Kiteboarding as a sport is so recent it hasn’t had a chance to train up its second generation. But the process is under way. Polite, handsome, deeply tanned Kai Lenny, age 12, is a promising young star on Maui, able to make a fairly difficult sport look easy.

Raised on a California beach, Pete Siracusa studied petroleum engineering at Berkeley until it dawned on him that his profession would land him either in Oklahoma or Saudi Arabia, where there was no surfing. Perish the thought! He soon took himself into the restaurant business. Many, many years later he sold his Rusty Pelican chain of 30 eateries and retired to Maui, “The Spot,” he calls it, where at age 51 he and wife and three sons looked forward to leading the good life.

Even among the water sports devotees in Hawaii, it’s little known that the ancient Polynesians used kites for traction—-pulling boats and rafts along coasts and between islands. Because the Polynesians, including Hawaiians, had a pre-literate society and thus few written records, such use is documented mainly by myth and legend. Anthropologists have long since understood, however, that such oral accounts, even if centuries old, are often very accurate.

The idea behind kiteboarding itself is very simple. A kitesurfer stands on a board with foot straps and uses the power of a large controllable kite to propel him and the board across the water. This simplicity also makes such boarding challenging. Your body is the only connection between the kite and the board and you have to control them both at the same time: piloting the kite in the sky and steering the board on the water.

Tomoko Okazaki is a veteran professional kiteboarder and wind surfer and it shows. She has surgical scars on both knees and on one shoulder to repair crash damage and has twice scraped her heels completely raw on coral. She has another “kitemare” story, which she defines as a time “when the kite gains control over you.” “I scratched my butt really badly when I was dragged across a coral reef by the kite. But I had to go out again, because the wind was so good. So I taped myself up with duct tape, and out I went.”

“What was my motive for surfing the 70-foot Jaws wave last year? It was fun. If not, I wouldn’t have done it. You challenge yourself. You move the notches upward.” The speaker is Pete Cabrinha, 44, of Maui, one of the better known water sports competitors. Along with colleague and rival Robby Naish and a few others, he has made a global name for himself as board surfer, windsurfer, and kiteboarder. Like several of his peers, Cabrinha has cashed in on his fame by running a thriving water sports equipment business, with sales around the globe.

Imagine a short, boxy surfboard with fins at both ends and straps for your feet. Then let a highly controllable, four-line kite drag you along. As in windsurfing (parent of this newish sport) you don’t have to go in the direction the wind takes you, you have control. Not easy to learn in one day, kiteboarding is worth the effort to learn. It’s fun, a first-class adrenaline charge.

It was with the awe and wonder of a small child receiving candy that I opened my copy of the recently published book Japanese Kite Prints: Selections From the Skinner Collection by John Stevenson. The book was in a way a culmination of not only Scott Skinner’s dream, but also mine. I will explain.

In the sky. In among the billowing clouds. A kite at rest, still. A child’s kite. On its back, the child. A kite at rest, still. Something even our fine-feathered friends are incapable of achieving, this child’s kite in the sky with its passenger, unmoving. A point of stillness in the vast heavens.

Xian, China, home of the famous underground ceramic army, is also home to the three best makers of mechanical kites in the country, if not the world.