Icesurfing or how latvians took it all

Aistė | Windsurfing | January 28, 2011

Lithuanian winter already reached its middle. After few weeks we all will be thinking about the spring. However, we still have some interesting thing to do in the snow for now. Last weekend I have visited Kaunas, where international ice surfing competition took place.

While Curonian lagoon intimidates with the thin ice, Kaunas lagoon is encrusted with the trustful ice and snow. Conditions like that seduced me to try ice surfing. At first I was afraid a little that I will not be able to recall the principles of sail control (three months have passed since the last time I did it). However, my instructor Darius was patient and I didn’t had any problems at all. After the first try I was speeding with the wind (at least it seemed like that to me ) The wind was light… This and the fact that I didn’t had my harness (looser) made my task physically exhausting. Still I had very good time and satisfied my need for adrenalin at least for now. Ice surfing is quite similar to windsurfing. The sail is the same. The board has ice-skates and the control of it is similar to skate. I will not go into the technical details but next time when I will have a chance to jump on ice surfer it will definitely be a real pleasure.  By the way, thanks to the cheerful guys from Kaunas. You rock

Short comment about the competition… Lithuanians were real gentlemen and gave all of the first places to Latvians. We stay hopeful that competition hosts in Latvia, Estonia and Finland will treat Lithuanians the same