The wind was a bit gusty, but not too heavy at around 18-25mph. I flew my 11-meter kite and was nicely powered. The water was very flat and Evans threw a bunch of huge tricks.

Thanks go to Rob for taking a couple photos.

We’re hoping to ride tomorrow late afternoon once Hanna runs through.

We parked two cars down at the Cape Hatteras School and launched up at Kite Point.

The wind was a bit light close to shore, but once you got out a ways, I was almost fully powered on my 16m kite. The rest of the crew took a bit longer to rig up, but Thomas and I had a great session.

There were some dark rain clouds over Buxton, so we took our time and practiced our jibing and toeside riding. The highlight was jumping fishing nets along the way.

Thomas’ main valve came loose and his leading edge started deflating, so we headed down to the school where we had scoped out a landing beach beforehand using Google Maps.

Unfortunately, the wind got lighter and shifted to directly offshore (coming from the South) once we got closer to Buxton. This made getting back in impossible without swimming and walking.

I thought that Pamlico Sound was waist-deep everywhere, but I managed to find a large area of chin-deep water. I put the kite on it’s leading edge, rolled up my lines, clipped my safety leash to the front of the kite, and swam/walked what was probably close to a mile.

We’ve had more than 48 hours of East-North-East wind in the 10-20 mph range. It’s not the best wind direction for kiting (wind is either directly offshore or onshore) and the conditions have been a bit light, but we’ll take just about anything after the last two weeks of no wind whatsoever.

Wednesday night: Thomas G. and I headed to the KOA and kited from 5pm until dark in very light offshore winds. You should never kite in direct offshore winds, but Pamlico Sound is waist deep indefinitely so it’s almost always possible to walk back upwind to shore unless you have major problems. We did a lot of walking because the light winds made it very difficult to stay upwind - but it was worth it.

Thursday: A solid day of kiting from 9am to 6pm. KOA in the morning with similar conditions (and just as much walking) as the night before. We smartened up in the afternoon and did a couple of downwinders from KOA to the Salvo Day Use Area. SDA is about 3 miles south of KOA, so we parked a car down at SDA before launching at KOA and sailing south around Slick Island and landing at SDA. Then we drove back to KOA and did the whole thing over again. We had plenty of wind offshore and both downwinders were a lot of fun.

Friday Afternoon (today): Same conditions. We drove south, almost to Buxton, and out onto Kite Point. You can literally park your car on the narrow sound-side beach and launch within feet of your car. Conditions were light, so I chatted with some other kiters while Thomas rode (and walked).

Afterwards, we drove further down the island out onto the Frisco beach because I figured there would be more wind on the ocean and, even if there wasn’t, at least it would be a side wind.

Riding in the ocean is much more difficult than riding in the Pamlico Sound because the water gets deep very quickly and you have large waves coming one after another. I decided to go for it because I have been dying to ride in the ocean.

It was a terrible decision because the wind was too light and the current was ripping (warnings today) down the coast in the same direction as the wind, making the wind’s speed relative to the water even less. I board-dragged out to the deeper water where the waves were breaking but there was a lull in the wind and the kite dropped into the surf. This made my situation very difficult - it’s not fun to be pulled underwater by your kite (which is being pulled by crashing surf) when waves are crashing over your head. I was very happy that I made it back to the beach. And that my kite didn’t break.

The rip tides were so strong that my board didn’t come back to the beach with the wind and waves. I had to swim back out into the surf to get it.

Driving on the beach is totally acceptable down here. And it’s really nice to have all of your gear on the beach right next to where you ride. We passed a Land Rover and Ford Explorer that were both stuck in the sand on our way out, but the 4-Runner had no trouble whatsoever.

Action shots coming soon, stay tuned.

But the rain is gone and it was a beautiful day. The surf was really cranking all day and the rip currents were stronger than I’ve ever seen. Here’s a shot from the dunes near my house.

The beach is only a few hundred yards from the house where I’m living, but I prefer making the trip on two wheels.

I’ll post some pictures of the house in the next couple days.

Dark clouds are like huge vacuums that have been known to suck kitesurfers out into the ocean never to be seen again. So I decided to play it safe and do some work inside.

I might get to ride this evening if the weather clears up a bit. And tomorrow looks promising.

Until yesterday, we had a basic holding page that used a Tumblr blog to push news and updates. But now it’s all centralized and WordPress runs everything.

The meat and potatoes of the site are being tested right now. I’ll post more updates about what we’re doing as soon as I can. If you’d like to subscribe, grab the RSS feed or sign up for email updates.

This morning the wind picked up just enough to get riding around 9am. I pumped up my 16m kite at the KOA and headed out. No one else was riding nearby, so I self-launched the kite from the water and grabbed my board off the beach.

The first half-hour was a lot of fun. But then the wind started to die out (wind chart below) and I did a lot of walking upwind. Desperate to ride, I continued to ride downwind and then walk back to where I started.

The forecast says it will be windy the next two days…