2011 04 02 Chapin Beach

By no means do I have transitions down pat yet, but that's all I was practicing on Sat.  Here's my 2 cents that seemed to start working for me toward the end of the day.

For reference purposes, I will talk about a transition from left to right (left foot forward stance).

I realized that back foot (right leg) pressure is your brake, and front foot (left leg) pressure is your accelerator.  When initiating the turn,  I SLOWLY brought the kite up to 12 to slow down. While doing this I applied a lot of back foot (right leg) pressure to help carve upwind and kill my forward motion.  I then transitioned my body weight from my back foot (right leg) to the front foot (left leg).  Your left leg will now be your "new" backfoot.  While transfering body weight to this "new" backfoot (left leg), push out and straighten your "new" front leg (right leg) and point the board downwind.  While your doing all this weight transfer, dive the kite hard into the power window (5 o'clock) keeping your "new" front leg (right leg) straight and ride out as if your doing a water starts.

I was watching you a little during your transition and it didn't seem like you were powering the kite down into the window hard enough in the opposite direction, so you didn't have enough power to stay out of the water. Also I was told a few things to keep in mind.

1) Carve up wind.

2) Straighten your back leg.

3) Look in the new direction.

4) Weight over your "new" backfoot (left leg).

5) Drive off your straightened new front leg (right leg).

6) If the lip of the board is diving after you change directions, you have too much weight over your new front foot so straighten out your front leg more and lean more over your back foot.  

7) If your catching your toe side edge, the kite is being powered up to 12 too fast, so slow that down.

Just a few observations I made.  Hope an experienced kiter comments on this.

Nice session report & pics!  Although that guy in red isn't the most photogenic... You looked good, handling those gusts like a pro.

My learning style is to experiment and see what helps with a move.  I'm no expert but here are some experiments I've tried for transitions. 

For the board- without even doing a transition try turning the board upwind to let it slide out then pull it back in line,  try it slow and fast, see how it feels. The goal is to be able to do both slow gliding transitions or very fast turn on a dime transitions. 

For timing- try sending the kite early , before you slide the board, or late, after you slide it, see how it feels.  I usually like to slide the board out before I move the kite.   

 For kite power- try to pay attention to where the bar is before and during the transition.  Are you pulling the bar in during the turn without noticing? If you have the bar out during the middle of the turn, (without slowing down too much and sinking), then you can pull the bar in at the end for some extra power when you need it most. How fast you send the kite to the other side also affects power.  You can send the kite slow for the nice gliding transitions or send fast for the quick evasive move transitions.  It's fun sometimes to send it really fast and get a little pop off the water during the turn, you just need to anticipate the amount of pull you 're going to get depending on how fast you send it.  

 O.K. now you can figure out the upwind body drag and give me some tips.