TAI TAM TUK village is quiet. At the community near Stanley, the sea is still, the surface barely broken by a ripple. After a few days of rain, the sun is shining in a near cloudless sky. It looks like a perfect day for my first lesson in wakesurfing.
Thrillseekers tend to gravitate naturally to such water sports as surfing and wakeboarding. These adrenalin junkies brave high speeds or fearsome waves to pull off stunning moves and catch perfect breakers. But wakesurfing is a gentler hybrid of the two, in which surfers use a specially designed board or a regular surfboard to ride the wake produced by a speedboat.
The sport was introduced to Hong Kong recently by a group of extreme sports, or X-game, fans eager to grab a surfing fix in Hong Kong waters where suitable waves are scarce for much of the year. David Chan, a keen surfer, was among the first to check out the new sport and is pleased to have an alternative. 'When there are no waves, we can still surf,' he says. The skills required for controlling a surfboard and a wake surfboard are more or less the same. But instead of tapping the power of the ocean, wakesurfers use the propulsion of a boat to create the 'pocket' - the section of the wake that allows surfers to gain momentum.
'The sea churns up different sizes and shapes of waves. But the wake generated by a boat doesn't change,' says Chan.
Although it was invented before wakeboarding, the sport didn't find a niche in Hong Kong until wakesurfing instructor Patrick Chang and a group of X-game friends decided to take it up.
'We didn't have a clue how to wakesurf when we first started,' he says. Eventually, the group worked it out for themselves, experimenting on regular surfboards before they graduated to wakesurf boards, which are easier for beginners to balance on. 'After about a year, we eventually mastered the skills,' Chang says.