FIJI AT LAST
They did. I arrived in Nadi along with Naish kite team rider Jesse Richmann (Kevin missed the window and had to compete in Tarifa) and his friend Patri McLaughlin from North. We jumped into our little shuttle vans, theirs taking them to Surf Fiji where they were staying on the mainland, and mine driving me to the dock where the Namotu boat would come and pick me up. Namotu and Tavarua are the two most famous surf resorts in Fiji. Tavarua is much bigger, hosting close to a hundred people on the island. About a mile away is Namotu, which at low tide is only about two hundred metres long and a hundred metres wide…and quite a bit smaller at high tide! It sleeps around thirty people if fully booked. Owned by Australian ex professional windsurfer Scotty O’Connor and his wife Mandy, Namotu has slowly evolved, grown, and transformed over the past thirty years from a rough and bare bones surf camp into a high end, comfortable, unique and very exclusive resort. It is a snorkeling, diving, fishing, surfing, kitesurfing and windsurfing paradise. Though the island was full, and because I was only going to be there for three days, and I knew the majority of the guests on the island (mostly kiters) and they had ok’d it, Scotty was able to squeeze me in!
WARM UP SESSION
My timing was perfect. Arriving mid morning allowed for an afternoon kite session at Cloudbreak. Fellow pro kiter Ben Wilson was also on the island, so we shared one of the open deck outboard boats and made the two–‐mile upwind trek to Cloudbreak from Namotu. If you think rigging windsurfing equipment on a boat is tough, you should try kiting. You have to lay out your lines on land, pump up your kite, connect your lines, deflate your kite, very very very carefully, wind up your lines onto your control bar, pack up your kite and carefully stick it in the boat. Once at the break, you have to back the boat into the wind, carefully pump up your kite, have someone knowledgeable hold it while you even more carefully jump in the water and swim out your lines…then have them launch your kite – hoping that your lines are not twisted etc. etc.! What could possibly go wrong?! The wind was just strong enough to get around and catch some waves on a kite, and the surf was three to four feet (Hawaiian, which means just over head to double over head on the sets) and it was a solid warm up for what was forecast for the next day.