Yo, hope you’re all having some epic summer sessions, I’m still in South Africa for a couple of days where it’s slowly getting colder, writing some boring exams, but we’ll be on holidays next week for a month (sth very odd) so I’ll be travelling to Spain, where I’ll meet up with some awesome buddies, Alvaro Onieva and Co. to have a sick summer holiday, kiteboard, wakeboard, have some fun and get some new footage together.

For now, I’ve got some random shots for you of some kiteboarding sessions I had with good ol travel buddy Pile Brueckmann from last winter which we converted into a little promo for his new awesome kiteschool operating in Sylt (Germany) and Cape Town (South Africa) named “Operation Windfang”.

Since early 2008 I’ve been riding bindings almost 100% of my time on the water.

They brought me tons of fun and I learned some wakestyle specific tricks and I will continue using them when the conditions are perfect, but today I feel as if I had build a wall around me by totally ignoring the advantages of straps.

While bindings are getting lighter every year it becomes easier and easier to do everything on bindings as well, but when it comes to learning new tricks that might not even exist yet in kiteboarding, boots tend to make you very lazy. I did learn the Bel-Air to blind and a couple of new tricks on boots before doing them on straps but in general, it’s easier on straps.

Marbella and Tarifa are also some of the choppiest places on earth, and chop is just deadly for boots.

Now the funny thing is, that I started to ride straps again, after hitting the cable regularly this summer. Part of the reason being that in bindings with chop you can’t get the same speed as on straps or on flat water behind the cable. So actually sometimes you’ll be able to ride more powerful in straps than in bindings!

So the message of the whole story is that kiteboarding isn’t one thing only.  I mean look at how good we have it: While skateboarders will always be limited to riding their skateboard, we can choose between a wakeskate, surfboard, twin-tip, wakeboard or even race-board.

So just go out there on whatever you like and have as much fun as you can!

Here’s a Mute 3 in bindings from earlier this summer (I still ride bindings with nice kickers, flat water or for rails):

A friend has created this little kite-video of our home spot. You wont find any hardcore riding in there, but it’s still fun to watch if you’re just into kiteboarding.