Flight School Travel Video duration – 4.32 minutes Guy Stuff Kiteboarding Cabarete, Dominican Republic Travel Video Adventure - Good life Laurel Eastman Professional kiteboarder Well. Kite boarding is the fastest growing water sport in the world. It is super exciting, fun and a little bit extreme. Basically you use one of these things, a big kite and that is just going to pull you across the surface of the water while your feet are on the board. So it’s kind of like a combination of paragliding and wakeboarding with a little bit of jumps thrown in for fun, you get to fly through the air, it is very fun. Well I can see why Cabarete is so popular for this sport because it is so windy here. Yes absolutely, Cabarete is known the world throughout for kiteboarding because the wind here is perfect. So what are the fundamentals of this sport? Well basically when you’re learning kiteboarding, you’ve got to get good at flying the kite, it’s all about controlling that kite. So you learn to fly first on the beach, and then you go into the sea, the kite pulls you along kind of bodysurfing with the kite, it’s easy up until that point. Then we give you the board and it’s another story. The Gear So the first thing is the control bar and here it is, you just hold on to that and it’s all in the steering of the kite, it’s like steering a motorbike not like driving a car, it’s as simple as that…you want to give it a try? Ok So you just hold on and if you pull right, the kite goes right and if you pull left, the kite goes left. It feels easy right now but out in the ocean, in the wind, is it hard to hold on to? It’s a very good point. Now you don’t have to actually hold on to the bar. You take this piece of equipment here and you hook it to your harness. So your harness, you wear around your waist and then all the power goes to the core of your body and you’re kind of leaning back against the kite and now you’re just steering, you can control it with one hand. It’s only about finesse. We have young kids as young as 8 years old trying this sport and they are with a lot less muscle than you, you’re looking pretty strong so I think you’re going to be great. Well so explain a little bit about the board because it looks a lot like a snowboard. Yes it is very similar to a snowboard in that it is a bidirectional board, it has fins on either side so you don’t have to change your feet when you change direction which makes it really easy. Now you put your feet into these the foot straps, into these nice cushy pads so it’s very comfortable and very much like snowboarding or wakeboarding. And what about the kites? Now we have kites in all sizes, if you’re a bigger or smaller person, you’re going to take a bigger or smaller kite. Also depending on how strong the wind is blowing, you choose your kite size. Show Time