Playing hide and seek with my kitesurfing mojo - Part 2

by Emilie Marx
(Part 2/4)

And here I am, in Paradise; I swapped brownish for turquoise water, hours of driving for rigging almost at my door step, gusty freezing wind for steady Caribbean breeze, the list is endless, I have it all…

But human beings get used to anything and for some reason, northerlies in this hemisphere suddenly seem to me as cold as the southerlies on the other side of the globe.

Two weeks ago, we had great conditions -big surf, side shore wind, twenty knots and the sun out.
I went in the water with topped up layers, for a total of four millimetres of neoprene …. That’s the same amount of neoprene as I was wearing back in Sydney.
Not kidding: an hour later I was freezing.
The water was twenty four degrees that day…

My last resort being my full length sealed wetsuit, I decided that, winter or not, it was perfectly unethical to wear such outfit in the Caribbean and just came back in.

Am I just spoiled or pretending that the water’s too cold turns out to be an excuse a little more acceptable to me than the possible actual truth?
I am about to say something dramatic.

I think I got bored of kiting.

It just happened…
May be I’ve stuffed myself (yeah, may be spending not far from eight hundred hours on the water in nine months was a bit glutton…).

I have this little bamboo wind chime in my garden, it’s orientated so it starts making sound when it’s strong enough to kite (I did it so I could tell if it was on without having to get out of my bed or even open a window (I’m lazy…)).
There have been too many mornings lately where I heard the clanging sound of my wind chime and that I couldn’t motivate myself to go.

I said in my initial Interview that getting into kitesurfing changed my whole life around.
Slowing down the pace and suddenly taking the time to do other things rather than giving this the priority was just as noticeable.

Even my dog felt the change, his days on the beach being suddenly replaced by painting afternoons at home –and now I can tell that if he is an excellent swimmer, he’s got no artistic sense whatsoever!

Even though I do find him quite photogenic….

My dog loves the water –we amused the tourists one day we gave stand up paddle surfing a go…
He swims so well he managed one time I had gone surfing to follow me at the line up.
I was used to have him following me couple of hundred meters –regardless of my (very pointlessly) repeated “no”- but, tiredness kicking in he’d eventually turn around and wait for me on the shore….
For some reason that day he decided to do otherwise…

There was a crazy current to get to the line up, it took me some good twenty minutes to get through the pass. The swell was a quite serious size, some sets had close to two meter faces, it was quite scary.
When I finally sat on my board, exhausted after the intense paddle I just had had, I noticed a black dot appearing between the chops at the pass. I thought it was a fellow surfer, I didn’t pay much attention to it.

It’s when I saw a set coming in, just as I laid down on my board, that I heard some splashing behind me: here was my buddy, his little black nose hanging out of the water, freaked out and totally out of breath.

Some days my dog’s loyalty really suck…

Imagine the scene: wave coming towards me, I’m spot on at the peak and my dog is next to me about to be smashed. I could see everything that was going to happen next in slow motion in my head!

Em’s next blog issue: “The day my dog stupidly drowned….”

As the lines were growing ahead of us, considering the situation wasn’t tricky enough as it was, he decided to hang on me and managed to get his legs caught in my surf leash.
Looking up at the sky asking: “Why me?”…

I generally really love my dog, but I admit there are certain moments I absolutely wish he wasn’t there (thought that only reinforce my theory that having children is a very bad idea (one can’t ethically have such thoughts with their kids, can they?))

I grabbed him with one arm while I started paddling like crazy with the second one, hoping to make it before the wave broke…

My dog is lying next to me as I type so he obviously made it past the sets that day, but it was quite an unforgettable experience to see the waves breaking at both my surfboard and his tail, while the three of us were tangled together…

He scared the hell out of me with his deed that day.
I actually think he scared the hell out of himself too: I’ve since taken him along on my surf trips and he patiently waited on the shore for me to return…
Lesson learnt.

But he still loves to swim and it’s a matter of fact he hasn’t exercise as much as usual lately and it starts showing (this actually applies to both of us…)

Okay, may be I am exaggerating: it’s not like I’ve stopped kitesurfing…
I’ve just gone from four hours daily to only one or two…. –and the kitesurfer stuck in the office six days out of seven is hating me right now…

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