Thanks for the very kind comments from John and my other wind colleagues. It was pretty brave of the Ski Archives to induct a boarder! Got some nice comments from a number of skiers there, afterward, who also dug the connection between the two sports. A former manager of Jackson Hole came up and told me how snowboarding had saved the ski industry, which had been suffering from an aging demographic.
Sorry I missed you at the dinner last week, John, it woulda been fun to say howdy and commiserate over the winding down of the sailing season. Much as I love the snow, it's always hard to stop sailing. You know, ever since I saw the Flexifoil-powered Tornado catamaran, Jacob's Ladder II, at the Weymouth Speed Trials in '83, I've always been intrigued with kite power. Link here:
http://www.panduj.plus.com/jladder/jl.htm But, as far as crossing over myself - sadly, I barely get out windsurfing enough and just don't want to spend the time starting from scratch again. Might be the case for some of my windsurfing buds, too, I venture.
Now, Marty has told me, "just forget the water, Dimitri, go learn to kite on snow", and that may be the plan. But with skiing, snowboarding, backcountry, and now skate skiing (starting last year), I'm low on days again to try something new. But I used to go to Fairview Canyon a lot in the 80's, snowmobiling and snowboarding, it's gorgeous, so I should head up there or Strawberry on a "learn to kite" day and give it a shot. Lots of incentive there. For example, I was out at DC a couple weeks ago and Brian K. popped some big 4 or 5 second spinning big air right in front of me in not much wind at all, then buzzed around my non-planing self in, came over, and said hi on the water, (no doubt snickering at my schlogging!) and proving how versatile kites have become in the last 10 years. Way cool and a great show. I remember helping Klem launch his kite by the old house on the NW corner of Utah Lake about 15 years ago. Man, that was scary in the rip-rap there! So cool it's gotten so much more advanced and safer since those days. Plus - all that stuff fits in your trunk!
From an aero or hydro-dynamic view, the sports have much in common. The semi-rigidity of the inflatable spars is very cool. More to come in that area. I'm also sure, as fabric technology improves, and people are willing to pay more for very advanced materials, the kites will become yet more high performance. I always wonder about what's called the "skin drag" of big sails and big kites, since the surface areas are huge. (think of jibing a formula sail and how slow that is) Not a big effect, but it might be low hanging fruit. I remember Ken Winner doing some things with surface coating on his sails back when he was on the World Cup tour. Improved some, but always had to be reapplied. That's an area ripe for technology, perhaps some coating that will let the skin friction be reduced. Same for the bumps of sewing seams and perhaps even the shape of the lines. I suppose it's conceivable that some kind of airfoil-shaped lines might be developed, or perhaps just really tiny ones, which would have minimum drag, too. But the big power and efficiency gains are of course in the kite airfoil shapes, and I'm sure there will continue to be big improvements there as well, maybe something more rigid than just the inflatable spars, maybe a clever mixture of designs.
Funny again, as I said about skis in the ski archives talk I gave, all these present-day toys - kites, modern-day windsurfers and sails - probably could have been built 30 years ago. But no one had thought of them yet! Great time to be out playing, on whatever we sail.