York Corner
Two Saturdays ago, when we were taking in the scenery at the western end of Long Sands in late afternoon, we spied what we thought was a kite, bright blue and looping, veering, swooping and wheeling, high in the air at the opposite end of the beach.
When we got there, we discovered it was not so much a kite as a parasail, or aerofoil - a strip of what appeared to be eight or 10 feet or so of nylon, maybe five feet wide at its broadest and tapering somewhat at each end, with multiple strands of cord leading off those ends. The multiple cords fed into two cords, one descending from each end, down to a bar manipulated by the handler below, whose aim, we discovered, was to cup the wind, to harness its pulling power.
"Kite-surfing," this is called, said the handler when we approached, as he used one hand to wrestle with the kite while dragging a homemade adult-sized tricycle back up the beach with the other. He was trying to learn, he explained, how to get the wind to give him a ride down the beach on the tricycle, in a new sport that's being practiced on both land and water - and he very graciously stood with us for some time to identify himself and elaborate on it all.
He was Chris Frantz, he said, a native of Stonington, Conn., who is now a resident of Kittery; he'd earned a degree in computers and business from Bentley College, in Boston, Mass., in 2002, he reported, and was drawn to this region by his job as a software engineer for Liberty Mutual.
Kite-surfing has been around for between five and eight years, he told us, and its forms are as varied as the surface beneath its kites - ocean water, lake water, beaches, mountains, snow.
"It depends on what you're on," is how he put it.
A conventional ocean surfer, he called kite-surfing "something to do when there's no surfing - or when there's an on-shore wind."
His own vehicle that day, the tricycle, was built for the flat beach and had been cobbled together imaginatively out of scrap material by three of Chris's surfing buddies, Mike Clarke, Tim Adams and Jason Orr, all of whom work as engineers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Its wheels were from a kid's BMX bike, its seat (with a back) had originally been a lawn chair and its foot-rests were the bike's handlebars, inverted. A hook in front of the seat, Chris said, was to hold the kite bar once its handler got proficient enough to go "no hands," and the whole thing was painted black.
But, in fact, the "buggy," as he called it, was only a month old, and this was only its first design and second trial, so that "improvements are to come," Chris said.
Chris himself was also completely new to the sport, he confessed, and so was using a small kite - one, he said, of about three square meters, in contrast to what he called more "normal" sizes of 10 or 15 square meters.
His goal: to learn how to control both the kite and the buggy simultaneously- no easy task, we could see as we watched for some time after we finished talking.
On that day, the sea was as flat as glass, with only the slightest ripples of waves where it met the shore. But there still was quite a wind ("on-shore is good, and side-shore is best"), the air was cold, and a barrier of ice floes piled up all along the shore at high-water levels heightened the challenge.
With the kite raised and pulling steadily, Chris would ease himself into the buggy seat and move along smoothly for perhaps 10 yards, then have to leap out of the contraption and race about, pulling on the kite bar frantically to keep the kite from plummeting into the ocean.
And when the kite did fall, even though not in the ocean, he'd have to approach it to straighten out all its lines before flying it again.
We would've given up long before Chris did, but he'd been there, he reported, for about two hours before we met him, and we watched as he kept up until what little sun there had been dropped below the houses on Long Beach Avenue.
Jason Orr, one of the buggy-builders who introduced Chris to kite-surfing, was then kite-surfing in Chile, Chris had told us.
As the cold began to etch into our bones, warm Chile - if not kite-surfing - began to grow in appeal…
Folks interested in learning lots more about kite-surfing, Chris told us, can visit a shop called Power Line Sports, in Seabrook, N.H.
