1st Kite Blade sessionFirst opportunity to go for a kite blade yesterday.
Place: My local, slight hill small area.
Wind: Offshore gusty 5-20+ knots
Kite: Flysurfer Psycho 4 8m
Dave & I headed down to our local yesterday morning, we were hoping the wind would turn more to the S-SE throughout the morning before the strong wind warning came in after lunch sometime. The wind at best came in from the W-SW over the side of a hill which was completely rubbish. Going on the forecast though its expecting showers through till at least next Thursday so it was now or never.
Put up the smallest kite we had (Psycho 4 8m, possibly not the best kite to try something new
), in the lulls it was falling out of the sky, in the gusts it got really dodgy so the session was extremely short.
Although from many talks with George aka Spartan, about ways to tackle your first attempt the conditions were to gusty to do a kite hand over and hook in, so I launched the kite with Terrablades parallel to the hill and took off, headed up the hill holding an edge into the wind, turned around and came back, they are stable, hold an edge better than what I imagined they would and from what I witnessed yesterday you could get up to some serious speed on these things.
I pulled the safety at one point on the kite, a massive gust came through and my feet were getting light, just as well it was solid and followed up by not much.
We then reset the bindings for Dave who takes a bigger boot, 4 allen key bolts on the rear binding on both skates and it was ready to go, Dave launched the same way, from a standing start and took off without a problem, edged up the park, turned around and started doing some laps, the wind was crap so for us to even do what we did we were stoked.
Dave can add his own notes at some point, although we need to work on our plan of attack with video, he shot in 4:3, I shot in 16:9 lol but we got a little bit of footage which was cool.
We packed it up as the wind got even stronger since we were in one piece and no damage done we decided to leave it for another day when the wind is onshore, clean.
We both agreed that the potential of the Terrablades is huge, they will be perfect for freestyle, they turn quick even if we were on the cautious side for this session, we got the impression they will turn on a dime and you could really carve some big powerful turns.
After taking a run on them, here are some notes.
Kite experience is a must, because Terrablades/Powerslides/Spartans pair you are in a boot that does not release from a binding if you get into trouble good kite control will be very important.
If you can ski/skate, you will most likely hop straight on these and take off without any problem.
I can't explain this next part, technically the weight between a land board and kite skates is marginal yet with a kite buggy you can use a smaller kite than on a land board in same conditions due to friction, but on the kite blades, you can use a smaller kite than I would have had up in a buggy, even though the footprint is much smaller and less weight distribution and I would have thought more friction, it could be due to the skates facing forwards instead of a land board that when you are going forwards your side slipping at the same time.
Cheers
Luke
ps, Quote of the day, Lady in park stops and says "are they the Hummer of Roller skates" I told her I thought that was a perfect way to describe them.
