There was no question of Kristin and I windsurfing together. Instead, I was deposited on the New Plymouth beach with Katrin, a 23-year-old German with sun-streaked hair, who had honed her skills in the Baltic Sea.
Katrin showed me my board. To my chagrin it looked more like a small boat than a surfboard. I had seen bathtubs with better aquadynamics. The point of this barge, I gathered, was to provide me with something stable underfoot while I got used to handling the sail.
Katrin went over the basic pieces on the beach. Mast, boom, sail, uphaul. I had sailed on yachts. This was a miniature version of the same, I figured, only now I got to be captain. Katrin and I put on wetsuits and waded into the water. A brisk breeze was blowing across the beach, but we were in a protected harbor. At worst I was likely to blow into the marina, about a mile downwind, and have to walk the barge back up the beach. Should I somehow blow beyond the breakwater, it was more than 1,200 miles across the Tasman Sea to Australia.
Katrin hopped on the board and hauled the sail out of the water. (Starting with a full sail, which is considerably more graceful, would come later.) Right away she began moving at a rapid clip away from the beach. She receded for a minute, turned around in a single smooth maneuver, and headed back my way. It couldn’t have looked easier. “You try it,” she said, handing over the contraption.
I got on. I kneeled. I crouched. I grabbed the uphaul, which is a cord attached to the mast, and began to heave. The sail came up a little. I wobbled, dropped the sail, lifted it up again, and buckled and wobbled some more. I expected this to go on for a while, but suddenly the mast and sail came clean out of the water. I was so surprised to be standing up, mast in hand, that I forgot what to do next. Fortunately, my whale of a board held me steady while I adjusted to the new state of affairs. “Grab the boom,” Katrin called. Convinced that this would send me flying into the water, I followed her instructions and found, to my surprise, that I still stood. In fact, at some point I had started moving and was heading across the bay toward a docked trawler. Katrin paddled after me in a surf kayak.
As I got used to the tug of the wind, I completely forgot about the possibility of falling and the fact that the water was cold. My first big splash came as a shock. I clambered back aboard with chilly water oozing up my sleeves and down my neck. Then I did it all again.
Since mono-directionality is limiting, Katrin showed me how to tack, which is to turn by bringing the nose of the board across the wind. Then we moved on to steering, and she urged me to slalom back and forth. Anything, it seemed, could be accomplished through proper angling of the body, the mast, and the boom. Getting them all to work in concert was possible, I felt sure of it. I splashed into the water again. Anything could be accomplished except sailing directly into the wind.
I spent the next two hours going back and forth with no great dexterity or speed. It can’t have been much to watch, but for me, it was thrilling. Katrin eventually retreated to shore, and I eventually relaxed enough to take in my surroundings. Sailing toward the beach, I noticed how Mount Taranaki, a perfect snow-capped volcanic cone, rose into the blue sky beyond the town. Maybe this was how passion began.
I was stripping out of my wetsuit when Kristin arrived. She was psyched that I was psyched. She’s a loyal friend, but to transform me into a proper sports buddy would be so much the better—and mountain biking didn’t exactly look like it was going to pan out. For the moment, though, she had something more urgent on her mind: wind.
It was 5 o’clock, and though she’d been to a beach, she hadn’t been on the water. Kristin is a wave sailor, and the breeze that was strong enough to move my bathtub across the harbor was apparently insufficient to lift a human being, even a small one like her, over pounding surf.
“There’s going to be wind now! James told me where to go!”
She had been making phone calls to a mysterious man named James ever since our drive from Wellington to New Plymouth, holding sotto voce conversations about the weather. This whole sports thing, I was noticing, made you very dependent on the weather. You waited for sun, waited for wind, waited for the low down on conditions. Often, you got very wet. Now there was suddenly no time to lose.
We jumped in the car, board and masts protruding from the window, and drove 8 miles southwest along the Surf Highway. At a dirt road just past the village of Oakura, we turned right and rolled through green pastures down to the beach. There, a lone young German stood next to his van (also evidently his home), gazing intently out to sea. Kristin got out and joined him.
“Not enough wind,” she said. He agreed. They stared. It was so cold and windy that we all put on jackets. I went for a walk. I came back. Kristin and the German were still staring and discussing the wind. “I don’t go out by myself,” Kristin said. “I need a wind dummy.” Someone out there already, that is, to sample the goods and act as a gauge of conditions. Big waves crashed over the rocks, and their white froth sprayed high into the air. Beyond the waves, whitecaps danced across the sea. Sure looked windy to me.
Nothing happened for a while, then a bunch of things happened at once. Kristin ran for the car. “We’ve got a wind dummy! I’m going out!” I looked up from my book and saw, way out on the surf, a bobbing green sail disappear into a trough. The German ran for his van and started hauling masts off the roof. Kristin unfurled a sail on the grass.
There was a crunch of tires on dirt and another car pulled into the parking lot, then another, then another, each one full of wave sailors and gear. Masts, sails, and boards were laid out on the grass. The mysterious James appeared in the flesh and helped Kristin with her downhaul. One by one, the sailors finished rigging up and began to carry their gear across the wide beach, board in one hand and bright-colored sail in the other.
I helped Kristin carry her rig. “If I’m down for an extended period of time, get help,” she said. “And if it all goes wrong, you can have my real estate.” She was kidding. I think. She had sailed in Taranaki once before and had been terrified. Today, though, with years more experience under her belt, she had a higher tolerance for big waves. I wasn’t exactly sure what an “extended period of time was” or if I would even be able to identify her out there. There were now perhaps a dozen sailors on the waves, riding at high speeds, skimming crests, leaping into the air, and disappearing into clouds of sea foam. They were spectacular.
Kristin was the one with the orange sail and the white helmet. She was up. Down. In the air. Out of view. Back in action. She came in tired and frustrated with her own performance. As I reminded her, a move from terror to mere frustration is progress.
The next morning over sausage and eggs, our fretful bed-and-breakfast lady was waving a copy of the Taranaki Daily News. “Bad for tourism,” she said. The above-the-fold headline read, “Sightings of Monster Patrolling Our Coast.” The article began:
Shark fever has hit Taranaki, with multiple reports of encounters with what is thought to be a great white shark.On Friday, a great white estimated to be at least five metres long spent about 20 minutes circling a New Plymouth couple fishing off Oakura.
Was it passion? Or madness? Kristin picked up her phone to inquire about the wind.
