Spot: Blue Waters Beach Club
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Description:
This spot is a short cab ride east of Falmouth, and is on the West end of White Bay. There is a nice beach. Bathroom facilities, food and drink, lounge chairs to rent, even DJ music, etc. Plenty of room to launch and land unless a cruise ship is in port. Royal Caribbean has a port in nearby Falmouth, a short cab ride. The cruise ships can be massive. This appears to be the nearest beach to the port. With a big ship in port this beach can be crowded, but seemingly there is always a place to launch and land. Also there is some grass to fold your kite at the end of a session without taking home 8 pounds of Jamaican sand stuck to your kite.
Dude alert! Around Spring Break time this beach will be covered with college hotties. There will likely be no one else kiting, so you will be the star of the show. If the author of this page, a 57 year old man with thinning hair, can attract a score of young blondes and brunettes between the ages of 19 and 22, all wanting to know what the sport is, how much it costs, will you teach them, and with a host of other questions, all you have to do is be in your 20s, fit, boost a few big jumps, and you should be in like Flynn. None of the cuties asked me for a spanking but they might ask you for what comes after that. (Please, someone who gets the humor, respond, and I will know I have not written in vain.)
The wind here will almost always be onshore or side onshore, given the prevailing easterly trade winds. The water here drops off fairly fast, the wave action can be in the 2-3 foot range, so if that puts you off kite and the more protected Burwood Beach just east of this location. Once on the water you will have to navigate the pier at the east end of the beach, a swimmer buoy line approximately 100 yards out, swimmers closer to shore.
This is not an ideal spot to kite. But if you are coming off a cruise ship,
looking for a spot where others in your group can hit the beach and you can
show off your skills its way better than the worst spot in the Caribbean.
Spot: Burwood Public Beach
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Description:
This is a public park. There is an admission charge, but relatively small. It is on the other side of White Bay from the Blue Water Beach Club. This beach is more for locals as opposed to tourists. Significant parts of the beach smell a bit of human urine. I would not advise using the public toilets. There are not a lot of people here, and the few that were there the one time we went looked a little sketchy. We would not leave stuff on the beach without someone watching it and kite for a couple hours.
This spot is not as bad as we made it sound above. Few people, plenty of room to launch and land. The water is beautiful, reasonably shallow a few hundred feet out, the east wind improves as you get away from shore and the wave action is flattened by the point of land to the east of the beach. This is a better place to ride than the Blue Waters Beach Club on the other side of White Bay.
The author has never met Brian Schurton of the Kitesurf Jamaica, but I have heard good things, and he does appear to be the king of Jamaican kiteboarding. He teaches at this beach which is perhaps the best seal of approval for this spot. Some of the other kiteboarding instructors on Jamaica have bad reviews. Brian appears to be the only reliable source of kite instruction on the island.