The sound of the underwater Christmas Carol - Part 2

by Emilie Marx
(Part 2/3)

I am a stubborn animal and one thing Arabian horses taught me is that when you fall from your horse, you must get right back on it.
- It’s a golden rule!
So I went to borrow the other Rhino –new as well- that was in Demo at the shop where I worked next door and I went back out at the Bummy
-to get back on my horse…
And I fell again….

I did the exact same thing I had done an hour earlier with my own kite….
I got back to the shore with my second brand new kite good to be thrown away.
It was the most expensive session I’ve ever had...

Imagine my feeling of déjà vu when I saw that wave about to smash my kite the other morning…
I thought: “Don’t tell me I’m going to do this again…”
I knew that opening the safety doesn’t guarantee the kite’s survival when it comes to big waves, but it’s the least one can do to do some damage control….
I felt the wave smashing the kite on the other end of the fifth line, pulling me forward, in the same time than another wave was breaking over me…

“I want to swim away but don't know how
Sometimes it feels just like I'm falling in the ocean
Let the waves up take me down
Let the hurricane set in motion”

Anyone else ever tried to play human submarine?
I popped my head out of the water to catch some air, still dragged forward when the pull of the kite leash suddenly stopped.
Thing is, I hadn’t released it this time….
I didn’t even need to look at my kite at that point: I knew that my safety line had just broken and I knew as well what was inevitably happening next…

I had a sudden flash back of the previous day, at the kiting spot, winding up my lines while talking with a friend.

She was saying that my lines looked quite strong and I told her I was really happy with them: I had never had any breakage.
To what I immediately added : “Damit, I should never have said that, now you can be sure I will break one!”.

Never say something doesn’t break or it will, that is a rule.
Because everything breaks…

oops

Still, I never thought the curse of the “unbreakable equipment” would happen so soon.
And well, breaking a fifth line after having opened the safety does belong to the worse case scenarios...

Here was my kite taking off on its own, rolling and flying in between waves.
My last hope was my kiting buddy; I looked around to localise my friend, my I-pod singing along:

“Where is the coastguard
I keep looking each direction
For a spotlight, give me something
I need something for protection”

But the coastguard had gone up to the bowl, which is only few hundred meters upwind from the break I was riding, but once one is up there, sets get so big, fast and punchy that the rest of the world stops existing....

Another wave came towards me, I dove under, already accepting the inevitable reality: today was the day I was trashing my soon to be ex-new kite.

Now it was a matter of not trashing myself: the Gallion’s reef hasn’t changed and never will; it is and will remain shallow…

The gallion’s reef on a flat windless day…

The amount of water sucked in and out that day only rose the injury potential.

“I'm treading for my life believe me
(How can I keep up this breathing)”

Another wall of white wash came over me.

”Not knowing how to think
I scream aloud, begin to sink”

My head popped back out of the water; and again I thought “where is my bloody kite?”
That was a good question, actually.
My kite was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t floating on the water nor flying around. What the…?
Oh great, now the question of the day was: “how does a kite disappear within few seconds in an open bay?”
(And where?...)

That’s when I remembered the “canopy colour” issue…

When I worked in wholesale, canopy colours were my dread.
People wanted the turquoise blue with yellow leading edge, the fluo pink and purple –yeah, and the boxes in which these were always had to be the ones in the bottom of the pile in the warehouse...

They wanted the one that matched their harness colour, their board design; we used to joke in the office that this sport was becoming “metrosexual”.
I’d ask my co-workers:
“Why don’t they make them all white and I just send some paint spray along? People can put daisies on them if they feel like it!”

Click here to read the end of “The sound of the underwater Christmas Carol”