Broneah Kiteboarding – We Build Kiteboarders – kitesurfing, kiteboard, kitesurf, lessons, camp
Broneah Kiteboarding school featured in Chicago LAKE Magazine
For a full-throttle summer adventure, grab a kiteboard and chase the wind.
By Emily Bingham
The breeze is stiff and steady, Lake Michigan is wide open and wild, and the afternoon light warms my shoulders like a soft, familiar hand. But instead of sunning myself on the shore, I am sitting in waist-deep lake water, strapped snugly into a harness and helmet, and my white-knuckled hands are gripping a bar connected by long, taut strings to a massive kite.
I am a first-time kiteboarding student, and I am here to conquer the wind.
If this is the first you’ve heard of kiteboarding, you’re certainly not alone, but the number of kiteboard-clueless people is quickly dwindling. Kiteboarding is one of the fastest-growing sports in the world, capitalizing on an abundant and cost-free natural resource: wind power. It’s impressive to watch and even more impressive to try: Riders strap their feet to a lightweight, four-foot board and use a kite to launch themselves across open water, jumping up to 30 feet in the air.
In the Midwest, the hot spot to get schooled on kiteboarding is Traverse City, Mich., where brothers Matt and Keegan Myers have established the well-respected and rapidly growing Broneah Kiteboarding. Kiteboarding – also called kitesurfing – has a fairly steep learning curve. And yes, while many of its enthusiasts toss around X Games adjectives like “stoked” and “gnarly,” don’t dismiss it as a sport exclusively for the young and taut. A majority of Broneah’s clients are middle-aged men.
“These are the guys that are sitting at their computer all day. They don’t have a sport. They don’t have inspiration,” Matt says. “But then we get them fired up on kiting. It’s the coolest thing on earth.”
Every weekend from June through mid-September, Broneah welcomes a half-dozen wannabe kiteboarders to its “Northern Exposure” learning camp. The sessions, held on a wide stretch of sand overlooking Grand Traverse Bay, are exhilarating and exhausting.
As the only female on my weekend, I anticipated working extra hard to keep up with the group. But I quickly learned that kiteboarding doesn’t favor one gender over the other, nor does it require expert athleticism or a rock-hard physique. When my fellow students and I gathered on a the beach for our first lesson, we were all equally uncoordinated beginners: a few soft-bellied 30-somethings, two lanky college dudes, and myself, the skinny chick whose most adventuresome athletic activity is the occasional yoga class.
Luckily, Matt, 27, and Keegan, 26, are warm and patient, with an infectious enthusiasm and a gift for helping all their students grasp kiteboarding’s vital concepts.
“We’ve taught everyone from 70-year-old men to 8-year-old girls,” Matt says. Many of these students hail from the Chicago area where, once they receive certification (available through Broneah), they can ride the wind at kiteboard-friendly spots such as Montrose Beach in Chicago and Lake Street Beach near Gary, Ind.
On the first day of camp we start with the basics, becoming familiar with the wind’s surprising strength. We stand in patches of dune grass while maneuvering small trainer kites, digging our heels into the sand as the wind pulls us across it. We learn terms such as “wind window” and “power zone,” new phrases that quickly gain meaning when the kites strain and dip under our control (or lack thereof).
With the help of assistant instructors, the brothers keep the student-to-staff ratio at 2-to-1, making for an intimate, thorough and unthreatening learning experience.
On the second day, we move offshore into the water – the real deal. As the day progresses, many of the students are standing on their boards and zipping across the water. Others, like myself, are having a more difficult time. But with each fall – after fall, after fall – the instructors are right there, helping us up, offering advice and sincere words of encouragement. By the time the kites are rolled up, officially closing out the camp, I am amazed at how much I have learned and how far we have all progressed. And while I didn’t quite conquer the wind this weekend, I sure had the time of my life trying.
Ready to ride? Be warned – you’re likely to walk away addicted. Miller admits he’s even missed wedding ceremonies to go kiting, only to show up at the receptions sporting tattletale sunburns.
“The first time wind catches your kite and physically tugs you along, it’s impossible not to want to feel that sensation again,” he says. “That feeling never goes away.”
