Careful, complete, step-by-step kite lessons; tailored to your individual needs.
We’ve been using our 17 years of experience, with thousands of students, to create a detailed and effective plan for your kitesurf lessons. We realise that each person we teach is unique, and learns in their own way. And we understand that best results will come from adapting a well-thought out, methodical course to your particular learning style.
Accuracy first… speed will follow.
Spending the time to learn best practices (and solid kite control) at the early stages will save you huge amounts of time and effort later. Trying to rush into “getting on the board” in as little time as possible will actually hurt your progress in two ways. One, short-cutting the important steps along the way will increase the risk of injury to yourself (and to others in the area). Two, this ends up taking more time in the long run anyway. Trying to get riding without first developing good control over your kite wastes a huge amount of time. Time spent on recovering from crashes, looking for your board, walking back upwind, untangling your lines, and getting started again. Time that you could better spend focusing on your riding.
So, you’ll find that we take great care to make sure that you have a good understanding of your kite first. We’ll teach you how to be self-sufficient and to take care of yourself out on the water. How to avoid trouble… and how to get out of a tight spot if you need to. And to control how much power is coming from your kite, and where it’s coming from. More about that here.
This always makes the “riding” part of the kitesurf lessons smoother, faster, safer, and easier.
We are committed to the process of continuously improving the quality of your kitesurf lessons. How? By ongoing, careful analysis both our own students’ lessons and others. We look for what works and what doesn’t, and what gets the best results. And by always being on the lookout for new techniques and procedures. We conduct reviews to see which are effective, and how to improve them. And we throw out the ones that aren’t helpful. Each of the many instructors in our school over the years has contributed their own insights and knowledge from a wide variety of locations and teaching techniques.
Is kitesurfing safe? It can be… if done correctly. It depends on you, and how you’ve been taught to handle your kite.
The kites you’ll be using to ride are capable of producing huge amounts of power, quite suddenly. Kite lines can cause serious injury to bystanders. Kitesurfers do get into trouble sometimes, even in accidents. You can see these on Youtube, as well on any kite beach.
But– and this is important– almost without exception, the incidents we see are preventable. Preventable with care, an understanding of good procedures, and proper risk management. So we teach best safety practices, situational awareness, good kite handling, and taking the time to do things right. We always teach with the idea of “Control first, then Power.” Each point of our school’s lesson plan is carefully prepared, discussed among instructors, and thoroughly tested. And our standards are applied by all instructors.
These techniques will allow you to not only to enjoy the ride, but to do it responsibly.
How long will it take? It depends on a lot of things, including how skilled your instructor is at using your time effectively. This blog article goes into more detail.
If this is your first time kiting, we’ll first check carefully for good swimming ability, and ask you about your health before starting any kitesurf lessons. You’ll need to be comfortable in deep water. And, if you have any medical issues that may affect your lesson, we’ll need to know about it. Finding out about your experience with other, related sports like windsurfing, wakeboarding or paragliding will help us adapt the lesson to your strengths. But don’t worry, if this is your first sport involving the ocean, wind, or riding a board– we can still get you there.
If you’ve taken lessons before, we won’t waste your time repeating things that you already know. Quite a lot of the people whom we help already have some kiting experience. So we’ve developed a very specific and time-saving process to separate what you’ve already learned from what we’ll need to focus on. Of course, we’ll still make sure that you have a solid knowledge of the important basics. This includes things like having a thorough pre-launch checklist, the ability to recover your board in deep water, and being able to complete a successful self-rescue. From there, we can move forward to the “riding” part of the lesson.
At Jibes, you don’t need to worry about paying ahead of time, or being locked into a kitesurf lesson package you can’t finish.
With our flexible payment system, you only pay for what you complete from day to day. If you’re on the hourly rate, get free “off-the-clock” Technical Session time. (Technical Sessions look something like this.) And all our lessons are open for free auditing. This means that you can join in other students’ lessons anytime. You can get additional information and learn by watching others do the things you are working on, while the instructor points out useful information.
While you’re here, have a look at the points in our lesson syllabus below. And for more in-depth observations and information, check the Chief Instructor’s Blog. Also, see what our students have been saying about us on the Reviews page.