Xenia reports us from Lanzarote
After having been training a lot this winter I was ready to enter my first pwa competition this year. I wanted to do just one stop, to gain experience and learn from it, and I chose the spot Costa Teguise in Lanzerote. I chose Lanzerote because I like that the winds can change a lot there – some days on 3.7 and some days on 4.8, so I could be lucky to be able to show a bit of everything there. I am more used to big sails in Denmark, but nothing beats a full power 4.2 session on the freestyle board. I knew it could be wavy, but at least it would be flat in between the waves, which alouds you to do good freestyle. That it turned out to be THIS wavy and windy was unexpected for everyone I guess….
The first day of competition we had nice and pretty mellow conditions. I was on my 4.8 in the morning and later on my 4.2. Perfect. But this turned out to be the calmest day of competition. From then on the wind just picked up and up, and some days you would see the girls on 3.0s and the guys fully powered up on their 3.7s. Wow… There was one day you would find big loco to mast high waves in the back of the course, and the competition turned into a wave look a like competition with the guys pulling big doubles or stylish pushloops. For me these conditions were pretty tough on my 3.7, but I managed to do some moves. The day after it was a bit mellower, and the 3.7 was just perfect again. Most of the time I used my smallest sail 3.7 and my little 17 chop-chop unifiber fin during my heats, which was a good setup. During the competition my heats got better and better, and even though this was my first international competition, the result of the heat was really close sometimes when I went to check the score-sheets.
I ended up in 10th position, which is acceptable for the first time in my opinion. But the experience I won from this competition is so much more worth for me right now, and I am ready for more training on the water. 
It is different to perform in a competition, and it is something I want to do more. It is like an adreanaline kick in itself to pull all your best moves in a really short time. You are a bit stressy, because you know what you’ve got, but you have to show it right in this moment. It was super hard, and I had both good and bad heats, and heats that I was close to advance. But now, training afterwards, I can really feel how much I learned from it. I am now in Tenerife for training a few weeks, before I head home to Denmark. We already had really good conditions here. Yesterday it was choppy in the spot I tried here, but that allowed me to practise some loops on my freestyle board. I like that I can use the small 17 fin also for jumping like this, it is stiff and has a good pop even though it has a short length.
Now I will head to the beach and check out the conditions for today.
Xenia Kessler
Photoes by Julie Kessler
