Flying high

Chris Breikss, Director and Co-founder, 6S Marketing
My business partner John Blown and I have skied together since Grade 5, and we’ve done some water-skiing and wakeboarding over the years. I think we first saw kiteboarding in 2002 out at Spanish Bank. We took a couple lessons in 2005 and we were hooked.

My first experience was feeling fear, followed by extreme joy and an adrenalin rush. You feel at one with nature, and you feel like you’re at the mercy of nature because you’re in the raw ­elements. Kiteboarding makes you feel young, but when you get out of the water it makes you feel old, because it kicks your ass.

You’re not allowed to kiteboard on any Vancouver beaches, so we go up to Squamish or Nitinat Lake on Vancouver Island. We also go on lots of kiteboarding trips; we’ve been to Florida, Texas and Brazil.

The water in Nitinat is extremely cold, so you need to wear a thick wetsuit, plus a helmet, life jacket and harness. But it’s all worth it; a surfer might ride a wave for a few seconds, but on a kiteboard you can go back and forth, back and forth, without stopping.

This year is really going to be a make-or-break kiteboarding year. The business is going well, so I have to grow up a little and take care of that first and foremost. But now that we’re into the spring and summer, I’m fired up to get back out there on the water.