by Brandon Wilner
4.88K subscribers.
The figure appeared just underneath each video’s title, a detail more significant than his channel’s name, or the photo of his grinning, bearded face that he used as his profile picture. Anyone who viewed or considered viewing his content would first see that pitiable number and note that not only was he an uncelebrated figure in the kitesurfing space, but that his channel had not even surpassed what should be any content creator’s first subscriber milestone, which for an effectively monetized channel should really have come within a couple of years. Despite the trends shown by the site’s analytics, which had him on track to surpass his target number some months back, he was now three weeks away from his channel’s fifth anniversary, by which point he’d vowed to reach five thousand subscribers.
Quality wasn’t the issue. He knew his stuff was solid. While global interest in the kitesurfing movement was surging and scads of channels had popped up in recent years, he could see that his “urban kitesurfer” brand was a novel take on the outdoor recreation genre. People had really connected with his gear reviews and tutorials, as well as his lifestyle videos about how to hang on to one’s passion for the sport while living in a tiny New York City apartment. Week after week he surveyed the landscape of kitesurfing content, and he could see that no one else was exhibiting the everyday issues faced by the metropolitan kiting community. He sought to provide genuinely useful logistical information, and his audience seemed to get a kick out of the fact that he, for example, stored his sopping kites and wetsuits in the shower of his and his wife’s extra bathroom. To him it was the most normal thing in the world to keep a large metal storage cabinet next to the crib in his daughter’s bedroom, or to use his car as a mobile storage unit for his kites, boards, and harnesses, but the idea was quite foreign to the broader community, who tended to live in more typical beach towns and own houses with ample garages or basements.
He was self aware enough to understand that the problem was that he wasn’t quite sure what the problem was. The site had become so difficult to create for in the past couple of years that he asked himself whether he had simply started his channel too late in the game and missed the ad revenue gravy train altogether. They sent so many mixed signals about which video duration was considered optimal for viewer retention and ad placements, which titles were likely to get boosted in search results without seeming too clickbait-y, what sort of thumbnail image would stand out against the overcrowded field of others. They provided creators with great heaps of data, yes, and he used other ancillary services to help him make sense of the numbers, but the site’s own handling of everyone’s content, what was promoted and what was suppressed, remained a black box.
He was certain his channel was still suffering from some errant profanity he’d ignorantly included in his earliest videos. Initially unaware of the Adpocalypse of 2017—the mass exodus of advertisers who pulled their business due to community guidelines violations by some prominent personalities, compounded by the site’s failure to address them—and its implications for content creators, he had written a few variations on “shit” and “fuck” into his early scripts and had included a couple offhand references to alcohol consumption and drug use in his sparse attempts at improvised narration. The three offending videos had been fairly successful and a few months later had view counts numbering in the thousands, and so rather than remove them outright he opted to replace the original uploads with edited versions that either bleeped out or cut completely the sections that weren’t family friendly. His channel hadn’t featured a whit of obscenity since (he recalled that he once discarded an otherwise usable clip because his dog’s soiled pee pad was just visible in the background), but he could not shake the thought that he would never be allowed to atone for that initial fall from grace, that he had doomed his channel from the outset.
Even so, he remained a strong believer in the power of meticulous goal-setting. How had he progressed from jerky movements on a directional surfboard to competent, solo hydrofoil kitesurfing if not by creating and methodically checking off incremental objectives? It had been just a handful of years since he first strapped himself into a kiting harness and spent five straight days being whipped about in the surf under the supervision of an instructor seven years his junior. But from that point onward he had been careful to record and make his way through the goals lists in his kiting log, and now he had created eighty-three videos on the topic that were helping inspire others to take up the sport. If he could hit his target of five thousand subscribers in these next three weeks, he would prove to himself that hard work trumped any variable he couldn’t control, and that he might just be able to will his channel’s success into being.
The Jacksonville trip was supposed to provide the final push of production that would drum up some new interest. He’d hoped to get as many as three videos out of the week at his in-laws’ place, which was close to the beach and was surrounded by solid kiting spots. Amidst the rigorously scheduled family activities and days of unfavorable weather, he’d found three opportunities to shove the bulging Mystic 135cm Foil Travel Bag he’d lugged from Williamsburg into his mother-in-law’s hatchback and head to a trusted location. That he might experience three consecutive skunked sessions never would have occurred to him, but a range of factors had produced exactly that result.
On his first morning there he’d assembled his foil and run out onto the beach after seeing the weather pick up, only to find that upon launching his CORE XR4 twelve-meter, single-strut kite, it fell right out of the sky because the wind just wasn’t cooperating. A couple days later, after seeing that the wind was blowing at a steady twenty miles per hour, he again raced onto the beach and quickly learned that he was horribly, horribly overpowered. All he had brought with him was his Nobile Infinity Foilboard, but the weather at hand called for his Nobile NHP Split Twin-Tip Kiteboard, which he had bought precisely because it separates into halves for easy travel, but which he had also stupidly left in his daughter’s bedroom because he thought he’d only want to ride the foil on this trip. On the final morning of their stay, he suited up and ran out to take advantage of the eighteen-mile-per-hour winds blowing diagonally into the shore, which were forecasted to last all day. He launched his kite and waded out past the sandbar. After taxiing for a bit on his board, just as he went to pull himself out of the water and onto the foil, his chicken loop—the safety device that connects the lines to his harness—gave way, and he sank back into the surf as he watched his kite sail slowly toward land, eventually getting stuck in a tree a couple hundred yards inland. Finding and extracting it had consumed the entire rest of his day.
Three skunked sessions in a row. A less driven man may have taken these events as a clear sign from a higher power that he was not meant to succeed. This other, more yielding man may also have been ready to submit to his wife’s ultimatum concerning his channel’s capacity for generating revenue, and may have considered abandoning the content creation aspect of his hobby altogether. But as long as his deadline remained in the (admittedly quite near) future, he was unwilling to forsake his pursuit of the subscriber goal.
The chicken-loop incident had not been a total waste. Documentation of a catastrophic failure counted as good footage, and he was able to turn around a short but, he thought, informative and even funny video about what happens when a kiter is careless with this key piece of his setup. Seven new subscribers had arrived since he posted it—a small portion of what he required, but not nothing. This next would have to be a hit if he were to summon the remaining one hundred and nineteen subscribers he needed.
“Alright, so I went back and forth on making this video,” he spoke into the GoPro MAX 360 camera he had mounted to a telescoping selfie stick as he exited his apartment building with his Ortlieb Xtremer 65L Dry-Pack on his back, “but if it helps someone else out with—goddamnit. Fuck.”
He turned around and went back into his building’s entryway and used the hem of his t-shirt to wipe a visible smudge from the camera’s lens.
“Alright, so I went back and forth about making this video, but I figured hey, if it helps someone else get out there and have a good session, it’s worth putting out into the world. I’m Ethan Parsons, and today I’m going to show you one of New York City’s most perfect kiting spots that’s also a bit of a best-kept secret.”
He proceeded down an empty Grand Street, its inhabitants still asleep and its shops and restaurants not yet open for business, and took a left on Berry toward where he had last parked his car.
“So one Saturday a few months back, the wind picked up, and I got the text from Ken at New York Kite Center saying he wanted to go kite. But this time he said he had sort of a crazy idea. He said it’s an extra hour boat ride each way, but he found this spot called ‘the Breach’ where the ocean broke through the barrier islands and created this huge, kinda flat-water inlet that looked perfect for kiting, and he wanted to go check it out.”
Knowing that Ken would get a kick out of being invoked directly in one of his videos, and would therefore be likely to share it on the Kite Center’s socials, he made a point to look directly into the camera and smile.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all these years, it’s that I should definitely say ‘yes’ to all of Ken’s crazy ideas.”
He thought about how he would cut in some B-roll of their journey to the spot: he recalled having captured some solid drone shots of the boat traveling up the Long Island coast and some fun footage of Ken and their other kiting buddy Phil horsing around that day. In his head he could hear the instrumental blues-rock track that he’d bring in for the video’s intro, which he’d found at his favorite royalty-free music resource and which he tended to use to create a rollicking and adventurous atmosphere. It sometimes amazed him how well he was able to visualize the finished product before even sitting down to review a day’s footage.
Once he’d made his way onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he faced the GoPro HERO13 mounted on his windshield and carried on with the video’s intro.
“So forty-five minutes later, I had a bit of a headache from repeatedly slamming into the chop, and I was starting to wonder if this was one of those not-so-good ideas. Then things took a turn for the worse, and we just full-speed slammed into the bottom of the bay. The water just turned out to be way too shallow to get anywhere near the Breach. So we throw our gear overboard and we start making trips back and forth to this tiny nearby island, and we’re just kinda hoping we can get a session in there and salvage the day.
“Then we realize that this is actually a pretty sick setup. There’s a really cool sandbar shooting off to the east that’s just perfectly blocking the wind and creating this shallow-water, butterflat spot just south of the island. And just out of the blue we had one of the best sessions of the year.”
Clips from that wonderful day slid through his mind as he narrated: the drone’s flyover view spanning the length of the island; a wide shot of their three kites lined up on the beach, the waves of the bay lapping gently at the narrow strip of land; and backlit, silhouetted action footage of Ken and Phil gliding over a glistening surface.
“And so later on, I looked it up, and this turns out to be an island called John Boyle Island. It’s really a perfect situation: there’s a small little beach there that fits two to four kites perfectly, and there’s this nice sandbar shooting out from the beach to the east that just perfectly blocks the wind and creates this super shallow, butterflat spot right on the south side of the island.
“So today, at the risk of blowing up this incredible kiting spot, I’m gonna head out there by myself and show you that it’s possible to session it on your own. I’m also going to give you some tips based on what we learned from our first time riding there, so you can get out there either solo or with some of your friends. Cool! So here’s my guide to John Boyle Island, just off the coast of Long Island, New York.”
Having nailed this portion of the introduction on the first take, he reflected on how far his presentation style had come over the last half decade. He recalled the belabored scripts he had written for his earliest videos, and the protracted recording sessions he spent hunched over in his wife’s closet, the acoustic properties of which were superior to any other space in their apartment. Take after take he repeated his lines in varied inflections, striving against what he believed was his natural tendency toward stilted delivery. In those days he had been too timid to address the camera directly, choosing instead to provide disembodied narration for merely illustrative images. Eventually he was forced to acknowledge that the site and its viewers favored personalities over mere information, and he began to practice holding the camera in front of his face and speaking into the GoPro’s tiny reflective circle as if it were one of his kiting buddies. He was now capable of writing a mere bulleted list of talking points in advance and weaving through them in what he believed was a methodical yet casual manner.
His shit had gotten so good, he thought as he merged onto 495 heading east. He just needed to keep at it and not allow his bouts of negative energy to define him.
After an hour and a half on the road, which he spent capturing some intermittent B-roll of himself and his view of the highway, he pulled into a gravel parking lot adjacent to the shore. He removed the GoPro from the windshield and tucked it into his dry bag before exiting the car with his selfie stick. With the bag on his back and his twin-tip board under his arm, he pressed record and carried on with the shoot.
“So,” he said, immediately picking up on the strain evident in his voice due to the burden of his gear, which he thought would add character and realism to the shot, “full transparency: I have a bit of a hack for this mission, but it will also help me illustrate how anyone can do this trip. I’m here at the Amityville Marina in Amityville, New York because my buddy Nate has very graciously lent me his boat. But this marina and others right next to it have super chill boat rentals, so even if you don’t have the luxury of using someone else’s ride, you and your friends can definitely still make it out here yourselves. I’ll put a link to a couple of the rental places down in the description.”
He thought about how glad he was that he’d purchased the GoPro MAX 360, which, as its name suggested, filmed in all directions at once and allowed the user to select the desired angle for each shot later on in the editing phase. There was no need to turn the camera and capture separate angles in each direction. He could simply hold his selfie stick in the air and be sure that he was getting establishing, local color, and narration shots all in one go.
Knowing it would take some concentration to locate his friend’s slip in the marina’s maze of docks, he stopped recording and looked around for familiar sights. A couple of wrong turns and a few right ones later, he found the boat’s distinctive pale-yellow slipcover, which he carefully removed and stowed in the storage hatch.
“So from Amityville, we’ll take Seaquester here to—ah, balls.”
The creaking of the boat’s descending lift was too loud for him to speak over this part of the process. He took his hand off the switch he’d been using to lower the boat and oriented himself so that its stern, on which was visible its name rendered in an expressive, evidently hand-written script.
“So from Amityville, we’ll take Seaquester here up the coast toward the Hamptons. It’s a pretty calm day so hopefully there won’t be too much chop in the bay, but even on days that are a bit rougher than this, a boat the size of this one—I think it’s a twenty-four footer—will do just fine in this area close to the barrier islands.”
He did his best to keep his selfie stick pointed upward as he finished readying the boat, and he soon headed out from the harbor, nudging the throttle forward as he made it into the great bay.
“Now experienced boaters will definitely already know this, but I feel like I need to say it.”
Around his neck there now appeared a bolo-like lanyard that held his DJI Mic Mini wireless microphone, to which was affixed a soul patch’s worth of faux fur—his DJI Mic Windscreen—so there would be no issue with picking up wind noise while recording from the boat. He’d decided to make the purchase after viewing a mountain-bike content creator’s video recommending this particular mic system for its unparalleled noise-canceling properties. It was great advice; he loved this microphone and relished every opportunity to use it. He often wondered whether any of the many product reviews he worked into his own content directly or indirectly had influenced others to improve their own riding setups. That was what it was all about, he would think to himself as he used a beloved piece of gear that had been suggested by a peer: inspiring others to keep improving their lives so that they could do or make the absolute best shit possible.
“You really need to pay attention to the shoal markers in this area because parts of this bay—this part’s called the Great South Bay—are quite shallow. As I mentioned already, we nearly ran aground when we were trying to make it to the Breach last time we were out here. Pay attention to the shoal markers and be extra careful if you’re out here at low tide. You do not want to slam into the bottom and risk damaging your motor just because it looks like you could squeeze through an area like this one.”
Off the boat’s starboard side were visible two island-like sandbars that appeared to have a passage through them, one that was likely less than three feet deep. He made a mental note to consult the three-sixty footage and grab the angle showing this deceptive artery, and he would continue to keep an eye out for similar areas. His rule was to provide at least two but preferably three illustrative clips for any point he made.
“Obviously if your boat has a depth gauge you can carry on as normal, but really it’s very mellow out here even without one. If you’ve got a good amount of experience behind the wheel of a boat, it’s a cakewalk. Just exercise a bit of good judgment and enjoy the ride.”
He followed his own advice, relishing the scenery and wildlife—brants were beginning to settle in for the winter and he saw a fair number of straggling scoters diving for food in the shallows—and breathing in the sea breeze for nearly an hour, knowing from the faint chill in the air that this otherwise temperate day would be his warmest outing for months.
While motoring along he also dreamt idly about the day when his content would attract sponsors, whose attention at that point he had not managed to capture. He’d love to work with the electrolyte-restoring hydration drink mix LMNT or the ready-made meal company Factor, both of which he knew had major targeted-advertising campaigns with content creators. In his research he’d observed that they tend to work with people who have subscriber counts in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, and so he knew he had some work to do before he was of interest to them. But he had noticed that some prolific brands like the home-security startup Simplisafe and the productivity app Notion didn’t shy away from smaller channels like his. Once he’d gotten over the hump and had a good few thousand subscribers, he figured he could reach out to their marketing teams and see if they’d be open to partnering with him. Combined with the site’s monetization tools and the increasingly lucrative affiliate links he posted in his video descriptions and on social media, sponsorships could turn his channel into a significant alternative revenue stream for his family, if not an out-and-out replacement for his day job (though even this latter wasn’t a complete impossibility—others had certainly achieved it). He’d explained the power of this earning trifecta to his wife on multiple occasions, and he knew she’d been remarkably supportive up to that point. It remained a mystery to him what she would say once the five-thousand-in-five-years ultimatum had passed. While they hadn’t discussed the agreement directly over the last year or so, he got the sense from the recent expressions of her wish to vacation in land-locked areas that she couldn’t wait to raise the issue of structuring their lives around something other than kitesurfing.
“Alright, so we’re almost there,” he said as he eased up on the throttle. “We’re now in Bellport Bay, and as I mentioned earlier, when you get within about thirty or forty yards of John Boyle, you’re gonna want to drop anchor so you don’t run aground. I’ll put the exact coordinates of my anchoring spot in the video description below. And now I’m also going to go ahead and get suited up because I’m out here in early October and I’ll definitely need my wetsuit and booties.
“And as a side note I’m really excited to try out my XCEL Drylock Hooded 5mm Hooded Wetsuit with matching 5mm Drylock Celliant Booties. Haven’t had a chance to use either yet, and they may be a little overkill because it’s not too, too cold right now, but I’ve heard amazing things about XCEL’s latest version and I’m expecting to totally love them. I’ll put a link to both in the description below.”
He stuck the handle of his selfie stick in between two seat cushions so that it pointed directly upward, and then put the camera in time-lapse mode. After pressing record, he dropped his anchor off the boat’s bow and put on his wetsuit, booties, Mystic Majestic Hardshell Waste Harness, and Neil Pryde Armor Skin 5mm Kiteboarding Gloves and smeared a thick layer of Raw Elements Certified Natural Sunscreen on his face. He let the time-lapse recording continue as he ferried the rest of his gear to the island’s narrow beach in three separate trips, and then swam back to retrieve his camera equipment, which he knew would be safe in his heavy-duty Helly Hansen dry bags.
The island’s patches of reeds and shrubs swayed steadily in what he figured were twenty- to twenty-four-mile-per-hour winds. Fearful of getting skunked again on this session, he had packed three kite sizes but had hoped for exactly these wind conditions, which were more or less identical to those he’d experienced on his first visit to the spot. For this reason he was able to leave his seven- and twelve-meter kites in the boat and bring only the nine-meter, three-strut CORE XR4, an all-around kite great for medium wind speeds, to shore.
Out of the same abundance of caution, he had decided not to bring his Ride Engine Air Box Electric Pump, which even if he had charged it fully right before this outing could be prone to some unforeseen electronic failure. Instead he opted to bring his hand-operated WFMG Kiteboarding Pump, which required more effort to use but had never let him down.
Once he’d gotten his kite laid out on the beach and inflated, he assembled his DJI Mavic 3 Classic drone and recorded a couple flyover shots of the island from its northern and southern sides and then had it hover directly above him for a couple of minutes, with the length of the island traversing the camera’s frame horizontally.
“So here we are on beautiful John Boyle Island,” he said with selfie stick back in hand, “and here you can see the difference between the water on the north and the south of the island. The north is visibly choppier and looks more like the surface of the ocean, and on the south it’s just this shallow, butterflat water that’s basically a kiters paradise. North wind is a little bit gusty, so we’ll have to manage those gusts as we go—not such a big deal when conditions are otherwise perfect. The water is also shallow enough that when you’re riding offshore in this north-wind condition and something goes wrong, you can always gather your stuff and sort of wade back to the beach and get reset.
“I do think the south side would be interesting to try someday—it would be much less gusty wind, but the water on the north side of the island is all much deeper, so you would need another person with a boat on that side so they could come pick you up if got into any kind of trouble. Otherwise you’d end up washing up on the south shore of Long Island.
“Cool! So I’m super pumped to be out here right now, and I think it’s time to finally get this session started.”
It took him twenty minutes to double-check his kiting equipment and get his cameras ready to record the action. When recording his sessions he usually relied on just his GoPro MAX 360 (learning to ride while holding the selfie stick had taken some time, but he was now quite comfortable with it) and a GoPro HERO13 mounted to his kiting line facing downward so that he always had a shot of his own movements. Today, though, he also set up his Alta Pro Carbon Travel Tripod on the beach for his Panasonic Lumix GH5 4K Digital Camera—his high-end videography camera—so that he could get some wider-angle shots that would add a sense of exceptional production value to the video. While this camera would be fixed in place, he figured that as long as he managed to stay in frame at various points throughout the session, he could do a bit of cropping in post-production and would end up with a handful of gorgeous clips from a distance. Then he would just have to discuss the matter with Dimitar, the Bulgarian film student whom he’d found via a freelancing platform that connected creators from around the globe, and who edited all of his videos for a reasonable fee. Dimitar had an amazing eye and always helped him to make a selection when various options were available, so he didn’t need to fret too much about getting perfect shots with the stationary Lumix.
One last look at his weather app reassured him that the wind would be up for the next few hours. He got his kite in the air with little effort, and walked his Nobile HNP twin-tip board out into the bay. Within a minute he was up and riding, his face immediately overtaken by an enormous grin as he darted along the water, propelled by the ecstatic force of Mother Nature’s exhalations. It was this moment, every time, that reminded him why he had fallen in love with the sport in the first place; why he passed countless hours assessing each season’s new board, kite, and accessory offerings; why he busied himself with purchasing, reselling, and purchasing anew thousands of dollars of kiting and video equipment; why he exerted so much effort storing and tending to his apparel and equipment, fending off mildew and keeping everything free of sand and salt so that it would either last him as long as possible or retain a decent amount of value on the resale market; why he lugged cumbersome bags in and out of cars, through airports, and across borders alongside all of his family’s other luggage and his daughter’s stroller; why he spent days in advance of an outing preparing for a session that had a high probability of being skunked; why he spent so many Saturdays and Sundays in far-flung sections of the region’s coastline, away from his wife and daughter: in those moments when he pulled himself out of the water and began skipping indefinitely across its surface like a stone launched from the arm of the creator Himself, he felt as though he were moving in harmony with a world—a universe, even—that at all other times was recklessly disjointed, plagued with its great whirls of problems that only combined and compounded as time passed; flaunting its unending capacity for conflict, which he could not keep out of his home despite having made the decision some years back to no longer pay attention to news media; evincing a seemingly natural tendency toward strife that he managed to encounter even when he took his daughter to the playground or tried to indulge in the basic pleasure of a concert or a favorite lunch—it all chipped away at the positivity and creativity that he knew was endemic to his being, and for some time it had made him believe his spirit had been defeated by a cosmos that he would never have expected could be so cruel, and it had been the discovery of this wondrously simple yet endlessly complex sport that had reacquainted him with an unalloyed joy he suspected had long been banished to some forbidden realm of his adult heart, that allowed him to ride the very breath of the earth, that afforded him a sense of fellowship with a community of people who’d paid close enough attention to the muffled cries of their souls to uncover the same secret that he had.
After nearly three hours in rapturous thrall, he gave into his arm fatigue and skidded onto the shore. The session had been perfect. He’d hoped only to do some basic riding, as the day’s objective concerned the location itself and not any skills or tricks he’d planned to showcase, but the wind and water conditions were so favorable and his confidence so high that he couldn’t resist working his way through his bag of tricks. His basic jumps and backrolls were feeling natural, so he introduced a few grabs—stalefish, then melon—and then completed the sixth and seventh double backrolls he’d ever landed, both of which took place, he was fairly certain, within the frame of the Lumix stationed on the beach. He’d paused only for a quick lunch consisting of a peanut-butter-and-jelly tortilla, a banana, and a couple fistfuls of his wife’s gorp before heading back out into the bay. For the final hour or so he hadn’t even concerned himself with tricks except for a few purely spontaneous airs that had surprised even him. His time on the water had gone so well that, wary of the possibility of blithe disregard toward the task at hand, after pulling his kite onto the beach he frantically checked his cameras. All three had battery life to spare and were still recording.
With fists clenched and knees bent, he leaned backward and roared into the cloudless firmament.
“Let’s gooooo! Yes! Yes! Woo!”
Dizzy with excitement, he sat in the sand and hung his head between his knees. He remained hunched over for mere seconds before pulling himself back to his feet, so moved was he by delight at having executed his plan. He then turned to check his surroundings for a moment as he considered whether this delight might reasonably be turned into flat-out pleasure. “Yeah, fuck it,” he sighed as he fumbled for his wetsuit’s zipper.
He wriggled out of the drenched second skin until it hung around the tops of his booties and removed both gloves before pulling his diving shorts down so that they joined the wetsuit at his ankles. The late-summer sun was still high, and he noted the prismatic beads of water illuminating his reddish tuft of pubic hair. He brushed the droplets from his crotch, spat in his left hand, and wrapped his fingers around his unerect penis.
“Ugh,” he groaned as he felt grains of sand make contact with the delicate skin.
He hobbled over to the water and shook his hands out underneath its surface. Cupping his hands, he then doused his dangling organ three times. His palm again coated in saliva, he resumed stroking, focusing his efforts on the pruny tip in order to harden himself. It took a bit of effort to wrest his mind’s eye away from the sights he’d just enjoyed on his board. He tried instead to goad his thoughts toward the memory of his wife astride him while on their trip to the Greek island of Paros the previous year. Her skin had tasted salty after they’d spent the afternoon wandering through the market in the peak-season heat, and her blissful murmurs alone had nearly been enough to bring him to completion.
His thoughts drifted to the following day of that vacation. They had in part planned to visit Paros, rather than Corfu or Crete, because he had read about a burgeoning kitesurfing scene there. Having brought his Nobile Check In Bag full of kiting gear—no, he had just switched to his new travel system at that point, so it was his Mystic 135cm Foil Travel Bag; he remembered that this had been first trip using it—he had gone out for a couple of sessions only to find that the locals in the Paros scene were quite hostile toward kiting tourists, groups of locals going so far as to carry out a coordinated effort to box him into one miniscule section of the spot where he’d tried to ride. It had left an unpleasant taste in his mouth, and he didn’t attempt another session during that trip.
He looked down at his inanimate sex. It had perhaps been a mistake to drench it in frigid water before attempting to gratify himself. As he considered his foolishness he noticed that the wind on his soaked bare skin was anything but sexy.
“Hard goddamn nipples, soft fucking dick,” he muttered as he labored to squeeze back into the neoprene, which had stiffened from the loss of his body’s heat.
Aside from compromising his suit’s insulating qualities, the dalliance had done little harm. He shook off the setback and carried on with deflating his kite, breaking down his cameras, and packing everything into dry bags. Once he had his gear back on the boat, he took a quick inventory and then looked at the shot list he kept on his phone. The only remaining on-location shots were some outro clips of him packing his gear back into the car and wrapping up his narration on the drive back to Brooklyn. If he decided to add a conclusion, he could record additional footage at his desk in the comfort of his own home.
The shot list was solid. It had the beginning, middle, and end to fill out the formula to which his content usually adhered. But he wondered whether the epicness of the spot and journey would jump out at the viewer from the footage he’d captured so far, and if it would be apparent to other kiters outside of New York just how sick the location was. It was possible—likely, even—that this bay off the coast of Long Island would come across as little more than a large lake, and in his own viewing habits he had observed that outdoor recreation content was most captivating when it demonstrated at least one of two basic criteria: risk and grandeur. So far he hadn’t managed to attain either.
His boat tottered in the steady but mild wind. He knew it wouldn’t be possible to construe these conditions as anything close to treacherous. It was a beautiful day, which would certainly come across in the footage, but he guessed that the visible coasts of Long Island to the north and the barrier islands to the south would have a limiting effect on the majesty his clips would impart. It wouldn’t require much additional effort to secure some shots on the open ocean, and he was sure that if he proceeded slowly he would find a path deep enough to accommodate the boats, which compared to other watercrafts he’d seen in this bay was quite a modest size.
Just past another small island was visible a broad inlet offering passage through the barrier. He quickly determined that he’d lose sleep if he didn’t at least attempt to traverse it so that he could record some views of the open ocean. Aware that the task warranted his full attention (and that he didn’t want the video’s final sequence to appear too contrived), he left his selfie stick on the boat’s deck as he brought in the anchor and took off. He created no wake and carefully scanned the sand just below his starboard side, letting up on the throttle completely whenever he passed over particularly light-colored patches of ground. Rebukes of his friend Nate clouded his head: what on earth was he thinking, buying this vessel with no depth gauge? It made absolutely no sense to have a boat with such an obvious restriction in this particular area. Perhaps for Nate’s next birthday he’d see about having one installed for him.
With great care he guided himself through the inlet, sure that in a couple of places the propeller was nearly grazing the floor of the bay. So focused on the peripheral shallows was he that some tens of seconds passed before he realized he’d already made it through the opening, the swift lateral careening of the vehicle finally announcing his arrival onto the ocean. Giddy at his accomplishment, he laid on the boat’s throttle and sped into the oncoming waves, revelling in the boat’s bouncing along the more vigorous chop of the open water.
The gleeful paroxysm out of his system, he brought himself back toward the shore and let up on the throttle as he considered what to do for these unplanned shots. He didn’t need anything too fancy—a few ebullient clips of himself skipping down the coast and some panoramas of the shoreline and horizon would more than suffice. Later on he would have the opportunity to add a bit of voiceover narration to emphasize any details of the ride that weren’t apparent in the visuals alone. He pulled back on the throttle, the boat cruising along at a low rumble as he picked up his selfie stick and fumbled for a decent mounting point. The tossing of the waves rendered his seat cushion solution useless, the stick toppling backwards or forwards after just a few seconds of uprightness. He was careful to keep the boat’s bow heading parallel with the shore as he searched his bag for his GoPro Jaws Flex Clamp Mount, which he fastened to his GoPro MAX 360 and secured to the top of the windshield, the highest point in the vehicle.
Once this first was mounted and recording, he turned his attention to a piece of equipment that he’d tossed into his bag on a whim, one which he hadn’t seriously considered using until his hand had grazed it in pursuit of the GoPro clamp: the Zhiyun Crane 4 Gimbal that he used in order to stabilize his Panasonic Lumix GH5 for handheld recording. He considered this gimbal a perfect piece of camera equipment: it combined ergonomic design, lightweight construction, and powerful payload capacity, all while producing outstanding stabilization results. But while he’d practiced with it at home many times, chasing his daughter across the floor of their living room or circling his wife as she prepared food at their kitchen counter, he’d hadn’t yet been able to use it for any of his published content. With the confluence of the waves, the motion of the boat, the fact that he wasn’t out with his kite, and the dire need for an exceptional product, the perfect occasion for it had finally arisen.
Ease of use being another of the gimbal’s key advantages, he was able to fasten the camera to it without disturbing his vessel’s headway. He fumbled with a few levers and settings until he had the device’s balancing mechanism operating correctly, and checked the viewfinder to make sure the frame wasn’t wavering at all. Pointing the lens first toward the horizon and then toward the shore, he could see even through the glare on the camera’s screen that the footage was going to look as sick as he’d imagined, the viewer appearing to glide effortlessly over the ocean as its surface reeled with visible roughness.
The camera rolling, he held the gimbal in his left hand and advanced the throttle’s position a couple of inches, playing with the boat’s trim button as he went until the bow leveled out and bobbed smoothly over the waves, his body settling into a squatting position just beside the captain’s chair in order to brace himself against the motion of the vessel. His eyes jumped repeatedly from camera to helm to his trajectory along the coast as he made necessary adjustments to each, and once he was confident in the boat’s direction, headed ever so slightly away from but still along the shoreline so that he was in no danger of running into it, he turned his focus to the task of videography. Sure of the stability of his crouched position, he crept his right hand into place on the gimbal’s second handle. He held the camera at his chest and began a slow pan from the visible beach of the barrier toward the horizon and back again, repeating the motion two times before deciding that the periphery of the boat was visible throughout and was probably restricting the epicness of the footage. Widening his stance to increase the efficacy of his crouch, he inched forward through the gap in the boat’s windshield until he’d made his way well into the seating area in the bow, looking up as he went to ensure there was nothing or no one in his path. He again focused his attention on the viewfinder before commencing another pan from starboard to port.
Just as he completed his sweep leftward and the bisected blues of the horizon came into frame, the shot wholly uncluttered by land, the boat lurched to the right, the apparent result of a collision with an errant wave. Knocked backward by the unexpected bump, he flailed in search of a surface against which to steady himself, his right hand separating from the gimbal and groping the air for anything at all, his left suddenly burdened solely with maintaining control of the camera, which the surprise of the original motion had thrown outward toward the water. He tightened his grip on the handle and moved to bring the object back toward his center of gravity, itself knocked all askew by the upsetting of his sure footing. Amidst his various efforts to correct the errors of motion, an estimated price tag flashed a series of estimated price tags across the screen of his mind: probably six hundred and fifty dollars for the Zhiyun Crane 4 Gimbal? About eighteen hundred dollars for the Panasonic Lumix GH5? Maybe twenty-five hundred total?
He made a final effort to contort his body in the direction of the camera, and found himself leaned too heavily over the port side of the boat, heading overboard. Using the last bit of contact his legs had with the bow to lunge away from the hull, he believed he’d done enough to avoid the path of the propeller. His next instinctual maneuver, part of the same motion outward, was to twist the left side of his body so that his arm stretched toward the sky in an effort to keep the camera and gimbal out of the water for which his body was destined. He extended his other limbs as well in hopes of keeping himself from sinking below the surface upon impact. He was in a fairly favorable position as his back pierced the skin of the water, his outstretched left arm maintaining its vertical position and his free limbs working furiously to propel himself upward. The water’s icy sting enveloped his unprotected head, and as he struggled his mind again produced a phantasmagoria of web pages, images, and prices inventorying all of the equipment that was being carried away in the unmanned boat: his Nobile NHP Split Twin-Tip Kiteboard; his seven-, nine-, and twelve meter CORE XR4 kites; his Mystic Majestic Hardshell Waste Harness; his CORE Sensor 4 Bar System; his Neil Pryde Armor Skin 5mm Kiteboarding Gloves; his; WFMG Kiteboarding Pump; his Ortlieb Xtremer 65L Dry-Pack and smaller Helly Hansen dry bags; his DJI Mavic 3 Classic drone and DJI Mic Mini wireless microphone system; his Alta Pro Carbon Travel Tripod; his GoPro MAX 360 and GoPro HERO13 action cameras with their extra batteries and various mounts and accessories. It all represented tens of thousands of dollars and innumerable hours of research and acquisition work, and it was all speeding away from him, perhaps destined for impact with some dismal private beach on the southern New Jersey shoreline.
As his body ceased its tumbling and its motion slowed to match that of the waves, he managed to lift his head and fill his lungs with cold air. His eyes found the screen of his Panasonic Lumix GH5, which he was amazed to see was on and still recording in glorious 4K.
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Brandon Wilner is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work of various types has appeared in Liberated Texts, The New York War Crimes, Wesleyan University Press' Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Resident Advisor, The New York Times, and The Believer, amongst others. He has also had less conventional works published by Publication Studio Portland and the design company Areaware. He is currently a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center's Department of English.
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