hardly in infancy

we are just lucky its' expensive and learning can be ego crushing to the mono symbolic

Nice question! Kite when it's windy, surf when there's swell, windsurf when it's cranking, SUP in the gaps...

Like you say, most of us start as surfing groms, it's the cheapest!

Missing the wind but had a great SUP today...

I came from mountain biking. not surfing or wind surfing. Ok i'd dabbled with surfing in the past but didn't like it.

my take is this

surfing: fun to effort ratio way to low. theres lots of paddling through surf, then waiting for a wave...whilst jostling for that one wave every 5 mins with 20 other surfers. Then its a token 10 to 20 seconds of fun then wait for another 5-10 mins. I didn't like the attidute of some arrrsewhole surfers who thought they owned that particular wave.

wind surfing: mowing backwards and fowards doesn't appeal. plus the equipment is large and cannot be stowed in the boot of a car. I want to be airborn.

Kiting: thrill to risk ratio is excellent. compared to a land bassed sport eg mountain biking you can launch big smash hard and you simply splash into the water no injury, on the land that same behaviour sends you to hospital pretty quickly. fun to effort ratio is also excellent. set up/pack up is down time. but one launched its pretty much all fun. unlike surfing which is mostly grind and small amount of fun. The clincher for me is the airtime. such glorious glorious boosts... so much control. so little risk (again compared to land based extreme sports).

I started with surfong and sailing, there are established clubs and places to nurture young (lack of) talent with organisations not looking ro make a heap of cash but just to grow the sport.
I think surfing is great and can be a good entry when you buy a second hand board for a few hundred.

kite surfing changes lives though.

not sure that really answerwd anything at all.

Been surfing and doing surf ironman most of my life. The only option for those messy windy days was to either go for a training swim or a training session on the racing mal.

Now I wait for those messy windy days in anticipation of a kite session.

Although given the choice between a kite session or a lonely surf session on a perfect peak, I would probably choose the surf. However that is a rarity... The crowds are normally thick and aggressive.

I started out sailing as a kid and for $500 I got a little boat I could muck around in, spend the winter sanding and prepping for the next season and was able to sell on for the same price when it was time to upgrade. The country city I grew up in NZ had great sailing conditions - not so much surfing and there was a very big windsurf school in a pond area off the side of the estuary.

I could jump on my bike any time I liked and go sailing all day during the summer holidays so I developed a lot of independance and self reliance, which was something I saw seriously lacking in the city kids of Melbourne when I moved here in my teens.

Before moving to London I was racing regularly on a keel boat and as we were coming back into Sandy, the sea breeze was starting to crank and the pioneers of kitesurfing were flying off Hampton Beach. I thought to myself "I have to get into that!"

A move to London allowed me to get a lot better at snowboarding - you can catch a train from London on Friday night and wake up in Bourg St Maurice the next morning, have your gear on and be on the slopes in time for first chair. Riding waist to armpit deep powder on a snowboard is amazing and an experience not to be missed. The fact you can do it half a metre from your mate, in near absolute silence and have a conversation whilst flying down the hill is almost surreal.

Kitesurfing is an awesome combination of Sailing and Snowboarding to me. The gear is very portable and gives you the performance and speed that only high performance yachts and Windsurfing can achieve. Now I want to get into racing as I dig the tension that builds in that final 30 seconds before the race start, calling the line well and hitting it at pace just as the gun goes off.

Now I'm back in St Kilda, living across the road from kitebeach is the equivalent of living on the mountain for watersports. I've also been to some pretty cool places around the world with my kitebag (Hayling island UK, Devon, Cornwall, Atlantic Coast France, Santander Spain, Costa Brava Spain, Beauduc France, Bol Croatia, Paros and Naxos Greece, Reunion Island, Mauritius, Margaret River, Augusta, Perth, Lancelin)

Kitesurfing has made me a better sailor - I can read the weather a lot better and can pick the gusts and shifts.

It's also made me a better snowboarder - I can go up for day trips and not be physically shattered at the end of the day. I also ride at a consistently harder pace from the get go, rather than easing myself into it as I get my eye back in.

I've thought about taking up surfing but at the end of the day, unless you are naturally gifted, you have to be spending a lot of time in the learning stages to get over what I call the "hump" ie. that point where you can come back to the sport after a break and still do it well. Surfing seems to be that sort of sport where unless you have daily access to a good break you're not going to progress. I'm not prepared to make the jaunt down to the waves maybe once a week to try my hand at it to only get frustrated. I'd rather go and smash out 100 km on my road bike or go for a swim at MSAC.

It's interesting to read the replies from guys who have had a surfing background as they tend to think differently about things than I do. But I guess if I grew up in a surfing town instead of sailing areas things would have been different!

Freedom in a backpack

Plummet might have nailed it from a weekend punters perspective, but I reckon he's far from the mark if you are decent at all 3 sports or live in a place that isn't windy most days (like WA).

For me kitesurfing was a progression from paragliding.

Paragliding gives you this sense of freedom to launch from anywhere at any time. A bit of the wind is good, not too much. I am talking Europe, and my first hill was in my backyard. 2000m mountain - 2 hrs drive.

Man, when you airborne nothing can compete with that. Only big kite boosts. They are relatively short trill tho:)

Skiing and snowboarding still beats kite boarding in my opinion. It's because of hours you can make in only one week snowboarding (ie 40 hrs min). And the variety of slopes, peacefulness and nature around you.

Add snow kite boarding into the equation and you've got a perfect match. You pack your kite in a backpack and go X-country:)

Never surfed or did any water sport before kiting.