21 April

Well, I had my second kiting session today and my first self rescue! I was getting in closer and checking out the waves, riding the tail end of a few just sort of watching where and how they broke when I found the reef. Grrggh, Grrrggh. No harm done I thought, just like yesterday. Until I went for my next turn and the board just slipped out from underneath me, whoomp. Flat on my face. Two fins missing and the fin boxes of one of them ripped. I couldn't hold a line up wind to get back to where I launched so I had to try and ride the top of a small wave across the reef and come back in down wind of the launching beach. Keep in mind here that the break is situated a couple of hundred meters off the south-west corner of the Island with an offshore wind; to both directions of the shore line. So the wind was only going to blow me out to sea.

Anyway, I managed to get enough of an edge on the board to kite towards the shore, downwind of my starting point, but to the shore at least. The problem with this was always going to be that when I got close to this part of the shore line I also got closer to the wind shadow created by the tree's and and hotels downwind of the kiting beach. Naturally when I hit the wind shadow my kite dropped. From here it was just a simple matter of standing up on the reef, pulling my kite in, deflating the leading edge, rolling it up and sitting it on the board, winding the lines and paddling/walking it in the last hundred meters or so. I always wonder about what type of poisonous creatures live in reefs, particularly when I find myself needing to stand on them. By the same token, having a surfboard rather then a twin tip makes dragging it all in to shore a lot easier and the leg rope meant I didn’t have to worry about the board floating off while my attention was on the kite. All in all, a good little exercise. Apparently there is wind forecast for tomorrow morning and then nothing for the next couple of days. So I'll go out on the two fins that I can put in the board and then see about getting it repaired in the next days. Any maybe finally climb that mountain I have been looking at. Man, you've got to see the scenery here form the water, it's pretty spectacular. I'll get some pictures from the gopro at some point.

I've managed to get rides so far either on the bus or from people pulling over and giving me a ride. But the ride home was the best yet today! I Mauritian guy beside a bus stopped me to talk about surfing; he was wanting to get into it. I met came around the other side of the bus and met his family, all thirty of them, had some rum and a big plate of Biryani. Chatted, played some drums badly then got a ride home on the bus with them all. Where the played the dgembe and sung songs all the way to my place. Sweet. I've got to remember to take my camera with me to get some pictures of this stuff