June 20th, a down winder and Father's Day

June 20, 2010

Dan and Martin talk to Radko and explain what our down winder was all about.

Then Radko came over and took a picture of the three adventurists, me, Martin Hubert and Dan.

As the wind started to build Martin put the last few pumps to his kite. Better too hard than too soft.

In our minds this is what we were going to do, down wind to the Huntington Beach pier on a straight tack, but it wasn't that easy because the wind didn't cooperate,

We did a warm up lap at Belmont and noticed that there wasn't enough wind to get past the marina entrance, so we went back and got a running start and headed for the oil platform. Then we went into Seal and kited a little to see if the wind was going to get any stronger.

Double click on the picture to make it larger and you will see that we made one stab at getting past Anaheim Bay. You may know it as the entrance to Huntington Harbor. We got to the entrance and Dan pointed back to Seal so we went back and twiddled our thumbs until there was enough wind to make it to Surfside.

Once past the harbor entrance Dan and I went into Surfside and worked our way down to Sunset. For some reason I didn't see Martin until we were playing at Sunset. Later he said he didn't get the signal at Seal to head South. Ooooppppppssss. Sorry Martin.

We were now at a critical place because we needed enough wind to get us the rest of the way so we did a couple of passes at Warner Avenue and then head to the finish line. We did find that we would get ahead of the wind and then would double back and then continue on the voyage. Once we passed Golden West the wind was really sketchy. We were really weaving our kites to get to the Huntington Beach pier. Then I saw Martin head in so I just followed him.

Once we got to the beach you can see it was no problem landing our kites since there was no one on the beach. Lucky us.

I asked one of the guys walking down the beach to take this shot. Yes we were happy to be on the sand.

Dan still had some juice left so he went out to ride the waves.

and another,

and another.....

That's it, that's a wrap. Time to head home.

We dropped our gear on the grass on PCH, then Martin and Dan walked down to Dan's truck and we headed home.

We arrived back at the house, then proceeded to clean up our gear and go into the warmth of the house. OH nice...

We walked in and heard the stereo blasting to the music from the show Glee. Then Sara and Ruth hit the dance floor. Two girls having fun.

Thanks to Martin we have this Father's Day picture. It was quite the day, filled with excitement, insecurity, sore bodies and relief that we made it all the way without a kitemare to tell.