With just a couple of days at home it felt more like a pit stop, a quick change bags then back onto the airport runway. Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands will be home for the next two weeks, not that we’ll have much time for lounging around if the wind stats can be believed. The freestyleers were already living out there twisted lives, flipping form one distorted move to the next.
I haven’t seen a world cup freestyle event for two years; boy has the standard gone through the roof. The complexities of the moves are just incredible, but amazingly they almost never fall.
The action looked fantastic and as the final got closer I couldn’t leave my camera in it’s bag any longer. Watching through the lens just brought me closer to the action, I clicked away with each spin and turn and thought I must have some amazing pictures.
Back in the room with everything downloaded on the laptop it all looked so different, all the action was there, yet some how there still seams to be something missing. I talked to JC about it, the next day. John Carter has to be the best windsurfing photographer around; I figured he’d have the answer to why the pix don’t shine on the screen.
It seams the answer is easy, only video captures the true magic of freestyle, that’s not to say you can’t have great stills. A sequence of pictures tells the hole story, but for a single shot there’s almost only one shot that works for me and that’s when they’re in the air, Woody from toy story could only describe the others as falling with style.
Speed was the competition that brought Sotovento to light in the later eighty’s. Back in the day you would only find speed sailors hurtling along the endless Sotovento beach. Like most of the island, that small event has expanded and now encompasses almost every discipline.
The night we arrived it was already the closing ceremony for the slalom guys and girls. Kite surfers had also had the time on the speed course, though looking at the injuries it didn’t look like the course was working so well. And after our speed the kites are back for there own freestyle and course racing.
This is one huge event, yet it still relies on the wind, and the day the course opens up for us, the wind just shuts off. Who said we would have time to sit around, that’s all we’ve had time for the last couple of days. Right now the wind is zero, we’re still on stand by as anything can happen here… at least its hot and sunny
