A lesson in humility

Every once in a while, I get one of those slap-in-the-face, undeniable "You're in over your head experiences". They're good in a way, because they mean that you're pushing yourself, but almost always demoralizing, sometimes humiliating and frequently dangerous. Today, after weeks of emails and preparation, I tried kiteboarding at Crissy Field.

As I've mentioned before, watching someone kite under the Golden Gate bridge was my inspiration for finally getting motivated to learn kiteboarding. The local that I had seen riding under the bridge five months earlier (Chris) had given me advice last week to wait until today, since conditions weren't optimal. One of the key considerations for kiting Crissy is the direction and speed that the water is moving under the bridge. During strong floods, it's difficult to get and stay upwind, and you get blown into the bay. During strong ebbs, it's easy to get upwind, but you could end up out to sea in the event of a breakdown. Today was a moderately strong ebb at 3 knots, and the wind conditions looked fine. Chris advised me to keep my kite moving right off the beach, since it was so light and that getting back in would definitely require swimming. After a lot of dumping my kite into the water I managed to body drag out past the sensor and stand up on my board. I was nervous, but elated to have made it to the wind. However, I noticed that the gusts were getting pretty strong, and soon I was way overpowered, barely touching the wavetops and going much faster than I wanted to be going. Furthermore, I wasn't making any upwind progress. Soon, the inevitable happened and I crashed into the water really hard. I went limp to avoid hurting my shoulder again, came back up and immediately noticed that my board (or rather, Chloe's board) was floating away. I body dragged as fast as I could, but couldn't keep up with it.

So there I was: in the middle of the San Francisco bay, bobbing around during a 3 knot ebb without a board. It's hard to describe how small you can feel out there, with supertankers steaming by, and how far away the shore looks. I estimate that I was around 1 mile offshore. I wasn't completely screwed because I still had my kite, and it was still in the air, so I started body dragging back to the shore. In order to not end up too far downwind, I spent most of my time dragging upwind, which meant a lot of spray in the face. After what seemed like a very long time, I finally ended up around 200 yards off shore. At this point I hit the wind line, and it started to get very hard to keep my kite in the air. I was now close enough to shore that I wasn't really that worried. Sure the current seemed to be taking me back out into the bay, but there were people everywhere: a mock-fishing boat full of tourists who were taking pictures of me and twenty or so people on the steps of the Saint Francis Yacht Club looking at me with a range of reactions from concern to pity to amusement.

I wrapped my lines up, let some air out of the kite and started swimming. I hadn't really had to swim in since my first time out at Alameda, and it felt like I was moving about a foot for every five minutes of kicking and swimming. After a long time, I finally made it in but my kite unfortunately got dragged over the rocks again. This time there were barnacles AND mussels, and I haven't gotten the courage up to check for damage yet. After pulling my soggy exhausted ass into a heap on the concrete causeway, I took a breather, wrapped my kite up, and began the walk of shame back to the lot. Chloe wasn't there so I gave her a call, and it turned out that she was watching some other poor bastard in a blue kite who was having problems. She took the loss of her kiteboard as well as could be expected, and smiled knowingly at my voicing my intention of taking a break from kiteboarding. Some guy must have overheard that I lost her board, because he said "You look like someone who lost a board!", to which we both exclaimed "Yeah!". It turned out that Chloe's board had gotten into the ebb and he had seen it floating out to Japan near the South Tower of the Golden Gate bridge. In an act that exemplifies the coolness of the kiteboarding community, he actually picked it up and brought it all the way back to the beach (it's a long way)! Chloe was overjoyed, and I was relieved. I'll be buying that guy some beers next week.

So there it is: my first experience at Crissy. The guy who pulled my board out of the water and Chris both say that I should just get back out there, but I'll have to give my sore shoulder a little time to rest first.

update: The kite had only a minor shred on the canopy, I found my valve, and I dropped off a cooler full of microbrews to Stefaan on monday.