Teneriffa, Cocos and a Luggage Mess

I was fairly dissapointed by Teneriffa. Even thought the worldcup has been organized very well, I can barely understand how tourists could ever voluntarily choose to come to this place to ride waves or kite. The wind is extremely strong, gusty, and the water more than choppy. Anyways, even though I planned on competing on this stop I dismissed this plan immediately, and rather helped out with the Orga of the event. Also, I got the chance of testing the new Shadow Boxes from California...

The Shadow Box consists of several GPS devices, acceleration-, rotational- and other highly sensitive sensors. For the first time ever in kitesurfing, we are able to actually put a jump into numbers and quantify height, length and duration. Of course I went for a try, and the conditions in Teneriffa (while actually sucking for everything else) are really awesome for high jumps: 50 knots strong wind and 4-5m launching ramps really snatched me into the atmosphere: In the end I reached 17m height, 130m far and 10,4 sec long jumps… I was quite stoked, as I never believed it was that crass!

My return flight home from Tenerifa was quite a shock: my luggage got totally wasted :-( Check the pics, and ask yourself how the heck an airline could destroy things that bad. Anyways, in the end it was not so bad, as they apologized and replaced it! Fair! Also, I was really stoked to get a big newspaper article about my kitesurfing and medicine career. That definitely made up for the crap that happened with my bags :-)

The reason I had been offline for so long was that I took vacation. I know, that people always think I am year around on holidays, but actually some trips can be really frustrating and exhausting. So I took 2 weeks off, and went diving in the Pacific Ocean: Cocos, the biggest uninhabited island in the world, belongs to Costa Rica, and is a huge natural park. Therefore, no electricity,no phone, no internet, no nothing! Only relaxing, chilling, diving, and having fun. A well-needed time out after my exams. What can I say, it really changed me: I realized the world will still spin even though I am gone for some time, and in order to have energy for certain things you need to look at it from a distance to find a new focus and strength! The diving was the best ever, and will hardly be topped: I have seen thousands of Hammerhead Sharks, Tiger Sharks, Whale Sharks, Mantas… and all just an arm-length away!!! Check the pics in the Cocos Gallery !!!!

But now I am back to work: I am flying straight from the Pacific ocean to Mauritius (3 full days of flying!!!!) where I will be attending the 2010 Fone International Dealermeeting for the presentation of the Bandti4 and all new Boards! Even though I have seen all the new products already, it will be great to show them to the public! I will supply you with pictures and updates from there!!! Stay tuned!

Cheers

Jule

04.09.2010. 20:41

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