It looks like a beach in caribbean sea. White sand, clear blue water and a strand as wide as an airport runway. But it’s this kind of beach where signs warn: If it’s summer bring a sweater!
Orrestranden near Rollestad in Norway, in English “Orres beach”, has a length of about 5 km and is Norway's longest sandy beach. Summer times here means sometimes sun, but the true strand feeling always depends on weather. With its light, fine-grained sand, Orrestranda is more like a sandy beach in another, souther and warmer country.
But you can never be sure that you will feel like swimming, because the wind from the Atlantic ocean blows cold from the west and he whirls up grains of sand that whip in the face like needles of steel. Blue sky? Sometimes. Black clouds? A few minutes later.
Tougher than the rest
On the other hand Norwegians are tougher than the rest. They are Vikinings! Vikings made for the wind and the weather. They like to swim here on days that count as cold autumn days in other countries. And much more tougher than the toughest swimmer are the surfing guys who surf here in any weather conditions in front of a blue or a black sky. They know for sure that te water will be cold as from a refrigerator. But for that the empty sandy beach belongs to them alone.
It’s a magical place especially for kite surfers who use the fresh sea air to make their tricks on water and in the air. Kitesurfing, if you never have seen this, is surfing, jumping and flying with a board under your feet and a stunt kite in your hand. The surfer is pulled through the kite with a rope.
Sailing on a parachute
It was Robbs Naish, an american pioneer in surfing, who brought extreme sports to the world when he invent the kite for surfing after the two French brothers Bruno und Dominique Legaignoux found out how a surfer can sails on a board under a parachute. At Orrestranden you can see how this works under real life conditions: The wind pulls out the surfers, they struggle with their kites, they're rinding the storm - before a wave crashes the board and strike them down in the cold, cold water.
At Orrestranda the wind is always very friendly to the kiters. See the bearded Viking who is preparing his equipment. A Viking waiting for the wind. When you look at him the first thing you see is the huge amount of equipment he has to bring to make his stunts: Ropes and more ropes, hooks and boards, wetsuits and surfing shoes, hoods and more ropes again. But the best of them can do magic when they jump into the storm. They fly high, 15, 20 meters, they’re looking like they can stand still in the sky before they fall down in slow motion.
It seems like hard work to start with this, but the spectacularst of them shoot across the water like an arrow shooted from a bow. As a spectator you see this with open mouth and goose bumps on your arms because, you know, this is Norway, high up in the north of Europa where the wind isn’t Caribbean like. But they have fun and they use their boards and kites like virtuosos as you see here:
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