Learning to ride blind is esssential to anyone wanting to get into their wakestyle tricks, many of which involve landing blind. It is also a superb stepping-stone to learning surface passes. If you can ride toeside you will already have a good idea of what is required, however, riding blind is more uncomfortable and far easier to muck up.
You are effectively jumping into toeside, but the opposite way so that you are riding with you back turned to the kite (hence the term, blind). Get good at doing little hops/ollies first ( practice a few ollies (slamming the back of your board whilst lifting the front) that are about a foot off of the water. It is these ollies that we give you the time to rotate into blind.
A common mistake when riding blind is to keep your weight centered over the board. This will encourage the classic heel edge catch that everyone loves to hate. To get around this, look down at your toes when riding blind to keep your weight over the toe edge. Like riding toeside, you need a fair amount of power and equal foot-weight distribution to keep the board on the plane.It is a good idea to get used to jumping into blind whilst you are hooked in as there is less to think about and therefore less to go wrong. Once you got it dialed hooked in, try a few unhooked, but remember you'll have to point further downwind if you want to keep the bar in your hands!
It feels awesome when you nail the pop and plane along in the blind position. Riders like Sam Light make landing and riding in blind look fantastically easy, and with a few tutorials, you can too.
Trick Steps
1
Ride at comfortable pace crosswind, take your back hand off of the bar and put your front hand in the center.
2
Perform a small hop, and as you do so, look over your back shoulder and bring your front hip away from the kite, causing you to do a 180 rotation to toeside (but in the opposite direction to normal). Pushing your spare hand away is a good way of speeding up the rotation. Note: you need to make sure you do atleast a 180 rotation, otherwise you'll be catching an edge quicker than you can say donkey dick.
3
Land looking at your toes, keeping the weight over that far side edge. Keep your hand in the middle of the bar. Try to make your shoulders as parallel as possible with your toeside edge.
4
Now that you are in the blind position, stay on the plane by aiming downwind. You need to be keeping the kite nice and steady whilst riding blind (easier said than done) by feeling where the kite is and using your 7th sense: Jedi-like Kite control
5
Once you've enjoyed the fruits of riding blind, its time to reverse the rotation and get back to that nice and safe heelside. Keep your weight on your toeside (leaning away from the kite) and look back over your shoulder, letting the kite take you. As the kite begins to pull you around think about keeping your weight centered to allow the board to slide around. Note: this is where most people catch an edge, try to keep this a quick movement and don't lean back!
6
Phew, you've ridden blind and now back to heelside. Now try it on the other tack and then give it a go unhooked! If you're the first one of you mates to do this, tell them that to ride blind properly you have to close your eyes.
