OH Baby, Good wind today. Thanks to the wind god

April 7, 2011

At a little after noon I got a call from Klaus, "The wind is blowing." I walked out and saw Michael D.'s van on Ocean and a few kites were out. It was time to hit the water.

As I pushed my cart to the end of the Claremont ramp I could see the wind was at least 20mph. Hmmm how was I going to go out on my 12???

The first kiter I saw tearing it up was Rully. It's hard to see but he was doing some great tricks very close to shore. Cool stuff!!! Michael D. was also one of the first on the water. He said he arrived at 11 and was on the water, on his big kite, close to noon. He left after 4 and had a great day after rigging his smaller kite. Check out the Queensway entrance in the background. Trevor, as usual, pulls off a great move right in front of me. What control. There were moments when the cloud formations just totally amazed me. While the wind was blowing over 20 the sky just captivated me. It's hard to tell how high up Trevor is but that's the breakwater behind him. Nice jump Trev.

My neighbor Christopher had plenty of wind today to pull off some of his windsurfer tricks. Radko was also out on his board today. Bongo was out on his small Caution today pulling off some unhooked jumps.

Klaus took off of work early because he didn't want to miss the wind today. He had the jumping down to a science with his 15 F-One. In the back ground are two Hobie Tri-foilers's. The are really fast and turn on a dime. They set a record of 43.55 knots in 1993 and it still stands. It looks like the wind is blowing Klaus sideways in this shot

You can get a pretty good look a Klaus's F-One board on this shot. He said this one jumps the best of all of the boards that he's tried. He looks forward to the Kite Expo to try some new ones Dan got to the beach a little later than some of us but pushed to catch up. The cloud formations behind Dan really makes this picture pop. Dan pulls off another port jump. It's like he's jumping over the ship... NO not really.

I finally caught a shot of Dan where the lighting was OK. Hope you like it

I think Drew is flying the new Naish Torch. As you can see he has it pretty well dialed in. I'm guessing that he's 4 maybe 5 body heights off the water. How high do you think he is???

I think I'm going to call this shot "Sky Pilot." Drew is up in the clouds and holding on.

Kyle got on the water a little late but there was plenty of wind left.

The clouds are starting to look a lot like rain. Hey, what difference does it make he's already wet

Gabor kited up from Seal. There was good wind out there.

I don't know how it happened but Drew is pulling off this trick just as the blue kite is going by. Double click to make the shot larger to get the whole effect.

At the end of the day everyone had a great session.

For more pictures check out, http://www.orangecounty.com/articles/break-18453-surf-lineup.html and http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/v1/yG/r/9buiZx_-Qt8.swf?v=146544858744428&ev=0