The sun loves us.

I am getting a little tired of saying this, but...it was another beautiful day. (Mother Nature has my back, as it looks like we’re going to be washed out for the bulk of tomorrow. I’m not praying for rain, but...if a little rain means we can rest a bit and do classroom work, so much the better.)

We did a *lot* of running today. I normally get 10K steps or so, and today I got 18600 or so. Not just steps, obviously, as I was hauling the mass of the wing behind me and/or helping to pull teammates (I’ll explain more later).

First things first, today started with no wind and a perfectly blue sky.

We did 3 main activities today: forward launching, kite handling, and tow launching.

For forward launching, you strap yourself into the wing, point yourself downwind, and start running. Just to make things fun, there was a 1-2mph breeze. This was significant as they wanted to play a game where we ran down the beach, turned around, and ran back to the starting point. That meant you had to run much harder on the way back (after using all your energy to get to that point). Basic training had nothing on that.

Next, we were doing “kiting”, or ground handling skills for the wings. Talk about frustrating and exhausting!

Finally, we got to do towed launches. That’s where a couple ropes are tied to you, and then you’re pulled as fast as the people can pull you down a gentle slope. You don’t have a motor, but it means that you have a little more momentum than before, and you get to actually leave the ground, before floating back down and landing. I might have gotten 5 meters off the ground today.

Here’s a video of one of my classmates doing it: For this launch I was filming, but for most of the others I was pulling. Then I found out that someone had caught my top to bottom as well:
On the way home, I saw that the water with this kind of sunset looked like it had quicksilver poured across the top of it;





Wow, I’m really tired.

Again.

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