Testing the 2008 Nemesis HP in Brazil: I Don't Give Up Easily ...

Posted Thursday July 26th, by Alex Shogren

Wednesday 25th July

I'm a pretty determined person. A little more than three years ago when I set out to build the largest kite company in the world, people laughed at me, but they're not laughing now. Well, Mother Nature is laughing at me, and she's laughing hard. I went to check out the dam we built yesterday to stop the breach and make the lagoon bigger, and when I got there Mother Nature was rolling on the floor, laughing her ass off.

I thought, "Damn, what I really need are a bunch of beavers to build this dam right." Well, I kinda figured there were no beavers in Brazil, and all the guys who kite at the lagoon were pretty tired of me asking them to shovel sand, and Peter was too busy "designing kites" to help.

So I hired a group of local fisherman. I always like to support the local economy, plus I'm sure Ian will not hesitate to approve this on my expense account even though the fisherman didn't give me a receipt.

After about an hour and 50 sandbags, we got the breach closed with the help of Beto and his 3 brothers who are the local Best rippers.

Now it's time to really reinforce this baby. Early this morning, I went to every supermarket in Pecem and Taiba and begged and pleaded for as many "sackos" (my Portuguese is only good when it comes to ordering food) as they could spare. I managed to get about 170 "sackos" with each proprietor looking at me very strangely when I asked for "sackos."

Of course the keystone to this whole marvel of modern engineering is a 2 year old prototype ...

So after building the whole thing about 4 feet high, we laid a series of "sackos" filled with sand along the top and then covered the whole thing with huge plastic "tarpos" - that was special asking for those this morning as well.

You may have noticed that Shannon, Marco and Veronica are not in any of these photos. Marco never showed up at all today, but Shannon and Veronica did for a while to help. Peter of course was still busy working, and to his credit, he's been locked in front of his computer for about 18 hours a day frantically making new kite files.

So by about 5pm local time, we finished. And it's a work of art. Mother Nature must be trembling right now ...

Keep your fingers crossed that it holds during high tide tonight. I never even got to ride today, I know, poor me ... but I made my "beavers" very happy by giving them an extra R$100 for cervesas tonight, which again I'm sure Ian will approve on my expense account and I won't have to play the Chairman of the Board card :)