From the 28th of July until the 2nd of Augustus I’ve been on Fuerteventura to compete in my first PWA event! After trips to Jericoacoara and Bonaire i decided to request a Wildcard. Just a couple of days before the competition started i got an email from the PWA that I was able to compete, sooo..I left to Fuerte!
I booked the tickets, contacted some people for a place to stay and drove the next day to Weeze Airport in Germany, where my flight to Fuerte left. It’s crazy to leave in such a short time, but it felt as a big adventure! I was lucky that Arianne wanted to pick me up from the airport and together with 2 friends of her we drove to the event side where i dropped of my gear. From the first moment i already saw that is was going to be a great party for 2 weeks long. The PWA set up several big tents for equipement, entertainment and ofcourse the big parties!
After dropping the equipement i went looking for Rick Yendrusch and some other guys, beacause they allowed me to stay at their house for the upcoming weeks. Pretty cool because we had 2 crazy weeks together, Rick, Bart-jan, Ronald, Joost and i!
On the 24th we registered and the 25th the competition was suppose to start early, butt..very weird..Fuerte didn’t gave us the wind we expected until about 5 o’clock. I picked my 4,4 and sailed the heat against Brian Metcalf-Perez US-515. On days before the competition started i was able to do some nice stuff as Kono’s and Skopu’s in front of beach, but unluckely the chop was so hard to sail that I didn’t manage to do any of those moves in the heat. Brian sailed a really good heat and went throught to the 2nd round.
The next days were also without or just a little bit of wind, what made it possible to just start the Double on the fourth day. I was scheduled in the heat against Andy Lachauer from Germany, also a good sailer which managed to pull some nice move of in the heat! I did some moves as Airflaka, Kono, Funnel, a nice ss Kono and some more moves in the heat, but unfortunately Andy seem to be better and went throught to the 2nd round.
On the 5th day of the freestyle event they finished the Double and Gollito Estredo won the event just in front of Steven van Broeckhoven, who came back from the 5th position in the Singles. For me it was a great experience to be and compete at Fuerte, and i’ll keep on training to get use to the extreme conditions there! I’ll see everyone in Sylt hopefully!
Cheers! =)
Danny Kater H-322 