I picked up a new one last week. I was in Pure Magic in Clontarf and they had some copies of Stance and Stance always comes armed with a DVD. Here’s the trailer which turned up on Youtube. I saw bits of this in Pure Magic so picked it up and took it home to watch. The Stance DVDs have a couple of different films on them but the one we’re interested in right now is Um Barco Nas Ondas, which is a 25 minute film of waveriding in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. I’ve known they exist for years but have never been down there. It featured four waveriders, 2 of whom I was already familiar with thanks to another kite DVD about 9 years ago, namely Tuva Jensen (I want a haircut like hers) and Bertrand Fleury, and two names which are new to me, namely Mitu Monteiro and Camille Juban. It’s about this latter I’m going to write.

Camille Juban is a windsurfer and it was a couple of clips what he was getting up to which caught my interest. I don’t get to see much windsurfing lately – I no longer track the PWA on Eurosport because to be honest I get overwhelmed with all the television channels we have and practically never watch it. I caught a little bit of it on the PWA’s live stream last year and did idly consider that it would be worth picking up again if they got a bigger picture going. I never quite got around to checking out the schedule do. I’d never heard of Camille Juban as a result and this is a pity. He makes me want to windsurf again.

Yes, again. Not that many people know this but I used to windsurf, a very long time ago. Waveriding as a windsurfer looks like a lot more fun than it does with a kite. And that film made me want to try again.

I’m serious unfit but I am thinking that this year at least I am going to try and get to a PWA event (as well as an ASP event – angling for France this year if it fits in with everyone else, and some kite event although there is a big event coming to Ireland this year so….).

One of today’s tasks is to go looking at PWA dates and kite dates. Meanwhile, the ASP are on the Australian Gold Coast at the moment – the live streams started this morning but I haven’t had a chance to review them yet.

I was sick during the week – I’m not going to say “pretty sick” because really I had a flu like thing, it flattened me a bit on Monday, completely flattened me on Tuesday and I wasn’t 100% since then. But there are people who are much sicker than that, who recover less easily from whatever little life form decided to mess me up during the week. And so I need to be prudent. I don’t, for example, need to climb into a wetsuit and go body dragging on a cold day in February because God knows I don’t need to be sick again.

Today, however, was the sort of day that it was really, really hard to think like that. Tuesday was  a lovely day I’m told. I know my phone kept sending me wind alerts to tell me how lovely it was that I vaguely registered in the delirium that was pasted to my brain at the time. But today, for me was the first day in a while where I stood on the beach and thought, dammit, I want to be back in there.

There was a time in my life when there was little enough sea and no kitesurfing but to be honest I can’t really remember what it must have been like. Now, I walk onto the beach and so many of my friends are down there. I may not have seen some of them for quite a while (since Christmas, in fact) but that somehow doesn’t matter. I could drop everything and go off to Tenerife with 20 of them next week if I wanted, or Morocco with another 20 of them.

Dollymount in some ways hasn’t changed much, in other ways it has. There was a coffee van down there. God be with the days that was a dream in someone’s eyes 20,000 miles away. The potholes on the road down to the beach are horrendous. The sand – typically for near winter I guess – is damp and thus very easy to drive across. And everyone is happy because it’s not icy; it’s the first time in months really that they can get out, say hello and get back on the water. It’s fantastic.

I brought the camera down there but took no photographs….Me without a camera is a bit strange sometimes so I like to have it hanging off me. But mostly, what I take away are the smiles, the happiness and the genuine sense of community I know from the beach.

I love it and I love the guys down there.

What I like about the green one though is that the surfboard on top is pink. I want pink things. When I am bored and without something to do (it happened once about 7 months ago), I design girly kiteboards because all the kiteboards lean on the macho or asexual side. I know that some brand that I can’t get here did a really nice girl kiteboard a while back. I can’t remember who they were although I have used their stuff at kite schools and liked them. And I remember a few years ago reading about how the surfboard shapers were going down the road of having to get pink board paint and stuff because Girls, goddamnt, girls wanted surf boards.

One of animal’s sponsorees – is that a word – is, or at least used to be Kirsty Jones, who is one of the top kitesurfers in the world. I happened to meet her 2 or 3 years ago – no wait, it might be nearly 4 years ago now – and she’s a really nice girl. And a very good ambassador for her sponsors.

Anyway, I was in Aldi on Thursday evening buying plots which I hope are surviving the galeforce winds okay and while I was at it, I acquired some chocolate. So the cookie jar is hiding my collection of mini Rittersports. It seems appropriate.

I’ve a bunch of watersports DVDs that I have, some of which came free with magazines and some of which I bought. Apart from the Whitelines snowboarding one which was average, I really like all of them, because they are pure escapism. When you’re sitting in a freezing cold Dublin, there’s a lot to be said for dragging out a Cabrinha DVD and watching Andre Philip ripping it up in Antigua, or the guys on Escape from Pressure ripping it up all over the world including the one place I really want to go which is the Cocos Islands. In the sunshine. You could be negative and feel jealous or you could be positive and say feckit, I’m going to go there.

If people have surf/windsurf/kitesurf DVDs that they got free from the front of magazines that are functioning as coasters, gathering dust that they don’t want any more, send them my way. I’ll more than make use of them. Don’t really care how old they are provided they are predominantly action and not so much interview. The best surf DVD I own is probably the Customs DVD that came “free” with the Billabong Odyssey DVD. Yeah, the big waves were cool but still….

Le principe est simple, il suffit de laisser vos cheveux sécher à l’air libre… vous qui n’aimez pas les coiffures ultra sophistiquées qui nécéssitent à la fois de maîtriser une certaine technique et du temps, vous voilà comblée. Cette coiffure zéro effort et maxi effet est la coupe qu’il vous faut.

All these years I’ve been doing the right thing. Letting my hair dry except on those occasions where I wanted to impress someone tall dark and handsome.

The thing is, stupidly, it doesn’t actually tell me what the suitable cut actually is. I mean, fringe, or no fringe. I have a fringe that is “too long” at the moment, but the hair dressers are all busy (recession, what recession…oh we don’t have recessions on Fridays, that’s fine then).

It just says “feck your hair away to hell, it’s not like you care, right?”

This is an exact combination of useless to me. The sun is in and out and in and out and in and out so much so that frankly it’s confusing me. The reality is not matching the forecast anywhere near adequately. Meh.

But I have plans for this evening when the tide in and the sun is going down. I don’t know where those plans are yet – Portmarnock or Dun Laoghaire probably.

Apart from the fact that it is one of the greatest windsurfing films made – I don’t think I am alone in saying that – there’s a great music sound track. It’s as a result of Escape from Pressure that I wound up searching for a track called Escape from Pressure on iTunes (it’s by the At Home Project if you’re interested), and also buying an album by Uusi Fantasia. All obscure music that is a) brilliant and b) unknown here.

Watersports DVDs are hot for this kind of stuff. The Billabong Odyssey DVD came with a free freestyling DVD called Customs which I’ve watched more often than I have the one I paid 27.99 for.

There’s some great stuff on the kitesurfing DVDs as well. One of the Cabrinha ones, Catalyst, has really good stuff on it and Cabrinha have thoughtfully put most of that online if you want to see it. They also have a short clip for their 2010 gear which has a terrific track on it which I’ve so far failed to identify. Click on 2010 Switchblade and feast your ears on something or other.

It’s all Cabrinha’s fault. And Andre Phillip. It’s his fault more than anything. I have him on FaceBook (just don’t ask why) and he posted a link to a new Cabrinha video link pushing the 2010 Switchblade kites. The clip was filmed in Antigua.

This is not anything new of course – quite a lot of Catalyst was done in Antigua as well – but on the day in question, the weather was not all that great, I couldn’t lay my hands on a piano and frankly the thoughts of dropping everything to go to Antigua and play in Andre Phillip’s slider park were very attractive.

So I did some thinking. I was supposed to go on holidays in November but we can “delay” that and maybe go at New Year’s Eve instead. I’ve worked the last 4. So I went to see how you might get to Antigua from Ireland and discovered you fly to the UK and give British Airways or Virgin Atlantic quite a lot of money and after about 10 hours you wind up on Antigua.

If you want to go for NYE, that is. BA came back with something like two and a half grand from Dublin including an Aer Lingus flight to London. Virgin came back with nearer three grand. And that was before I discovered something I hadn’t know. Antigua is popular for weddings and honeymoons which sucks if you’re travelling on your own to go play in a slider park. Repeated requests for hotel accommodation came back with fantastic figures, such as 6000E.

Eeek. NYE not such a hot deal for Antigua then.

But I am nothing if not determined and when one of my friends saw this yesterday, she is equally determined that I go. Just not for New Year’s Eve. I am not looking at going at the start of February before the schools in Ireland are looking for holidays. I can work the flights more easily around then, and now all I have to do is pick kitesurfing brains for accommodation that is not designed for the ultimate in Romantic Honeymoons because a) I’m single and b) not getting married any time soon but that is designed to be near the kite beaches.

So if you know anything…including Dre’s phone number, I’m all open.

I am so up for this. The summer has been spent doing stuff that was not a) kitesurfing or b) kitesurfing photography because I have just had so much other stuff on the go. Boo to that too. I have been slagged by a few people for not making it out. The one suitable day I wound up taking photographs. I have zero confidence and am mightily cheesed off about this. The other day I drove to Cork to go kitesurfing – that’s a 3 hour drive – in the hope that the wind would cooperate and stay cross on. It did not. It swung around to directly off shore so I didn’t get to go kitesurfing. I was mightily cheesed off by that too. The friend I have down there was very sorry on my behalf. Bad things happen, I said but bad things are happening far too often and I have so little confidence about flying a kite now that I’ll be back to square one soon.

I want to go kitesurfing for New Year’s Eve. Don’t give a toss where although Tarifa is an option as is Tenerife. But either options require me being able to kitesurf before I get there and frankly I’ll need the weather to swing around SE for me if I’m to get water time in Dublin, else, feck it anyway.