Lourido

It's a good 30min drive from Cesantes, interestingly Google says just 14min. In the past I've put the difference down to the bus, but we are in the instructor's car and he knows exactly where he is going.

Lourido is in the next inlet with good on-shore wind and a handy sandbar from which to water start. We were there around 12:30 and the wind was still quite light, testing my light wind flying skills. Under these conditions the kite can fall out of the sky, and it did. Relaunching from the water, straight forward when the wind is light, becomes a lot more difficult and time consuming.

Atur my instuctor had a good look at my kite launch from the beach. This was particularly useful since although I knew the basics, it hadn't really been taught in the UK where the instructors always got the kite in the air on the beach. For me to go out with my own gear, I have to be able to safely launch and I had mishaps in France.

Back to water-starting, Artur is telling me I don't release the kite after the first dive, I just keep pulling resulting in some spectaclar crashes. It's difficult and exhausting practicing this mainly because the loss of space downwind and body dragging or walking back up wind. Anyhow, I have at last managed start to master this resulting in some longish rides. The next challenge is to get weight into the harness and out of my 'pulling hands'. Since my right hand is still sore after the bike crash there is a lot of incentive to get this right.

So far I've had three sessions with Artur, one in Cesantes and two in Lourido, mainly because of the difficulty reaching the beach when the festival was on. I've also been out on my own in Cesantes. Here I managed a run in each direction that I felt was reasonably controlled, but the beach launch was messey and the wind dropped and I had to pack the kite/lines up at the water's edge because I was unable to relaunch the kite. This left my lines in a mess and a job for the morning.