A very elaborate kiteboarding road trip, by air!
Up on the Northern tip of Fraser Island, there’s a place called Orchid Beach. It’s a two day trip from Brisbane to get there, through 200km’s of rough sand tracks on Fraser, for which a serious 4x4 is most definitely required. But if you happened to have an aircraft handy, there’s also a landing strip right on the beach, a convenience store for lunch and an amazing beach with huge kiteboarding potential right next to the runway...
Having two pilots on the team helped, so the Kitepower team jumped in two Cessna aircraft packed to the gunwales with kiting gear and took off for the beach. The aircraft, a vintage Cessna 182 built in 1959, and a Cessna 172 from 2013, were definitely not designed with kiteboarding equipment in mind. Hired from the pilots flying schools, taking them into the beach landing strip was a challenging exercise, but nothing compared to trying to fit the kite gear inside! Twintips had to be stacked up on a spare seat, kites were stuffed into the cargo compartments and the rest was left at home to save weight. The passengers even had to load their own baggage!
Within an hour of take-off the first aircraft landed on Fraser island, over 300km away (or 8 hours by car!) and immediately the kiters began pumping up small kites. Picture this, 30 knots, 4m swell, cross off conditions. Perfect for surfboards and 6m kites right? Wrong, because surfboards don’t fit in the planes! So twintips were the order of the day, and the only worry these guys had was the big fish lurking under the waters surface. It was Fraser after all! Sharks over 3m are often sighted just off the beach here, although according to the kiters, not even a guppy was seen!
What an epic way to get to the beach! Check out the video below filmed by Josh Porter, it’s a pretty fun clip and we challenge you not to be at least a little envious!
Cottesloe, WA
