Storms in Sydney provide perfect boosting conditions!

With storms continuing to sweep through Sydney this week, experienced kiteboarders made the most of the conditions to clock up some airtime, as evidenced by the WOO leaderboards this week.

What’s a WOO? Well it’s that little blue thing all the pro’s are strapping to their boards right now. The leading pro’s anyway, like Ruben Lenten and Kevin Langaree. The device measures height, speed, rotation and all kinds of stuff, but the most interesting (and competitive) aspect of the WOO’s is their online leaderboards.

Kiters from around the world post their highest jumps to see where they stack up compared to the current world leader – Aaron Hadlow with a maximum jump height of 18.9m. He managed that on a 9m Vegas in South Africa, courtesy of the perfect kickers and uber-strong wind, but what could our Aussie riders manage in similar conditions?

Well, conditions weren’t similar this week (as you’ve seen on the news). Kiting in Sydney was like being in survival mode at its best, but Kitepower’s head instructor Alessandro Allori took it on with the school’s 5m Cabrinha Radar, and boosted to 13.8m off Dolls Point. Not bad seeing it’s flat water! Also joining kiteboarding royalty on the leaderboards was Vit from KBL in Sydney, and Elliot Drury from Liquid Force with jumps of 13.2m and 11.1m respectively. They join Dan Sweeney who’s placed third in the 10m+ club for Oceania.

So what makes the perfect jumping conditions? It’s obviously not 50 knots and a 5m Radar in bay chop. It’s probably not even a 9m Vegas in South Africa. With a little more time under it’s belt, the WOO devices could provide some really interesting stats on what kiteboarding’s optimum combination really is!

Well done to the kiters who managed to safely ride in Sydney’s storms last week, and we’re sure there were heaps of kiters up there in the 10m+ range who didn’t have a fancy GPS logger on their boards!