Trapeze of the seas

It’s show time at Ho’okipa Beach, the world-renowned wind mecca on the northern shore of Maui, Hawaii, and South African kiteboarder Greg Heydenrych is doing a move no one’s seen before. Latching onto a 25-knot gust, he catapults 40 feet out of the water, lets go of the bar with one hand, dangles trapeze-style with the other, pulls his board off his feet and hugs it to his chest like a long-lost lover. But that’s just the beginning. Near the apex of his jump, Heydenrych starts spinning faster and faster; soon, he’s a blur, whipping two, three, four times around, spinning like a top, like an ice skater, like a dervish, like a ... “Temporary Tornado!” screams the announcer. Spiraling downward, Heydenrych slips the board onto his feet just in time to stick a perfect landing. The crowd oohs and ahhs, impressed by this new trick and the sport that made it possible.

Up the beach, however, the kiteboarder’s dance gets a different reaction from his rivals here at the Red Bull King of the Air competition, the Super Bowl of the young sport. “Tornado? Call it ‘The Ballerina,’ ” one with a Dutch accent sneers. “Call it ‘Disco Fever,’ ” smiles an American. “Call it the ‘Hey, Look Everybody: I’m a Girl!’ ” says a Spaniard, to raucous laughter.

Translation: The Tornado was hard, but not that hard -- not anymore, at least. “Lots of tricks look hard to the general public, but they aren’t to us,” says Dana Point’s Chuck Patterson, one of the sport’s biggest air and wave riders. “Two years ago, that trick -- known as a board-off, since you remove your feet from the board -- would have been considered insane. But now it’s just old news with new style.” Patterson, 33, spectating at Ho’okipa while recovering from a shattered heel that punched through his board at the end of a 50-foot jump, noted that there are far harder tricks today: the kite loop, in which the kiter swings higher than the kite itself; the handle pass, a risk-it-all maneuver in which you pass the handle from one hand to another behind your back while rolling and flipping; monster hang time (the world record is 13.2 seconds); and one of Patterson’s specialties: ramping 40 feet off an incoming wave, doing a back flip and landing back in the wave going the other direction.

It was no surprise to the competitors that, despite the crowd-pleasing Tornado, Heydenrych didn’t even win his heat. Skills that would have dominated 18 months ago earned a mere ninth-place finish at the 2003 King of the Air in October.

That a blockbuster move is considered passe underscores the rapid growth of kiteboarding, which didn’t exist until five years ago, but has since exploded out of its original base in Maui to the U.S. mainland and Europe, sparking conversions from windsurfing, drawing thousands more from surfing, wakeboarding and paddling, and enticing landlubbers to the sea for the first time.

The rise of kiteboarding has also set off turf wars and has added danger, not just for participants but also for others on the water and on shore, who can be strangled by errant lines. As kiteboarding ups the ante with higher, faster, more spectacular stunts, it increases the risk threshold.

“There’s a dark side to kiting,” says Steve Bard, 48, a Malibu real estate developer and 22-year windsurfer, who also owns two kiteboards. Kiting has been blamed for several fatalities in recent years and has been banned from some beaches.

As the name suggests, kiteboarding pairs a kite, measuring 23 to 82 square feet, and a board, a 5-foot mini-surfboard that on its own is barely big enough to support an average adult. But tethered by four thin 100-foot lines to what looks like a giant, airborne tortilla strip, and strapped into a handled harness that lets the rider manipulate it like a puppeteer, very little of the kiter’s body weight is on the water.

One moment, a kiter is a human rock skipping across a pond; in the next, he’s rocketing skyward as if wearing a jet pack. Then he’s a sky skateboarder. Next, he’s catching sets a surfer can only dream of, spraying zigzags through the lip of the swell like a hedge trimmer, then bolting ahead of the wave like an Indy car racer punching the passing gear.

The feeling? “Your senses are on fire,” says Adam Denny, a manager at the Kite Now shop in Seal Beach. “You read the wind and the waves like radar. With the power of the wind, it’s like you’re wakeboarding, but driving the boat at the same time.”

“It’s addictive,” says Richard Menna of Malibu Kitesurfing. “Suddenly, you can fly, the dream of all men since the beginning of time. You don’t go back to other water sports once you get into this.”

The exhilaration is matched by practicality. Compared to windsurfing, kiteboarding has a shorter learning curve, a milder wind requirement (a minimum of about 10 knots, versus 16 or 17 for windsurfing), and is far easier to transport -- no roof rack or expensive baggage fee required. Kites stuff into a backpack and the board can fit in a Mini Cooper.

These assets have taken their toll on windsurfing, where kiting initially had its largest impact. According to Ryan Riccitelli, editor of Kiteboarding magazine, half of all windsurfers had converted to kiting by 2003. Most of the best, like eight-time world champion Robbie Naish, known as the Michael Jordan of windsurfing, switched to kiting. Windsurfing magazine’s subscription numbers dropped by 20% due to defections, according to editor Eddy Patricelli. Windsurf manufacturers have fought back by introducing more stable, entry-level products that are attracting beginners, but kiting keeps flying higher.

Captain Kirk’s, a windsurf shop in San Pedro, now stocks more kiteboards than sailboards. Manager Tom Johnson gave up windsurfing after 25 years and now only kites. Drawing from an ever-wider audience of surf, skate, snowboard and paddle enthusiasts, about 8,000 to 10,000 people kiteboard in the U.S. today, with another 10,000 kiters riding the waves around the world, all within the last few years, says Riccitelli. In Southern California, they can be found in kiting hotspots that dot the coast from C Street in Ventura to the Coronado Silver Strand in San Diego. With its consistent, gentle wind and wave-blocking breakwater, Long Beach’s Belmont Shore is one of the world’s best places to learn, drawing as many as 100 kiters a day. A couple of dozen ply the waves at Seal and Sunset beaches, the high-performance magnet next door.

A longtime professional windsurfer, wakeboarder, big-wave surfer, extreme skier and tow-surfing pioneer, Patterson first tried and gave up kiteboarding in 1997. Rescuing and relaunching one of the old waterlogged foil kites could take an hour or more of precarious swimming. “It hardly seemed worth it,” he said. But in ‘98, armed with one of the modern inflatable kites, which float on water and are airborne in seconds with a few strategic tugs, he was getting big air in a week. And he experienced euphoria.

“Suddenly, the unthinkable was possible,” he says. “In a split-second, with a flick of a wrist, you’re soaring 50 feet in the air -- practically hang-gliding. The adrenaline rush, the feeling of no limits, the wind in your face, the instinctual connection with forces of nature, is astounding. It encompasses everything I’d ever done before.”

Since Patterson says he makes his living “doing things bigger than everyone else” (he’s one of the few to surf a 60-foot wave, and once set a record for the longest snow ledge drop -- 142 feet), it wasn’t long before kiteboard magazines were running pictures of him soaring over rocks and trees. In March, on a day of 30-mph winds and 10-foot swells, Patterson arrived at Sunset Beach with a photographer, an innovative new kite and one goal for the day: a downloop, an aggressive, low-probability trick that involves whipping the kite in a vertical circle like a lasso and holding on through fall and recovery like a parachute jumper. He powered toward shore, ramped off the back of a massive cresting wave, launched 40 feet above the water and started whipping the kite. Then a “double-lifter” -- an unexpected gust of wind -- jerked him 10 feet higher. Caught off guard, rhythm lost, Patterson hesitated. The kite, which needed to do at least 1 1/4 turns for the trick, momentarily stopped. “I was free-falling from 50 feet, looking down at the kite, frantically trying to rotate it, to catch it up to where it should be,” he said. “But it was too late.”

Patterson braced. He slammed into the water so hard that his board snapped in two, his left foot going through the fiberglass. His heel bone shattered, and the muscles connecting the instep and the ankle tore apart. No King of the Air competition this year.

Although athletes like Patterson can skywalk in days on the device, it’s not so easy for regular folks like Quan Nguyen, a 29-year-old Westminster programmer who tried and failed at surfing. “Last summer, I saw two kiteboarders at Huntington Beach going so fast, flying so high, that I was immediately hooked,” he says. In September, he plunked down nearly $2,000 for a standard kiting package: a 7-foot dry-land trainer kite ($100), basic kite, harness and board ($1,300 total), and a set of 10 lessons ($500).

“I can stand up and surf a bit after four 90-minute lessons and a half-dozen practice sessions at Belmont Shore,” Nguyen says. “That’s right on schedule. In a couple months, I’ll be edging and going upwind.”

Being able to turn around and sail upwind is the first benchmark in kiting. Typically, it is a hard-won skill that challenges even experienced watermen like Seal Beach Mayor Pro Tem Paul Yost, 43. Three years ago, the then-mayor and 15-year surfer-windsurfer found himself caught between the two groups in a controversy over beach access. To quash accusations of favoritism, Yost began kiteboarding. His first lesson at Kite Beach on Maui brought him the routine frustration of crashing his kite in the water again and again. It took about three months and 25 sessions at tranquil Belmont Shore to master the basics: edging the board, staying in the power window and kiting upwind.

“I was the first guy to kite on Seal,” says Yost. “Now, there are dozens.” Having virtually mothballed his surfboards and sailboards, he’s now a kiting junkie. The convenience factor is why half of all Malibu windsurfers have switched to kiteboarding in the last three years, estimates local boarder Steve Bard. He says he won’t be one of them. “Even though I learned how to kite and enjoy it, it’s not worth the hassle or the danger. You need a large spot on the beach and someone to help you launch. You’re out on the water on dental floss -- which is so sharp and strong that it can slice off your finger if you get tied up. If you lose control, you can strangle people on shore.” The clincher for Bard is what he calls “victory-at-sea conditions” -- the 20 or 30 days a year when the wind gusts 25 to 30 knots. “Those days,” he says, “windsurfers are in their glory. And kiters are cowering on the beach, afraid. Overall, windsurfing has a way better feel on the waves.”

Bard’s safety concerns are well-founded. A handful of people die every year from kiteboarding -- on and offshore -- and the sport is being banned in some locales.

Bolsa Chica does not allow kiteboarding in the summer, when the beach is crowded. Others will likely follow suit as kiteboarding’s numbers grow.

But for most kiters who have tasted the thrill of space flight, it’s onward and upward.

After wearing a cast for eight weeks, Patterson is now back to 70% of his original flexibility, enough to get him and a camera crew back to Maui. “I’ve got the downloop dialed now,” he reports from the North Shore. “And I’m pushing the window -- adding big-wave riding and a 360 spin to it. After that, I’ll shoot for a 720, or add a back roll, who knows?”

The ER’s the limit.