Kiting!

Kim and I headed down to lake Pepin today to meet up with Nora for some kiting. We tried Maiden Rock this time, which was better for a South Breeze than the beach we were at last time. The wind was better than last time, but still not consistently strong enough to pull us on the boards (I was busy or out town for the good wind days, so we had to deal with borderline winds today). Also, I'm wishing that my kite had more struts on it. When it would sit on its trailing edge in the water the struts wouldn't be able to support the kite, fold, and the kite would load up with water. That made it tough to re-launch. Nora's bow kite, which is smaller but actually has more struts, held its shape and re-launched pretty easily. We did have both kites in the air quite a bit, and each managed to get up on our boards. I actually had about a 3 minute session of up-down-up-down continuously as I would get up on the board, wipe out but not come off the board, then get right back up again. It's a little more tricky than using the board behind a boat. We wound up spending three hours in the water while Kim was getting scorched on the beach. It was a fun day, but I think next time I'm going to try heading up to Mille Lacs for some consistent winds. Thanks to Nora for bringing the camera - I shamelessly copied these pics from her blog. She has even more posted there, though, so check it out!