another great way to stay in the water in Charleston, because there’s always wind blowin’ my waves up.” As he aged, so did the abuse his body was taking from surfing and windsurfing. “In windsurfing, either some gear
Special Event!
Full Moon Kayak Paddle On Shem Creek June 3 at 7pm
was broken or you were bleeding almost every session,” he said. After enduring the sometimes- agonizing sport throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Floyd was exposed to kiteboarding. Like most action sports junkies, he was always searching for something new and quickly picked up the sport, finding it much easier on the body than its painful predecessors. “A new sport is only new once,”
he explained. With the excitement that came
from being a part of something so fresh and cutting-edge, he talked a friend into buying some kites, and the pair opened Charleston’s first kiteboarding school in 2000 through Half Moon Outfitters. Since that time, the sport has grown in leaps and bounds, and locations such the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island have become some- thing of a mecca for beginners and advanced riders alike.
“Te practicality of it makes Charleston to kiteboarding sort of like Utah is to skiing or snowboarding,” Floyd said.
Mark Bily, an avid kiteboarder and
former certified instructor and man- ager at Air & Earth in Mount Pleasant, was first exposed to the sport in California. Having come from a snowboarding and surfing background and having always been self-taught, he returned to Charleston, bought a used kite and tried to teach himself the sport. Te result of Bily’s initial attempt was a pair of black-and-blue feet and enough frustration that the kite languished in a shed for nearly two years. Eventually, though, he gave it another shot, slowly progressed and now recommends lessons to anyone interested in taking up the sport. Bily openly confesses that he has been an undeniable kiteboarding addict for the past seven years. “It has taken everything I love
– skydiving, snowboarding, surfing – and put them all into one package,” he said. He gets his fix in the waters of Isle
of Palms and Sullivan’s Island, for the most part, and claims that the Carolina coast spoils local kiteboarders. “We have a predominantly all-sand coast, and there really aren’t many obstructions,” he said, noting the beaches’ easy launch and land spots. Obstructions or not, kiteboard-
ing certainly requires a certain skill set that not everyone possesses. If
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Photo courtesy of Air & Earth.
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