Kiteboarding Equipment

Series Summary

Kiteboarding, or kitesurfing, is a sport in which a rider uses a large controllable kite to catch air power that will propel him or her across the water on a small board. The kiteboard, similar to a wakeboard, is held to the feet with straps. Kite boarding is growing rapidly in popularity, and recent innovations in kite and board design have made it even safer. Riders are constantly developing new tricks and riding styles, and compete in tournaments worldwide. Because kiteboarders are at the mercy of nature’s forces, the sport can be dangerous, and professional instruction is advisable to avoid basic beginners’ mistakes.

In this free video series, our expert Matt Sexton will talk about beginner's kitboarding and kitesurfing basics. He'll tell you about kiteboarding equipment, boards, kites, repairing a kite, maintaining your pump, lessons, the handlebar, safety gear, weather, wind direction, launching a kite, and the terms and parts of a kiteboarding kite. He'll tell you how to prepare a kiteboarding kite, managing the lines, connecting the lines to the kite, double checking everything, beach etiquette, wrapping up the handlebar and lines, and cleaning, folding, and storing the kite itself.

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to show you basically all the essentials for kite surfing. With this sport, it's the fastest growing water sport in the world right now and it's also one of the most versatile. You can do three basic disciplines with this sport. There's freestyle, free ride, there's actually more than three. You can pretty much take this sport where ever you want. You can surf with it. You can do wake-style tricks. Anything you're looking to do it's possible in this sport. All you really need, basically, for this is wind, kite, bar, board and a harness. The harnesses we have there's two main styles. The harness, that simply wraps around your waist. Or a seat harness, depending on what you like. Everything in this sport is personal preference and although most people are going to be trying to sell you on a certain thing, don't listen to it. Try everything in this sport before you buy it. Everything is going to be different. A seat harness is good for a bigger guy who wants a little more support down here, but sometimes it can bunch up a little bit too much, so waist harnesses are better for like freestyle-oriented riders. All the different kites we have here are, you know, we have different meters for different sizes of wind. You know, if we have a hurricane, we're going to use a very small kite, obviously, and people aren't going to go out unless they're an expert rider. Light wind days, you're going to need a larger kite, something around 14 meters. Or, on an average windy day, you know a 12 meter kite is pretty much the most standard kite here. We have a very fortunate quiver of kites here and have pretty much every style from Bose, Cs, SLEs to hybrids and pretty much ranging from '05 until 2008 kites. Since '05 this sport has gone drastically evolving into the future. We can use kites now in higher wind ranges than what we've ever been able to before. And, you know, they're also much more user-friendly and forgiving. So, with one of these new kites, you can do everything that you could a couple of years ago, but you're actually getting the equivalent of three kites out of just one. So, what we're going to do today is just pretty much show you the difference between, how to set them up, how to use them and why it is absolutely essential to take lessons before you get into this sport."