Water & Wind: Extreme Kite Flying

By Jon Bosworth

“Think of the best part of every sport and mix them all together. It’s surfing, it’s wakeboarding, it’s hang gliding, it’s everything mixed together. Everyone dreams of flying. This is the closest you can get to it for sure.”

Daryl Drown, owner of Extreme Kites in St. Augustine Beach, is a key reason that local beaches have had a new kind of sportsman on their sands this past summer.

“We were the first retailer of power kites in the US and we are still one of the largest in North America. Right here in little St. Augustine,” said Drown.

Drown grew up in Cape Cod, Mass. He’s been a skater since the fourth or fifth grade, “when skateboards turned from banana boards to street boards.” Drown then moved on to snowboarding in the ‘80s, and he’s been flying power kites for a couple of decades now. As his interest in kites and extreme sports grew, he and a group of others developed the sport of power kiting by incorporating large foil and inflatable kites into wakeboarding, surfing, buggies and snowboarding.

A relatively new and increasingly frequent sight at local beaches, power kites are enormous sails with long tethers. Extreme sports enthusiasts defy gravity with these aerial anomalies to take their favorite sporting activities on the land and on the sea to the next level. A power kite used with a surfboard, for instance, can help the surfer get 10 to 15 feet of vertical loft when executed correctly.

The enormous kite catches the wind and propels whatever is under your feet, be that a landboard (which is like a cross between a skateboard, a snowboard and a monster truck), a kite buggy, a wakeboard, a surfboard, or a snowboard. Originally, Drown and his ilk would combine large kites with these other sports to create a similar effect to power kiting, but now they are making kites specifically for this purpose.

Foil kites are for land and mountain use because they are lighter and easier to get into the air. Inflatable kites are most commonly used in the water so that when the kite comes down it doesn’t just fill with water like a capsized sail and sink.

It costs anywhere from $500 to $2,000 to get started, and the learning curve is aggressive. But most people get the hang of it fairly quickly.

“It’s easier and more user-friendly than windsurfing, because it takes a lot less wind. You only need 10 to 15 knots with a power kite, but you need 25 to 30 knots to have any fun windsurfing,” said Drown.

He has been in a few minor crashes and he’s seen some pretty bad ones, from people running into poles to getting tangled in the tethers. The sport can get messy, but for the most part, the people who wipeout or get injured are the ones not using their equipment properly, said Drown.

“If you learn correctly, it’s a very safe sport,” he said.

How long it takes to learn the sport can vary. A wakeboarder or windsurfer will pick it up faster than someone that has no experience with similar outdoor sports that involve balance, gravity and inertia. But it takes daily and weekly practice to excel.

“There are some young guys around here riding in the top ten percentile in the world,” said Drown, but any age can access this sport. Drown is in his mid thirties and he knows people that continue to ride into their seventies. It’s as simple as flying a kite (while strapped to a surfboard).