Red Letter Day: CHANCE ENCOUNTER

Rider & Words: Vinnicius Martins
Photos: Philip Mackenbrock
Location: Pozo Izquierdo, Gran Canaria
Date: Saturday July 6th, 2024

Bumping into your friend & photographer-of-choice while visiting an island in the mid-Atlantic might – in most cases – be a little coincidental. But given their deep involvement in the wind sport events the island was hosting, the surprise quickly morphed into opportunity…

I arrived in Gran Canaria a few days before the GWA Big Air World Championships and went str aight to Pozo to watch a bit of the Wind-surf World Cup that was also happening on the island at the same time.

When I got to the beach, I bumped into Philip Mackenbrock from NeilPryde, and we were both surprised to see each other there. We’ve done many photoshoots together before and the out-come has always been really good, so we spon-taneously decided to go for a session the next morning, in order to create some wing content in Pozo while the light was good, and the crowd hadn’t yet turned out. It was also a nice oppor-tunity to get some images of the new NP Firefly wing, recently launched by NeilPryde, and I’d only just received it that night.

The next morning I woke up early with the sound of the nuking winds hitting the doors and win-dows of my Airbnb. As I drove down from where I was staying in Vecindario I could already see lots of white caps on the water from quite far up the mountain; it was gusting more than 30 knots even though it was pretty early in the morning, and that reminded me of how incredibly consist-ent this place is. It is that windy (day and night) for pretty much the whole summer, and I was happy to think that this was going to be the first of many strong wind sessions of this trip. After spending some time at home in Brazil during the low wind season, I was looking forward to some overpowered action.

“AS WE’D PLANNED, WE WERE THE FIRST ONES OUT THAT DAY AND LUCKILY ENOUGH THE CLOUDS CLEARED SHORTLY AFTER THE BEGINNING OF THE SESSION.”

Philip and I met at the parking lot in Pozo at 8am. The weather was a bit cloudy and for a second we doubted if it would be worth the shoot, since taking pictures from the water in Pozo Izquierdo is super tricky with the very strong winds and currents – the reason why you don’t tend to see many water shots from this spot. But since Philip was leaving the island that same day, we decided to give it a try anyway. The launch over the rolling rocks in this spot is al-ways tricky on the wing gear so I decided to get on the water from a sheltered beach a little way upwind from Pozo and then ride down to the main spot from there, and save some time while avoiding too many scratches on my foil.

I unpacked the brand new 3m Firefly, setup my JP S-Winger board and Swift 600 foil, and we jumped in the water. As we’d planned, we were the first ones out that day and luckily enough the clouds cleared shortly after the beginning of the session. There were some really fun kickers, with wind around 30 to 35 knots. The wing worked really well, the short wing-span and the mono-handle are very helpful to do freestyle and handling the wing felt really intuitive, and I was able to do all my tricks with it.

But as I mentioned before, shooting from the water in Pozo is quite tricky and the strong winds quickly took Philip downwind towards the rocks at the end of the beach, so we had to call the session off after around 30 minutes. I have to say that I was also glad that it was a short session because the jetlag of the trip all the way from Brazil to Gran Canaria was starting to hit me hard…

We got out of the water just as the first windsurfers were arriving at the beach and went to take a look at the pictures over a much-needed cup of coffee at El Viento. These pictures that you see here are the out-come of this short but fun session! It was a great way to start my trip to the Canary Islands…