Monday, July 17, 2006

Kitesurfing expedition

One rainy weekend and nothing to do, Hold on a minute yes there is, lets go kitesurfing. We had herd about this place that was only reachable by boat and was supposed to be a kiteboarders heaven. I looked up on google earth and found where they were talking about a lagoon that at high tide is about 1 meter deep and just perfect for kiting. I stole the co ordinates and plugged them into my garmin 76cs and leeroy organised a hire boat from the Gold Coast. As we woke up sunday morning it was still raining but with a quick check of the weather it looked like it was going to clear and be a nice day but not for flying. So we gathered up a group to bring the cost down and soon ended up with a full boat of 10 people well ok 9.5 people. We boared the little 50 hp boat and began on our mission. It was not untill we brought the boat up to full speed untill we relised it was going to take us over 2 hours to get where we wanted to go. Ouch we were not expecting to take that long but it was nice a boat trip up to the end of Stradbroke Island. when we arrived the weather for kiting was not as good as we hoped but we all quickly set up on the un crowded beach of Stradbroke. We all had a great time trying to kitesurf and just hanging out on the beach watching the nice surroundings. The wind came on good about 1 hr before we had to leave so there was only a limited amount of time for kiting and when your restling your kite upside down in the water that hour can go by very fast.. I pulled trick of the day once again by trying to show off a little and boosted high into the sky from the beach and went face first through the soft quick sand about 2 metres from the water.Ouch I was so happy to have hit the quick sand as it would have really hurt if it was something a little harder. I made quite a impact and as the tide started to drop you could see that I actually made another lagoon inside the lagoon a perfect imprint of my body was left behind on this deserted beach. There were no other incidents apart from nearly running out of fuel on the way home. We were not suppose to take the boat that far away, so we used every bit of the 82 litres we had on board. We returned back to Marina Marage at the end of the day with a boat full of smiles and good memories. This will not be our last boat trip up there but we may have to find a faster boat for the journey.. Below is some pictures that I snapped off during the day.