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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

I surf and kitesurf. I guess the hardest thing to describe about the sea is how violent it can be. Getting a wave on the head (a wave of decent size) is colossal. Every part of your body is attacked, board shorts ripped off, arms flung around, head whipped back, legs hit your chest or back.

Big waves are crazy powerful.

Then there's the speed, wizzing over choppy water on a board feels like driving over a very pot holed dirt road, the chops SLAM into the board over and over again. You lean on the rail to turn and the board may just drop away into a hole or get slammed up by chop.

And if you fall, you don't penetrate the water, you just skim over it like a flat stone (or a rag doll in the mouth of a dog, shaking it from side to side)

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When you wipe out, especially if you do it close to where the wave breaks, you're leaving out the part where you're deep underwater, being thrown around like a coffee bean in a grinder, not knowing which way is up and having the somewhat nagging problem of finding air again.

And when you finally do emerge, what do you know, the next wave is already here for the next trip down.

And all of that is assuming there isn't sharp coral reefs at the bottom.

It's even more nerve wracking when you watch surfers wipe out on big waves where you need jetskis to get on the wave and then again to get out of the pounding zone of the later waves of the set. Sometimes the jetskis just can't get to them in time and you see the surfer getting put in an extreme wash cycle mode one time after the other until the ocean decides that they're done with them.

With kitesurfing you also have the lines in the mix. The biggest waves I personally surfed were 8m (what can I say, I was young and stupid). One guy dropped his kite and the next thing he was standing on the shore with every section of his kite ripped out. We were all feeling sorry for his ruined kite but he was happy to get out of there alive. Apparently he got tangled in his lines underwater and thought he was done but by some miracle managed to get out.

Something similar happened to me as well, kite dropped in on shore winds in fairly small surf (max 2 meters), but pretty soon the lines were around my legs. Tried to cut the lines using the knive in my harness, but couldn’t get loose. Luckily I washed up on shore, but was a pretty scary experience.

Largest waves I windsurfed was about 4 meters in Maui, went head first down the wave, mast got stuck in the coral reef, snapped like it was nothing. Even at 4 meters, waves are pretty powerful.

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