vela99 wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:17 pm
I have continued practicing drifting starting with low to moderate winds and fairly flat water to moderate to high winds with some wind swell. Drifting the kite and adopting turn radius and board speed are not yet completely second nature but I am getting there gradually. As the wave faces are not steep and waves are only small the margin for error is big and it is fairly easy to avoid the kite from dropping into the water. Things will change once I get onto a real wave but at least I am able to take one variable out of the equation.
Swell has a "wave set speed" and a "wave speed". The wave speed is typically twice the set speed. This means that if you get on the best wave in a set (swell), you will ride it and watch as it diminishes as you get kicked out the front of the set. But if you look behind you, that big peak will have moved one wave back. If you want to ride it again, you have to cut 2 waves back since it takes you time to get to that peak wave, and that peak wave will have moved back again.
When surfing swell, you really get good at going downwind and upwind to ride and to catch the wave, respectively. You are on the right path with your practice on that.
Breaking waves, when the amplitude of the wave is large enough to touch the bottom river or ocean bottom, will change wave speed to set speed. Both speeds will be the same and thus the breaking wave will be slower than the set speed that delivered it to the shore. This is a HUGE difference in feel for a kitesurfer. Swell riding is surfing for you now, but you may look at that differently in the future. The techniques for riding the wave are so different, that you will develop a completely different skill set for breaking waves that is not really applicable to riding swell. Still, continue with swell riding as it will at least give you a foundation skill set (useful for onshore wave), and develop some skills that are skipped over by moving right into breaking waves.
vela99 wrote: ↑Fri May 11, 2018 1:17 pm
I have started to build in some downloops when dong this "switch stance front side windswell riding" but the boost is so hard that I always have to abandon my wave. Any thoughts?
Finding your tempo is something that just eventually clicks. If you have a kite that will stall well (not a typo), the stall can be the used to lose power in the kite in the back of the window. It is hard to go against your intuition on this - sheeting in a kite when you want LESS power - but you will love this skill once you develop it. It basically allows you to ride any kite, even "grunty" kites, directly down wind of you while on a wave. If you have a small kite, say 5m, take it out in winds that you would normally use your 12m and just fly it on the beach. Trim it so it is fully powered up, and try to stall it out when it is off the edge of the window in the power zone. Then recover it. Then try to walk one way simulating your tack line, stall out the kite when you start to go the other way, and recover it.
This is the skill old foil kite flyers had back in the day. But with modern inflatables, that skill has mostly been lost to new kite designs that are "plug and play" easy to use.
My own flying style is pretty much stalled out to the point where I can't even hand my kite over to another kiter with out depowering it. If I do hand it over as I trim it, they stall the kite and lose control. And I am not powering up the kite for power, I am powering it up to stall it for turning speed, jibes, quick redirects with no power, and for placement in the window as in an intentional over run of the kite (placing it deeper in the window).