My beer’s fermentation has pretty much completely mellowed out, so a couple days ago I transferred it from the plastic fermenter to the glass carboy. I did a fairly decent job at my first siphoning attempt, though I did lose suction a couple times throughout the process. Sometimes foam would travel up the tube from the carboy, and once it reached the racking cane it would lose all suction.
Frustrated with trying to get the siphon going again, I eventually gave up and pitched the leftover beer that was in the fermenter. Fortunately there wasn’t a whole lot left, and much of it was sediment anyway. In the end, I only soaked one pants leg with spilled beer.
In a week I’ll get to fire up the fermentation again, and start bottling my beer. It’s no stretch to say that I’ll probably still get at least 36 bottles of beer out of this deal. That’s good, because down at The Sandbar I’m starting to owe a lot of people beer. These days I’m riding without a board leash, which is quite pleasant and very convenient most of the time. Sometimes, however, I’m getting chewed up by gusts and ending up blown 75 feet downwind of my kiteboard, at which point I depend solely on the good graces of other kiters.
I mean, I’m not a total wanker. While kiting today I must have lost and retrieved my board five times or so without assistance. Usually it’s only ten or fifteen feet away, which is a totally manageable distance, but once today I had to spend a couple minutes relaunching my kite… and that’s all it took for my board to make a break for it. Seriously, when kiteboarding is fun, it’s freaking fun. But when kiteboarding is bad, it’s freaking bad. Luckily, I still have have a 100 percent success rate when it comes to not dying in the pursuit of this sport.
As for that kiteboarding mime who’s been hanging around, I think his days are numbered.
I think I’m actually looking forward to the wind picking up, because once it starts blowing stronger with more regularity I’m going to spend more time windsurfing. While it comes with its own unique challenges, windsurfing is a sport that doesn’t frighten me nearly as much as kiting. If the wind is light I’d rather be out kiting than riding on some huge-ass windsurf gear, but if the wind is nuking I’d be much happier tearing it up on a windsurfer than fighting a kite.
Perhaps tomorrow will be the day. Matters are kind of complicated by the fact that I don’t actually have a windsurf board, but it sounds like our rental shop is willing to help me out during these first few weeks. I might need to tweak my sail quiver a tiny bit as well, but it seems like the rest of my rig components are solid.
Kiteboarding. Windsurfing. I can throw punches from both sides of the bar.
