SEND IT!!!

How cool is this shot of my buddy JK at the Laughlin Desert Challenge, the first SCORE event of 2008. Kind of reminds of me Herbie the Love Bug flying through the air. He and his co-drivers (dad (Jack Sr.) & wife (Dani) each participating in one day of the two day event) took THIRD place for their class!!! w00t-w00t!!! You may have seen my previous post on their exploits here, and it seems that they have now moved into 2008 invigorated to kick butt! I’m really psyched for them.

They are known as Team Baja or Bust in reference to the Baja 1000 race at the end of the season. They are supported by ORAF (Off Road Auto Fab) who built and maintain their car. Per JK’s permission, here’s an excerpt from his e-mail discussing the events and the practice session…pretty nuts…

The course is a 7 mile loop, with 80 minutes to complete 6 laps, with two days of racing and placement based upon combined times. The track had sections of very fast straight aways with several jumps that launched the car over 30′ to 50′ forward, and up to 10′ in the air. That was combined with very tight curves with ruts up to 4′ high. Great mix of terrain on mostly sand and mud. ORAF had the car back in fighting shape after the 1000 last year required a new front end, new shock, new engine, new transmission, and re-welding of many parts of the car. If you recall the pictures, it looked like it had been through a war!

Friday was practice running, and about .5 miles into the first lap, I hit a curve a little too hot, hit some deep sand and rolled the car over! Jack Sr. was co-driving, and got to see first hand dirt defying gravity as the car flipped. Help from some fellow races, and we turned it over and got back on track. Added a new small dent to the roof, but everything else was functioning fine.

Practice running was intense, as all vehicles, including 800 HP Trophy Trucks were on the course. One particular jump on a fast straight away, I looked out of my side window when we were about 5 feet in the air after hitting a high speed jump to see the bottom of the tires of a trophy truck about 3′ away, slightly higher then my roof! I was going about 45 mph, he was doing at least 90 mph!

Sat we awoke at 5 a.m. for a 7 a.m. start to a warm sunny day, and after a slow and cautious first lap, times continued to drop, putting us in 7th place with only seconds separating me from the next 4 drivers. Jack Sr did an excellent job of co-driving even after I destroyed his back in the Friday roll over. The course was dry and extremely fast, and the car performed flawlessly. A couple of pictures show us with all 4 off the ground, flying high enough to make the Duke boys look like a couple of wimps. Sat. afternoon after the race all Knight family members took turns at the wheel including Dani and Jack Jr. He was elated to get to drive daddy’s desert race car. Good stories to tell child services when they take me away. The most excited was Dani, and she caused me to hold on hard to the driver T bar while she took some good bumps at speed. She definitely got that look in her eye (those of you who have hung with us late night know what I mean).

Saturday evening after a few tequila’s, it was decided, with Jack Sr’s back out of line, and with some borrowed racing gear from Nicole at ORAF, Dani would co-drive with me on Sunday, the second day of the event.

Sunday however, was a different story weather wise. We woke up to torrential rain and temperatures in the low 40’s and a mud bog of a race course. She just gritted her teeth, and jumped in the co driver seat. All the gear was a bit of shock, as you are strapped in with a 5 point harness, neck brace, race suite, head restraint, gloves, and a poncho to try and stay somewhat dry, but she never complained. Growing up in PA was good experience, as the course was like driving on ice. The ruts were up to 5 feet deep, with small lakes forming all over the course, however just like blizzard skiing, I love the inclement weather.

After a good start we passed our first car on lap one, and then one by one knocked them off until we got up to third place. Dani had to wipe my visor down every few second after the waterfall of mud and dirt dumped into the car like Niagara Falls. (Remember, there are no windshields on a desert race car). We hit the last high banked curve, came through the finish line to cheers, with the news that the team thought we had either 4th or 3rd place! Again the car performed better then a new Maytag washer, with little to no issues, through most of the race. The guys at ORAF really came through for us and had it in tip top shape for the weekend. Nothing less then a miracle what they pulled off. Rulo, the lead engineer on the car had not slept in several days putting it, and his new car together. The results were posted about an hour after the race, and there it was, third place. Congrats to the whole team for their support and drive to help us bring across the great finish. I could not have done it without them.

Next race for the SCORE series is the San Felipe 250 in Mexico in March. A very high speed race through tough terrain.

A special treat from the Washington Post:

Report: TSA Site Exposed Travelers To ID Theft

A House of Representatives panel yesterday released a damning report about a Transportation Security Administration Web site built to address grievances from travelers errantly flagged by the government’s no-fly list. It conlucded that cronyism and a lack of oversight exposed thousands of site visitors to identity theft.

I’m getting tired of seeing security theatre lulling the public into a false sense of security only to open up greater dangers that were preventable had the knee-jerk reaction that brought the TSA into being not been acted upon. Oh well.

Here are a couple of good books for those who want to better understand the challenges of dealing with the unpredictable and the fact that these events don’t actually happen as much as the media would have you believe, nor are they predictable or preventable:

• Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner
• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Both of these books provide a sobering view of spectacular (and some not so spectacular) events in addition to some worthwhile insights to keep in mind.

This is super cool.  As I was catching up on my blog reading, I picked this tidbit off of Marc Andreessen’s blog, that he titled “Where can I buy one of THESE?“.  Well, that got my attention as I love remote control toys, especially of an aerial nature.  You have to check out the video below.  Imagine being in control of a plane and flying without having to risk death :)

Just when I thought I had heard it all, here comes a new sport (if you can call it that given that you’re just “hanging around”, pardon the pun), and it’s called Cluster Ballooning.

The history behind this sport is actually pretty interesting as there’s been some urban myths about this sport, though the reality is far more interesting. A great summary of this can be found on Snopes. The Cluster Ballooning site shows step by step pictures of how it all gets set-up. Definitely worth checking out.

If the links above don’t work for whatever reason, you can get to the Cluster Ballooning site at this URL: http://www.clusterballoon.org/intro/intro.html.  There’s also a QuickTime slide show here.

I recently attended The Lobby Conference on the Big Island of Hawaii from October 24th through the 26th.  It was put together by David Hornick, a venture capitalist with August Capital.  The event brought together a really bright group of entrepreneurs along with top folks from several media and tech companies, to mingle and share their thoughts on where things are heading in this fast pace interactive online world.  But for three of us, it was also about kitesurfing a new island :)  Bill Tai, Saar Gur and I were on e-mail for the two days leading to the event deciding on times and locations for our kitesurfing rendez-vous (plural, if there is such a thing in this French term).  We were as maniacal as being in the Bay Area deciding which spot we are going to kite on any windy day.  The kitesurfing addiction is not to be taken lightly.

Rather than to recount this, let me point to Bill’s blog post on our adventure here.   Suffice to say, we pretty much got skunked for the first two days that we could go, Wednesday and Friday, but managed to get a good 30-45 minutes of riding on Saturday before the winds died and left several kiters stranded off-shore.  Fortunately, Bill, Saar & I had just come in as the winds dropped so we came away without incident and happy to have gotten some nice warm water riding in a truly inspiring location.

For all of you who think that kitesurfing or snowkiting are pretty dangerous and crazy sports, here’s another that brings in an extra dose of “hurt yourself pretty badly if you mess up”.  Most of the guys caught on film seem to have things under the control, but something tells me that the accident to happy flight ratio has to be pretty high.  Check it out…

I’m still trying to figure out if we should call this an extreme sport or just extreme stupidity, but then again who am I to judge?  In the end, all I can really say is that I’m glad to see these boys psyched to…SEND IT!!!

Well, it didn’t take long for this to make it on to YouTube, but here’s Jeff Kafka doing his thing.  Note that Jeff has been a surfer for a very long time and is one of those crazies that has surfed Mavericks on numerous occasions, so he’s not unfamiliar to this territory.  As you’ll see, he’s the only one that was captured riding the BIG wave head on.

The pics that I previously posted were nice and clear, and while the swell was obviously big, it still looked like a nice fun ride. Well, now for another view of the same day, perhaps one could say a more ominous view…

…and…

…and…

These pics were taken by someone named “pdogg”, who posted them on one of the iKitesurf.com forums. Having been out riding just a couple of miles away, I can tell you that the previous pics were more representative of the day in all its sunny glory, but these pics offer another cool perspective.

My good buddy Gabe Brown (aka. Gary Bronson) recently put up a cool video he made featuring Zeev Gur and Maibu down at Waddell Creek near Santa Cruz.  He caught them on a pretty nice day tearing up the waves.  Matched with the cool Jimi Hendrix tune, I totally dig this video…

Two Saturdays ago, my buddy Charlie & I started driving south along the coast from San Francisco to decide where we would kitesurf. We past by Ocean Beach, but the big swell was making a washing machine effect out of the inside and wasn’t going to be very manageable to get to the outside. We continued to head south deciding that we would either hit Half Moon Bay or keeping going south to Scotts Creek down by Santa Cruz. The winds and swell was definitely up and as we approached Roosevelt Beach in Half Moon Bay, and as we looked up wind we could see four kites up by Mavericks. We stopped and got the binoculars out, and sure enough it turned out to be Jeff Kafka, Chip Wasson, Steve Gibson and Sean Richman.

It was a pretty crazy day to be out there, but here are some pics of Jeff Kafka hitting the Mavericks break…

(Note: if the pics are not displaying, click on the broken image as I’ve linked them to the originals)

Yee-ha!!!

Charlie and I decided to stick it out at Half Moon Bay which had the biggest swell I’ve ever ridden there. Probably somewhere close to double-overhead. Looking at these pics, I sure wish we had gotten motivated to experiment with this giant :)