Kite Surfing.
ite surfing is growing quite quickly in Western Australia. A lot of sailboarders are
seeing the advantage of these sailing devices and are giving some thought to taking up
this new challenge.
That being said, the kite surfers must also realise the dangers of the devices and regulate their use to places where they will not interfere with the sailboards and the general public. There is some friction between the windsurfing/kitesurfing camps already, which is a shame for such excellent and complementary sports.
Western Australia has thousands of kilometers of beach along its' coast. There are some superb areas that have great rigging, great sailing and are free from the more established water users such as sailboarders and surfers. Some of these areas are detailed in the following pages.
A lot of the coast is kitesurfable, and it easy for kitesurfers to move their operations to less crowded areas where they will not endanger or interfere with other beach users. I am labouring this point because I am a kitesurfer (and sailboarder) and do not want to see kitesurfing regulated or to produce bad blood with other water users, especially when there is so much beach for us all to play in.
Kitesurfing has a lot to offer sailboarding. Think of your favourite sailboard shops who were struggling with diminishing turnovers. Now they have a new line of product to sell. This will keep them in business and help with their overheads, which should make for more choice and smaller prices for all our gear, both sailboarding and kitesurfing.
The Swan River provides some excellent locations for kitesurfing, especially for learning. More and more people are doing it up and down the coast also. Around Perth, Pinnaroo Point provides a long (usually) uncrowded beach, with flatish water. It is great for rigging up and kite launching, great for kite sailing, and generally uncrowded, not being a a preferred sailboarding beach.
Cervantes is becoming a kite surfing mecca. There are some great rigging areas, and a nice kiting beach. Although Cervantes does get some sailboard action, it is limited most of the time. The beach is relatively empty also, providing good kite rigging conditions.
Airborne Kitesurfing is a dedicated kitesurfing shop. They stock and sell a large number of kites, boards and accessories. This shop has everything. They have demo and second hand gear as well, and do promotional tours and lessons up and down the coast.
One kite surfing school in Perth is run by Ian Young. He mainly teaches on the Swan river in Perth, and can be seen regularly on his jet ski, accompanying students across the water.
Ian's kiting web page describes the sport in more detail and his links page has pointers to useful resources.
Pelican Point Windsurfing also runs a kitesurfing school at the same location that they run their windsurfing school at Pelican Point. Pelican also run kitesurfing (and windsurfing) clinics on the Cocos Islands during the winter months.
SOS is heavily in to Kitesurfing. People from SOS can often be found on the Swan. They have all the gear you need (both for kitesurfing and windsurfing).
The best page I have seen on Kitesurfing is Hung Vu's superb page describes everything about kitesurfing that you could want. It is an extremely complete and detailed page, obviously taking a lot of time and energy to put together.
The site kitesurfinginfo4u.com is a tremendous list of kitesurfing (and windsurfing) resources. It is a compendium of thousands of links arranged in logical groups. It is well worth a look.
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