Bay Area Kitesurf

Sitting across from me as I cruise down Highway 1 is a hulking Mitu Monteiro filling out the bucket seat of my full size truck. My job today is part journalist/photographer, part tour guide and part unexpected concierge. I had planned on scoring an early session at Waddell, but Mitu had requested we stop off at a tackle shop outside of San Francisco’s city limits. Mitu talks in creoled-out broken English with a laid-back island style. English is just one of Mitu’s six languages, self-taught from years of running a destination kite school on his home island in Cabo Verde.

As we pull into the tackle shop, I glance at my dash clock and we’re already late, but Mitu has a relaxed sense of time, and it reminds me to stop hawkishly checking the iKitesurf numbers on my phone and chill myself out. We duck into the cavernous tackle shop, and Mitu becomes a young boy loose in a candy store. He schools me on shiny lures, vibrantly colored rubber squids, carbon rods and complicated windy reels. There’s pure passion in his words, which makes me think fishing sits somewhere even with kitesurfing in Mitu’s soul. His affinity for fishing feels like a great litmus test of a true waterman — Mitu is not just another shallow surf rat — he is perhaps more a vestige of a childhood surrounded by water and waves in a much simpler place.

Back in the truck and safely pointed down the coast, I probe Mitu for his life story. He tells me of a modest single parent upbringing and the early years of learning to surf, windsurf and kite, challenged not by a lack of talent but the ability to get his hands on equipment. I want to know about his kite school, his wife and his son and how he’s made a life out of kiteboarding. I’m often jaded by the impression that success in kitesurfing is hard to come by, but Mitu is both heavily traveled and speaks with the voice of someone whose found a simple and rewarding balance in the athleticism and commerce of kitesurfing.