Com uma média de 4h de kite por dia não à tendões que resistam, como tal estou com uma bela duma tendinite no braço, restou-me para não variar passar o dia a beber uns sucos e a ver a carvana a passar!!!
Contudo, não foi tudo tão mau porque o vento hoje esteve fraco o que fez com que não me sentisse tão mal!!!

A disfrutar de uma Brasilazy no Duro Beach

Jantar com o Daniel Gifford no Porto Azzul

De TOPIC ter com o SLINGSHOT TEAM

Our kite surf courses and lessons are appropriate for both beginners and intermediates. Year round wind and great scenery make kite surfing in the Algarve really special. Our setting is the shallow warm water estuary of Alvor, a stones throw from the exciting town of Lagos. The northerly wind the ‘Nortada’ filters through the mountain range of the Serra de Monchique creating perfect year round conditions for kite boarding in the Algarve. The predominant wind in the Algarve especially between the months of May-Oct with June through to Sept being the best is the northerly wind the ‘Nortada’. The wind usually picks up through the morning until about 2o’clock when it blows it’s strongest at 25 knots. The Alvor estuary is one of the best spots to learn kite boarding in the Algarve and is one of the stops in the professional kite surfing world tour each year. The estuary itself is adjoined to the ocean and hence as well as a beautiful setting is also a safe one. With the Atlantic Ocean just the other side of the sand dunes, providing another perfect setting for kite surfing albeit with the more advanced kiters looking for an open ocean experience and from time to time some waves as well. The quality of the water is very clean and is usually between 17 & 20 degrees warm.

…a longterm photographic series i’m working on.

{all photos © julia schiller}

Since finishing the Worldwide KAP Week 2009 Book, I’ve had more time to do photography, and to at least attempt to do KAP.  Last weekend I got out of the house for a few hours to do some KAP up on Mana Road, a dirt track that runs from Waimea to Mauna Kea’s Summit Road on the south side of the mountain.  The weather in Waimea was rainy, and my plan was to keep driving up Mana Road until I came out above the clouds.  This worked out better than I thought, and I eventually got to do some KAP at a large water shed.

The photo received some positive comments when I posted it on Flickr, including one from someone who said how much they enjoyed seeing pictures of Hawaii that don’t appear in the tourist literature.  In looking through the photography I’ve done, I realized a good percentage of it has been done at beaches, or in places that are stereotypically tropical Hawaii.  I hate getting stuck in a rut, so the comment on the water shed photo was timely.  Exactly the kind of direction I need!

Yesterday my wife took my daughters to dance, so my son and I threw our stuff in my Jeep and headed out.  My plan was to hike out to some remote kipukas on the slopes of Mauna Loa and try my hand at KAP there.  The wind was favorable, but as it turns out the weather wasn’t.

A kipuka is a forested cinder cone that has been surrounded by fresh lava.  This cuts off the kipuka from the surrounding area, making it a pocket ecology.  Kipukas are common wherever there are cinder cones out on a relatively flat area near an active volcano.  The saddle between Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea has dozens of kipukas that host native Hawaiian flora, and numerous endemic Hawaiian birds.  My son packed binoculars to do some bird watching, and I packed my KAP gear.

By the time we got to the turn off to Mauna Kea Summit Road, it was obvious our plans had to change.  A line of clouds was blowing through the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and already the area we were planning to hike was covered by clouds.  Rather than turn around and call it a loss, we pulled in at Puu Huluhulu, a large kipuka situated at the turn off to Summit Road.  My son and I have hiked this area frequently, and it’s a favorite of ours.  I had some level of hope that we could reach the top before the clouds rolled through, and that I could get a kite and camera airborne before things socked in.  But the clouds moved faster than we did.  By the time we got to the top everything was an opaque mass of white.  My kites stayed in my bag, but my camera didn’t.  A day that’s bad for kite aerial photography is often a good day for ground photography.  The most obvious subject to work with was the twisted trees that grow on Puu Huluhulu.  It’s trees like this that originally inspired the art of bonsai.

But there were a number of other subjects that also drew my eye.  Completely overcast skies often make for poor landscapes, but they make for great macro photography.  This plant is about as big as my palm, though the adult plants grow much larger.

When the clouds and the wet and the cold finally got to be too much, my son and I hiked back to my Jeep.  The misty photography and macro photography felt good, but I was still disappointed that we were packing it in and turning around.  But then I remembered just how close the far end of Mana Road was.  Even better, Mana Road does lead back to Waimea.  It’s not the smoothest ride home, but it was a chance to keep the day from ending before it had really started.  I asked, my son said yes, so we headed out Mana Road.

Not too far in we ran across a really picturesque stream bed.  The water wasn’t running, which was a little surprising given the amount of rain the area had received recently, but we were fairly high up so things had probably drained well before we got there.  The clouds that had made KAP at Puu Huluhulu impossible had cleared the air between Mauna Kea and Puu Oo, one of the two active vents on Kilauea.  The two steam plumes from Puu Oo and from the lava flow entering the sea near Kalapana were both clearly visible.  I set up my tripod and lined things up to make a panorama.  When I metered the sky and the ground, however, I found I couldn’t get both the foreground and the steam plumes in the same shot.  The sky was just too bright, and the overcast sky made the foreground too dark.  So I wound up shooting it as an HDR panorama.  It wasn’t quite the look I was after, but it served to balance the two strongest elements in the frame.

By the time I’d finished the panorama, my son had hiked up slope to a really pretty tree.  Rather than follow, I hiked down the stream bed until I reached the pools I’d spotted while photographing the panorama.  The overcast sky made for nice reflections, so I arranged things for a low angle shot that would pick that up.

The same soft light that made for good close-up photography on Puu Huluhulu also made for nice macro photography here.  Some recent experiments at work using CombineZP made me want to try the technique in the field.  The idea is to take pictures at a range of focuses, and use CombineZP to take the sharpest part of each shot and combine them into a single image with infinite apparent depth of field.  I don’t know how enamored I would be of this if I didn’t have CHDK running on my A650.  One of my favorite scripts is a bracketing script that will bracket whatever your last control setting was.  I use it to do HDR photography, but it can also be used for CombineZP.  The A650 can be set to do manual focus, so once MF is selected, the bracketing script can be set up to rack focus through a nice wide range, taking pictures along the way.  I set this to do 37 focus positions, shifting by 3 clicks in focus each time.  (The A650 has well over a hundred focus positions, so techniques like this are quite straightforward.)  When I got home I put the files into CombineZP, and got this in return.

A few miles down the road my son spotted nene off to one side.  I stopped and got out, with some faint hope of photographing them.  Unfortunately the A650 doesn’t have much in the way of long focal length in its zoom range.  I’ve tried several times to photograph nene with my 20D, but light, weather, or the patience of the birds has always thwarted my attempts.  I was overjoyed to find these geese to be very patient with me.  They let me get quite close without reacting much at all.  I was happy to walk away with a couple of good photographs of them.

Mana Road is miles and miles of beautiful scenery that changes every time you go around a bend.  I’ve been out on it several times, and each time there is something different to photograph.  I still haven’t figured out quite how I’d like to photograph the koa forest the road winds through, so that’s still one I have to return to once I have a clear idea in mind.  Just past the koa forest, though, the road became quite muddy.  At one point the road dropped away entirely, and I was looking out past my Jeep’s hood into space.

I’m sure there are those who would give a loud “WHOOP!” and hit the gas, but I’m not one of those.  I hit my brakes, turned off the engine, and got out to look.  I saw a muddy slope with about a 25% grade, maybe 40′ high, and covered in skid marks.  I wasn’t keen on the idea of driving it, but of course I had to photograph it!

The wind was too gusty to get a stable kite shot, so I opted for my 20′ carbon fiber pole.  This is a converted breem pole I picked up for $20 and stuck a ball head on for photographic work.  Setting up the shot took about as much time as setting up a tripod, and the CHDK intervalometer script meant I didn’t need to remotely trigger the camera.  All that was required was a little patience waiting for the “click!” sounds coming from the camera, and lining things up between shots.

After photographing my Jeep and the slippery slope, I wound up backing out and going down the lower road.  This avoided the inevitable skid, and got us back on track.  A little further down the road we came across a water shed.  This is smaller than the water shed I’d photographed the previous week, but being closer to the road it offered more opportunities for close photography.  These water sheds are essentially large catchment systems used to collect rainwater for the cattle that graze in the surrounding fields.  The roof of the shed has gutters that are piped into the tanks.  When it rains (which it does quite frequently) the rainwater runs off the roof, through the pipes, and into the tanks.  The water in the tanks is then diverted to troughs for the cattle to use.

I’ve driven past this water shed several times, and have made numerous attempts to photograph it.  But I’ve been disappointed with the results.  I know the picture I’m after, but I just never managed to get it.  This time I got close.

Ideally I’d have liked to be about five to six feet to the right, and aimed the camera more to the left.  Unfortunately there’s a barbed wire fence in the way that makes that angle painful, if not impossible.  I’m still working out how to get the shot I’m after, but this one worked out better than the others I’ve tried.

I did finally get a kite airborne once.  I was on the leeward side of a stand of trees, so the air was minimal and tossy at the ground, and blowing like a freight train higher up.  Kite handling was rough, heavy, and not fun at all.  I clipped on my KAP rig and tried to do some photography of a water tank that’s managed by the water department.  With the wind through the trees and the altitude of the rig, I couldn’t hear the shutter whenever I told it to take a picture.  So it was no surprise when I got home and saw that the only picture I had from the one KAP session of the day was a picture of my feet when I tested the shutter on the ground.

Ah well…

So it was the KAP outing that wasn’t, but I still had a good time.

- Tom

<< GO BACK

If you cannot live without the journey sport of kiteboarding, then what you need is the Cabrinha Crossbow. The company that makes the Cabrinha Crossbow, Cabrinha Kites, was the idea of Pete Cabrinha. Pete was a huge wave surfer from the U. His dedication to water sports events has made him an excellent and a pioneer in his field. He has additionally been presenting kitesurfing appliances to help others like him enjoy water sports too.

Thanks to the foil-like shape, both the rear as well as the front-lines of the Cabrinha Crossbow can get attached to the forefront. There are a sequence of pulleys that permit the bar to enhance the depower, and there is not any Recon or 5th line, either.

Using the Cabrinha Crossbow is easy also and is completely safe when the user is adequately trained. All you’ll need to do is just pull the rear line and the kite will roll over and relaunch. The Cabrinha Crossbow is sure to be plenty of fun for the rider who loves the massive air and the waves. The Cabrinha Crossbow uses the corporation’s exclusive IDS technology and that is why it is typically known as Cabrinha Crossbow Ids.

Each and every Cabrinha Crossbow and all of the other products are hand tested by real folk in extreme water and wind conditions, which is how you can be sure that they may always deliver quality products.

The company makes various kinds of kites like the Convert, Cabrinha Switchblade and naturally the Cabrinha Crossbow. When you pair a kite with a board from Cabrinha like the Prodigy, Rival, Cabrinha Custom, Plasma or the Caliber, you’ll have something that’s just excellent for the lake or surfside wakes. you will still have to make sure that you’ve got the correct fins, bindings, and harness, and that everything is stowed correctly in the bag for the entire kiteboarding package.

2010 Cabrinha Crossbow

The 2010 Cabrinha Crossbow is the speediest kite in its class in the world. In fact, the Corporation has put in years of refinement and the result is there for all to see – it is the best performing free ride Race kit that you’ll be able to find. It has the capacity of winning the most competitive course races in the world like the U.S. It is among the 3 kites in the world that will beat the velocity barrier of 50 knots. It is, actually, the essence of security, flexibility, control, and speed.

Cabrinha Crossbow 9M

The legacy of the 9M continues and it remains a leading performance bow kite. Designed for potency and maximum performance, the Crossbow two stands out thanks to the wave, free go reputation and hang-time. Based on the Pro Span extraordinary arc, its performance has improved even more due to reinforced durability, the new sprint and Override systems and the faster flying options.

Are you ready to jump? Just send the kite and you would not be pulled from the edge. Just pull the bar when you are in the air and while coming down, you’ll have to sheet out using the bar to fall under your kite. Extended depower of the Cabrinha Crossbow gives you extended range – it gives you the range of 3 kites. Now you can watch all of your chums using smaller kites as you use your Cabrinha Crossbow. The depower of your Cabrinha Crossbow works on both the unfastened and the hooked riding.

Get to know it all about the amazing Cabrinha Crossbow.
Go through the Crossbow review at http://www.othersideboardsports.com/kiteboarding/cabrinha.html to learn more.

What I’m looking for

is a house
where I can spread myself out like butter,
and converse with light
caught on my shadow.

I’m not looking for a dog, or a mother
or anything but this:

to feel the light course through my body
and know it’s not mine — to know

that I, too, am a house.

When I look inside,
I see light trapped in a cathedral,
rays cutting through my dark places and
filtered in my kaleidescope.

Houses within houses,
boxes nesting within boxes
like silent eggs in straw,
incubating light.

Will you be this for me?

This is all I ask, and all I want of shelter.

© Sarah Noack 2001

Positioning is a big deal for anyone in arenas, but for hunters it is a particular problem. Today I’ll present all the information I can in a concise way on the topic of arena positioning. At the end, I will address all the hunter-specific considerations associated with the same.

The number one thing to remember about positioning is that no matter how good a reason you had to “line of sight” (or LOS) your opponents (and in the process, your teammates), it was a mistake unless you told your teammates that you were going to do it. If you prepare your teammates for a move, then it’s on them to execute it well, but if you don’t call out in advance what you want to do and what you want them to do, then it’s your fault when the shit hits the fan. It sounds easy enough, but most people won’t bother to cue their mic to let everyone know where they’re going, and that’s a huge problem. But more on this later.

There’s really two parts to positioning: defensive positioning and offensive positioning. I’ll talk about defensive positioning first, but allow me define my terms.

Defensive positioning is any movement you take towards a position in order to mitigate the damage you’re taking (or to heal up), whereas offensive positioning is any movement or configuration you and your team takes in order to get a kill on someone. Defensive positioning is the kind of positioning that’s easier to plan in advance, and it becomes a big deal when your healers, in particular, have to make a decision between being in LOS or not. If there’s a serious threat to them when they’re in LOS, such as being mana burned or polymorphed or whatever, then defensive positioning becomes crucial. Your healer should be letting you know that he will be behind such and such pillar healing until he has to run back, so if the pressure gets too intense you know where to fall back to. This was really important in BC where games were slower paced and mana was paramount. Nowadays, it’s not that big a deal unless you’re one of the 20 people on every battlegroup who really takes 2s very seriously. This isn’t to say you should never change positioning during a fight except to facilitate a kill, but it does mean that defensive positioning is something you REALLY don’t want to overthink. Because there is rarely time these days to retreat back to a safer place (and, on some maps, rarely a safe place to retreat to) without totally sacrificing your ability to put pressure on the other team, 95% of the time it’s best to just make sure your whole team is in LOS of each other, especially in 5v5. Outranging or LOSing your healer for a split second in 5v5 will cost you the game. Sometimes, as much as it might kill you, you just have to trust your teammates to do their job locking down the other side’s dps

There’s much more that can be said on defensive positioning in particular, but the only additional comment I will make here regards a mistake I see healers make all the time in 2v2 and 3v3. They tend to panic when a teammate outranges or LOSes them, so they will abandon the pillar they were using to LOS the other team, and come in range of everyone just to get a shield or a heal off. THIS IS NOT GOOD. The healer should see what his dps is doing and where he’s going, and call him back when he’s obviously going too far. It seems so simple, but it so rarely happens. Tunnelvisioning is bad, but healers (like parents who spoil their children too much) encourage it by bending over backwards to keep their teammates alive. As weird as it may sound at first, healing is only part of what a healer does in an arena. He also has to avoid being casted on as much as possible, or being caught out in the open and trained down.

Offensive positioning is a complex issue, and even more complex for hunters so stay tuned at the end for more on that. What you want to do in every game is decide whether you can afford to let the other team come to you. On the one hand, if you wait for them to come to you, you can set up all you want and come up with contingencies for whenever the shit hits the fan. On the other hand, if the team you’re playing needs time at the start of every match to setup and decide how they want to tackle your team, then it comes down to whose planning and/or team composition is better. If, however, you have absolutely nothing to gain by sitting around and waiting for them to attack you, then you can just say screw it all and run in to fight on top of them. I would encourage the latter strategy if your composition has a lot of spammable cc, but obviously this is very subjective advice and sometimes the only way to figure out what you need to do is to lose a couple times. [snip-see comment section for revised example]. So you need to decide with your team on a case by case basis what the best way to tackle any given team is. Just make it clear to your healer that he isn’t a dps class and should really avoid being right in the middle of things when the fight gets underway they seem to forget this fact on a regular basis. The other thing I would caution everyone on is chasing people behind a pillar. Sometimes it’s a great idea, sometimes it’s not, and there’s no reliable gauge for predicting the right choice. Just make sure everyone knows if you want to chase or if you don’t, and if you don’t, be ready to find the next target.

Hunters need to be especially wary of positioning. It can be the pivotal factor against any team we play, more important than differences in gear, skill, and coordination combined. If you run with only 1 healer in 3v3, and 2 in 5v5, then you really want to bring every fight into the open as much as you can. Pets can be hard to micro-manage, and if your healer is LOSing you, he’s probably also LOSing your pet, which will make it difficult to get a roar of sacrifice out in time. In 3v3 if you have a priest or shaman healer, you really want your healer to stay mounted and have him be ready to run as far from the opposing team’s melee as possible. Hunters have notoriously bad peels, and it can be hard to get a warrior or rogue off your healer once he gets on. Additionally, when we are being focused by melee teams, our inability to shoot in melee forces us to kite, but our desire to avoid taking damage prevents us from merely kiting back and forth in a tight formation. Our natural inclination is always to just go really far in one direction until we have to turn around, but it’s important that this impulse be resisted. I can’t tell you the number of times I died right out in the open when my healer was in LOS of me because I dipped out of range for a split second. Disengage is another 2-edged sword (like all of our pitiful excuses for defensive cooldowns) which often takes us farther than we’d like to go, or into random objects that block our path, or off of ledges taking us out of the fight for awhile. Kiting in a sort of small triangle formation is what I’d advocate for in any bracket above 2v2, so that the risk of errors with disastrous consequences can be minimized regarding range and LOS.

Chasing is always dangerous for a hunter, but especially so in dalaran sewers. Attacking someone who is humping those boxes is a good way to get feared/polyed/novad, or swapped to once you’re out of LOS of your healer. On RoV you want to be hyper-aware of the pillars and which ones are going up/coming down. The second a pillar goes down, you need to be ready to find a target and kill it, because once your target gets back to a pillar you’re screwed. Alternately, if you’re being focused, you need to know where to run. The most important thing hunters should remember is that having targets run out of LOS is inevitable, but you MUST be ready for it and switch to another target once your first one escapes (or agree that your teammate is going to chase, and you are going to bide your time).

The ultimate goal of this post was to express to you the importance of making your intentions explicit over vent. All the thoughts you have in an arena regarding who you’re going to burst, cc, and kite/LOS should be mentioned so there is no duplication, and therefore waste, of effort. I still don’t call out my scatters, it’s a terrible habit but I find it so hard to kick =/. Good luck guys, I wish you all success with a fun but tricky class.

-Jurgwena

Ok so extreme sports usually arrive on a Friday, but this article and video from Monday, posted on the BBC news website has got to make it in.

Simply unbelievable, this must have been a massive thrill, but 3 years planning, that’s loads.

The kite surfers jumped in winds gusting at more than 40mph

Two kite surfers from West Sussex took advantage of strong winds on the south coast to realise an ambition to jump over Worthing pier.

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/8362671.stm

On continue avec les tests, et cette fois c’est l’Ile du Vent à Noirmoutier (85) qui nous parle de la Boss 12m² et de la Smoke 9m² 2010.
Les tests sont visibles ici:
- Smoke 9m² 2010
- Boss 12m² 2010
Enchanté par l’essai des voiles, Eric le gérant à décidé de rentrer toute la gamme cette année.
Les voiles seront à l’essai, n’hésitez pas à le contacter, il saura vous conseiller!