As a child, you may recall the thrill of getting a kite airborne, feeling the string tugging against your hands, watching it dance in the wind in a way we gravity-bound humans can only dream of. Or is this dream of windborne motion something more?
Mike Kratochwill, owner of the Lakawa School of Kiteboarding and Board Shop in White Bear Lake, helps locals make playing with wind a reality. Kiteboarding, the sport Kratochwill so readily and articulately promotes, involves harnessing oneself to a large kite, and being spirited away on skis, a snowboard, a surfboard, or a mountain board, depending on the season and your inclination. While the sport may sound extreme, it doesn’t have to be. Kratochwill likens it to riding a bike: “You can ride your bike to a park or you can ride your bike down the side of a mountain—it just depends on your mood and your personality.”
Kratochwill caught the bug in 2002 while on business trips in Hawaii. It played on his mind for a couple of years until a friend told him about a man giving snow kite lessons on Wayzata Bay. Kratochwill took the lesson, which, ultimately, changed his life—he ended up buying the company, Lakawa, from the man who taught him, and ditching his corporate career to turn Lakawa into a full retail shop and kiteboarding school.
Though it may sound like a warm-season sport, kiting is really a means of propulsion: you move with the wind. Depending on the season and your gear, you can move across just about any terrain. Some of the most popular destinations here are lakes, with White Bear Lake a prime environment to take up the sport. “Kiters complement the recreational lake user really well—when the fishermen and boaters are looking for calmer waters, we are out there charging after it, looking to ramp off those waves and just play in the howling wind,” Kratochwill says. “The places it gets tight are near boat launches.”
Though the sport can be a great year-round activity and something that can be enjoyed by people into their 70s, some training is a must. “It takes skill to manage these things, and there are other people at stake here,” says Kratochwill. “How do I manage this thing without taking out a fisherman or a mom with a baby buggy? When you see us out there kiting we make it look simple, but we have all been through the hurdles of the learning curve.”
To that end, Kratochwill offers classes to get people going in the sport safely. Lessons happen in three stages: first you learn to fly the kite, next is kitesurfing 101 (or snowkiting 101) that teaches you to incorporate the harness, and lastly you marry the kite control to whatever is on your feet. “Really the sport is 80 percent kite control and 20 percent about whatever is touching the surface,” Kratochwill says.
Getting a full-on setup for an adult will run $2,000 and up, but once you have the gear, the wind is free. And the ability to hit a wave and fly 30 feet high before descending like a bird? Priceless.
