Should I learn kitesurfing in deep or shallow waters?

This is a question that we often see on kite forums: Should I take my kitesurfing lessons in deep or shallow waters? Knowing that deep water requires more skills, is it easier to learn in the shallow, or should you jump straight into the deep? To be fair, both have their benefits and drawbacks, and you should consider where a kitesurfing school operates before picking one.

What are shallow waters, and what are deep waters in kitesurfing? We consider the water shallow when you can stand and walk around comfortably, and you can crash safely. Any water level below the knee is usually considered too shallow and too dangerous for a beginner. A failed water start would send you hitting the bottom (or other objects below the water, such as rocks) face-first! Deep water begins when most of your weight is supported by the water and by the kite, rather than by your feet. It means that even when you can touch the bottom with your toes, you may not be able to walk around: you start floating and the kite pulls you. It usually happens when the water is hip- or waist-deep. For those who have never flown a kite in the water, you should know that you cannot sink when hooked to a kite in the water. Your own buoyancy, combined with the pull of the kite, makes you float. Moving in the water with a kite without a board is called body dragging. It is fun, and it is a good exercise, taking for granted that you already know how to control the kite safely.

Some schools operate in waters that are so shallow that students can’t practice body dragging safely. It means that you go straight from learning to control the kite to learning to ride the board. If you can’t body drag safely, the location is not suitable or safe for learning to kitesurf.

Learning in shallow water has many benefits. The risk of drifting away from shore is usually nil. You’re getting a bit too far? No problem! Stand up and walk back. You had to pull on the quick release and flag out the kite? Easy! Hold the safety line and walk to your kite, or wait for someone to come and help you; no need for self-rescuing! You lost your board? Stand up and wait for it to drift back or walk toward it. A bit scared? Let go of the bar and stand up. Overall, because you can stand up every time you mess up, you can learn to ride the board quicker. And because the instructor can quickly reach you, you always have them nearby to save you.

By the sound of it, there are only benefits to learning in shallow water, right? But there’s more to it. When picking your kitesurfing school (and therefore its lesson location), you should ask yourself: where am I going to ride after the lessons when I’m no longer with an instructor? If you plan on always riding in shallow waters, then you may get away with learning in the shallow. However, if you plan on riding in deep water – and most kitesurfing happens in deep water, to be honest – then you should learn in deep water.

Did you know that most kitesurfing spots across the world are in deep waters? Conversely, most kitesurfing schools across the globe operate in shallow waters.

I truly believe that learning in deep water is far better than learning in shallow water, and here’s why. Everything that makes it quicker to learn in shallow water are skills that you do not learn properly when choosing the easy option. Instructors will pretend to teach these skills, but the truth is that you don’t really master them unless you’ve practised them in deep waters. Deep waters have currents and chop, and it makes things like body dragging upwind and board recovery harder to accomplish, for instance. Those are real-life situations. Even if you succeeded in doing a board recovery in the shallow without cheating (using the ground to help yourself), it doesn’t mean you would be efficient at doing it in deep water. Even more, in shallow waters, your instructor will teach you how to do it once, and the rest of the lesson, you will walk back to your board, so you are not actually getting the practice that you need to master the new skill. If you’ve done it once, it is not enough. When learning in deep waters, you practice deep water skills regularly, as they become a normal part of kitesurfing.

The worst part of learning in shallow water is that your instructor may take shortcuts on the skills that you don’t need in your shallow water lessons. When I was teaching in the shallow, I was guilty of this. I was teaching body drag upwind and board recovery, but I would not spend much time on it, even when the student was not successful at it. Self-rescue is arguably the most critical deep-water skill to have. I was teaching it, but I would never trust my students to do it on their own in deep water during the lesson, because I knew it would not end in a satisfactory way. I was quickly skimming over these techniques, like boxes to check, and I did not care much about whether my student was able to do it independently. Because my students didn’t need it in my lesson, I was skipping straight to the fun part: riding! They would get to the board quickly, but once I was gone, my students were lost. I was not creating independent kitesurfers: I created kitesurfers that relied on an instructor and on being able to stand. “Not all shallow water instructors…” Well… yes, the vast majority of them. Even with the best intentions, a shallow-water instructor cannot replicate deep-water conditions (current, chop, etc…) that make deep-water the real deal. What seems to be mastered in shallow water may not work in deep waters. If you can only teach in shallow water, you’re not a good instructor. This is a harsh judgment, but it is my conclusion after having done it myself, watching others doing it, and watching plentiful shallow water beginners going into deep water for the first time… At our deep water spot, we retrain plenty of students who had lessons in shallow waters and came to the conclusion that they knew nothing after going in the ocean for the first time and endangering themselves. 

Self-rescue is the most poorly taught beginner kitesurfing skill. Most instructors will either not teach this skill at all or simply give a demonstration of it on the beach or in shallow water.

If you have never successfully done at least one deep-water self-rescue without any assistance during your training, you haven’t been taught this skill properly.

Now that I teach in deep water, I see the aftermath of lazy shallow water teaching. Most beginners who learnt in shallow water, when first coming to our (deep water) teaching location to practice, lose their board and then drift dangerously away from shore. Their self-rescue skills are very poor, if they were ever taught self-rescue, that is. Some of them will panic, clueless about what to do. It quickly turns into a kitemare (a nightmare with a kite) with kitesurfers drifting away from the shore for long periods of time, sometimes ditching their kite and swimming back to the shore, sometimes trying to swim back to the shore with their kite pulling against them. The shortcuts that I took in my teaching in the shallow, I cannot take them anymore in deep water, because the student will end up in danger during my lessons, and this is not something that I want to see. Poor shallow water instructors will never see their students get into danger in deep water when they practice on their own. When my students have finished their lessons, I know they will be safe on their own, because I taught them what they need to know to manage shallow or deep water. Even if you learn in shallow waters and practice in shallow waters after your lessons, you will inevitably end up in deep waters at some point. When you do, you must already master deep water skills such as board recovery, water relaunching and self-rescue.

Overall, it may take more time to learn in deep water, but it makes the student truly independent. Contrary to the widespread misconception that learning to kitesurf in shallow water is easier, deep water kitesurfing lessons are actually better because they teach proper skills and real independence. 

So, if deep water lessons are better, why are most schools teaching in shallow water? Well, not everyone will agree with the above statement: “If you can only teach in shallow water, you’re not a good instructor.” I would have been quite insulted to hear such a thing when I was teaching in shallow water myself. I explained why I now believe such a thing, and I rest my case. The other thing to consider as well is: what’s the actual goal of your kitesurfing school? Giving you an experience? Selling you equipment? Or teaching you how to kitesurf independently? As we saw in our popular blog post, some kitesurfing schools only aim at giving a kitesurfing experience. Their marketing is usually aimed at tourists. To be fair, many people look at kitesurfers from the beach and think, “This looks like fun, I would like to give it a try”, and go on to take lessons, not really knowing what to expect. These customers will not care for lesson quality; instead, they will look for the best price. Kitesurfing looks easy, so they don’t expect to be learning safety skills and boring stuff like theory, self-rescue and board recovery. They want to put the board on and ride! To satisfy this clientele, kitesurfing schools need to fast-track the learning experience and skip these essential skills in order to put them on the board as quickly as possible. The customers get to ride the board for a few meters, leave with a smile, go back home with pictures and videos, and tell their friends and family they kitesurfed. They will probably never touch a kite again, and that’s fine. In this scenario, a shallow-water shortcut lesson (i.e. a kitesurfing experience) is the perfect answer to this clientele’s needs. You can usually recognise these schools by their competitive pricing, their promise to get you riding in under 10 hours or less (typically called ‘’Zero to Hero’’ or something along those lines), their group lessons or their touristic location. Unless they have a rescue boat, they will always be in shallow water. Be wary, as some of these cheap touristic schools can also be found in deep water, operating from boats or jet skis.

Many shallow-water locations can also have deep-water areas; for example, when you get further from the shore, the water often gets progressively deeper. Tides can also quickly make a shallow-water location turn into a deep-water location or turn a shallow-water location suddenly too shallow for safe practice.

We often see these new students at our kite school saying, “I got X number of lessons at this tourist country / in this particular shallow water school”, and they have never heard about self-rescue or board recovery. Some of them had several weeks of practice and can ride confidently, but would not know how to save their life if they had to. We also often hear “The last time I got a lesson, I rode 50 metres, I only need a bit of help with my riding”, and they have no deep-water skills. For this reason, when a student comes from a different school, we always need to refresh their deep-water skills before continuing their progression.

In our school, we have yet to see a new student who had prior training in another school who was already competent at self-rescue.

About a third of our students had lessons elsewhere and came to us after a kitemare, when they realised they didn’t have all the needed skills to be independent. Knowing that so many kitesurfers ride in deep water without the proper skills is very scary. It is why the quality of your instruction is so important, and why deep-water learning should be a mandatory part of a complete quality kitesurfing tuition.

Most students will measure the quality of their instruction by how quickly they get to ride the board

You should instead measure the quality of your instruction by your competence in handling a variety of problematic scenarios and your ability to kitesurf independently after your lessons.

Now, you don’t have to take ALL your lessons in deep water. There are different ways to approach it, but keep in mind that you should at least get some lessons in deep water so that you can master the skills required for deep water. An option would be to start your lessons in deep water, allowing you to learn these skills from the beginning. Then, when it’s time to practice, you can save time by practising riding in shallow water. Instead of spending precious time doing board recoveries, you could stand up and walk to your board, fast-tracking the lesson. Since you did learn the deep-water skills with your basics, you will be fine to go in deep water when you’re ready. The danger with this option is that you get comfortable in the shallow and forget how to behave in deep water. Because you don’t practice the deep-water skills, you may forget them. Therefore, it is important not to spend too much time “cheating” in the shallow.

Another way to go would be to start in the shallow, practice until you are comfortable riding, and then get lessons in deep water to learn the missing deep-water skills. You will find that riding in deep water is harder (especially riding upwind), as there are currents and usually more chop. Don’t be discouraged if you feel that you perform poorly in deep water the first time. You will feel like you are taking one or several steps back, so don’t be hard on yourself. The problem with this option is resisting the temptation to go into deep water before you get your deep-water lessons. You may have planned a kitesurfing trip and realised on the spot that it was deep water, and you’re not ready for that. You may have kitesurfing friends who invite you to ride with them in deep water locations. It could be very tempting to go, especially if you have gained confidence in your riding. It is more likely to end up in a kitemare if you mess up. And if you don’t, you will gain the confidence to do it again, and forget the importance of learning deep-water skills, until you need it - when you end up in a (possibly life-threatening) kitemare, that is.

For the above reasons, I believe that it is better to take all your lessons in deep water, but know that it is not the only way to go. If there are benefits to shallow water learning, the skills you will learn in deep water are crucial and can hardly be adequately taught and in a realistic context in shallow water.

Whether you wish to start kitesurfing from scratch or wish to refresh your skills in deep-water, book your lessons here with us in Perth between October and March.