For the adventure… it’s literally all about the adventure – yours, mine, theirs, wherever, whenever: we’ve got the tools and tales for the all-season slayer.
Kiteworld issue #78 – where the Switch team also etch their lines into Aitutaki – like no other spot
For the adventure…
Kiteboarding 1000 kilometers along the Great Barrier Reef would get them a world record and they only had ten days. The ambitious plan didn’t end there. The mutual purpose was to attract attention and raise money to support MND research. Known alternatively as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease, MND’s sinister advance robs muscles of their use and eventually kills its victims, while locking them helpless inside their withered bodies and leaving their minds completely intact to endure the imprisonment. Dr. Nicholas Cole is one of the world’s leading MND researchers and battles daily with understanding this killer and trying to raise money to support his research. His search for a cure, his search for support and his immediate goal of reaching a bit of land on the Coral Sea before nightfall, had all but blended into one. His back ached.
Excerpt from ‘One Thousand and One – Kite the Reef’ – photographer John Bilerback’s 12th column in ‘The Snap’ series.
We rigged up and took the challenge. It certainly wasn’t easy. Light winds on the small beach made launching tricky, but once out to sea the wind was really strong. Riding the wave all the way to the end took us in to the super light winds again on the inside where it was a real effort to keep the kite in the air. Jalou had to swim in twice to get her kite from the rocks. Not an easy spot at all under such conditions, but the barreling waves were just too good and too promising to not keep trying.
Excerpt from ‘Mozambique Memoirs’ by Gilles Calvet, featuring Jalou Langeree and Matchu Lopes.
Few kiters willingly pile on the pounds. Not so Briton Stew Edge and Canadian Devon McDiarmid, who have spent months bulking up. Edge stuffs himself with red meat, fats, nuts and avocados to add eight kilos ahead of an epic 640-mile ‘downwinder’ in the harshest conditions imaginable. Before breaking out the kites they will have already walked 580 miles across the Antarctic to the South Pole, hauling 100 kilo sledges in temperatures down to -40°C. In such extremes, under such physical duress, shedding weight is unavoidable. Researchers monitored Edge’s build-up. “Not only have they to make sure I’m fit enough,” he says, “but fat enough, too.”
Excerpt from ‘Shackleton 2015 Trans-Antarctic Centenary Expedition’ preview feature, by Ian Mackinnon.
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