Every year the worlds fastest kiteboarders pack their little kites, take hacksaws to their twintips and head to Namibia, for a little place called Luderitz.

Before you picture white sandy beaches, palm trees and beautiful girls, stop. Because Luderitz isn’t glamorous. It’s dusty, surrounded by desert and the water is brown, oh, and don’t forget there’s only one single channel to ride in that’s only 5m wide. Sound appealing yet?

The real appeal of this place is the wind. It howls this time of year and already during this event they’ve seen wind speeds over 35 knots blow down the course. The man made channel is dug to the idea angle for maxiumum speed and luckily, the angle seems to work well for both windsurfers and kiteboarders. Error margins are very small here, one wrong move and you’re onto the sand in one bounce. All that harshness pays off however, when world records are in sight!

It’s been happening for a few days now, and there’s still over a month of the event left! Already one French kiteboarder, Sébastien Cattelan has come within 0.2 knots of the world record reaching an average speed of 55.36 knots over the 500m course. While they’re still a fair way off bettering the outright world sailing record, it’s of course possible with the right wind conditions and a kiteboarder with enough guts to hurtle down the channel.

Over the next month the competitors will be glued to forecasts, waiting for that ‘big’ day to pop over the horizon, when it does, the worlds fastest sailors will fly out to Namibia and it’ll be ON. Stay tuned for when that day happens, we’ll bring you the biggest speeds, hardest crashes and of course all the new world records.

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