Dirk Hanel ::: Kiteboarding

The forth stop of the KTE Tour braought us to the nice location in Silvaplana,  it is a lake up in the mountains 1800 m high which is just so beautiful and different to all what we usually have!  You are riding in fresh water and you have nice woods going all the way down to the lake, but then when you look up to the peaks of the mountains they are still snowcovered and it is just so amazing to be able to ride there!

Due to the hig altitude though the wind has not the same power as on sealevel! Friday the first day had an amazing good wind and the organizers went for freestyle. The racers went out for some training and fotosessions on this amazing location! We where all fully powered with 14 square meter kites and even in the end 12s could have been used. Unfortunatly after the singles the call was for completing the doubles instead of doing some races!

Saturday morning the weather looked really promissing for another strong thermic day of wind, but as we where in the mountains it can also be completly different and weather changes in split seconds are quite common and therefore also really dangerous! we tried to start one race but had to abbandom it one minute before the green flag as out of the blue a thunder storm came over the corvatsch! So no races!

Sunday looked really bad for wind and just a few minutes before the official starting time was over the startboat meassured 10 to 12 knots on the water and we did one race , once again in really light conditions to get a result!  I got 5th and started my journey back home!

Last event in Poland will now be interessting and lets hope for more luck and more win so also the racers can have some races in strong winds like we had in Podersdorf!

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