How kitesurfing dreams come true. The dummy crash test (part 2)

by Emilie Marx
(Part 2/4)

That day I spotted the babies was an absolute no go: the whole belt was visible, with most of the reef popping out of the water…
Aware of the tide and careful not to give the babies a heart attack, I was riding carefully downwind from the coral belt when I spotted a shark.
It swam up the lagoon and disappeared in Paranoia’s fire coral belt, just as some white wash was immersing the reef.

And that’s how in one second, I forgot all about the tide, all about the coral underneath, all about basically everything: I saw the reef disappearing underwater, the outline of my shark fading and I went.

Wombat moment…

And you’ve guessed the story wouldn’t be worth telling if I had made it, uh…

Just as I should have expected, all the water got sucked away underneath me and I found myself nailed on the dry reef the following second, looking like a silly starfish hooked on a kite.

Interesting picture isn’t it…

Feeling all the razor blade like cutting edges on my back, I wisely kept my sail at twelve o’clock, waiting for the next set of white wash to push me out of there in a less damaging manner.
Luckily for me, this actually went according to plan.
Few seconds later, I was back to safety, inside the lagoon.

Back to safety, well, it’s a figure of speech: everything is relative…
I guess there are safer situations than being sitting in the water with a bleeding back while surrounded by half a dozen baby sharks….

Some days I am full of great ideas, some days am I not …

I should write an instruction manual on all the various way to get hurt very stupidly with a kite for the sake of bringing this extreme sport to the next level...

“Page 26: go body dragging while bleeding in a shark infested lagoon.”
I’m a genius…

At the end, the outcome wasn’t very dramatic; I had a couple of deep lacerations and a whole lot of scratches on my back.
The most annoying really, was the fire coral infection I got out of my encounter with the reef and that kept me on antibiotics for a week….
That and the urchin on which I kind of sat. You can start smiling, I assure you, you wouldn’t want to have been in my…hm, shoes… lol!

To read the following of "how kitesurfing dreams come true: the dummy crash test"