swim and a 5km run. None of us did that well but we weren’t trying hard — it was just for fun.
But it got us all in the mood that evening to have a try at the most spectacular of the unusual combinations — Kite Surfing. The kites were huge and brightly coloured. Some were 5 metres tall but there were monsters of up to 25 metres. And put simply — the kite powers you along the wave tops on a surf board. But we soon found it was rather more complicated than that! The first problem is that you frequently get dragged into the air. Well — actually that is supposed to happen. Experienced kite surfers do massive “jumps” — tens of meters into the air. We discovered that going up into the air was simple — the tricky part was to land smoothly and carry on surfing. Usually our boards anchored awkwardly, followed by an undignified drag and crashing the kite. It also takes time and a huge amount of energy to get started again after each “crash”.
To be honest after 30 minutes I was approaching exhaustion — and I am pretty fit. We would never have tried Kite Surfing without experienced instructors on hand to teach, advise and keep us safe. But the biggest problem of all was the wind which was blowing off the shore. For inexperienced kite surfers this implied a one way ticket across the channel to France! But again, the experienced riders seemed to be able to achieve anything regardless of wind direction — I don’t know how they do it.