While locals may often suffer the strong south-easterly winds that blow through the Mother City in the summer months, for kite-surfers in search of big air they're nothing but a blessing.
And now the wind known as the (in)famous 'Cape Doctor' has given the city a world-first, with one dare-devil kite-surfer using the howling winds and whipping waves to complete a jump over an aircraft!
The kiter in question is Red Bull athlete and extreme big-air kite-surfer Lasse Walker, who pulled off this world-first stunt offshore of Dolphin Beach in Cape Town on Thursday, January 16. Leaning hard into the gusting southerly winds, Walker managed to fly his board high above the wings of a Red Bull aircraft piloted by Red Bull Air Race pilot Łukasz 'Luke' Czepiela .
Neither kiter nor pilot are strangers to death-defying aerial adventures. Walker is a regular at events such as the Red Bull Megaloop, and is known for his jumps over obstacles as bizarre as a freighter, a pier and a whale! This latest antic took place at what he regards as his favorite kitesurfing spot in South Africa.
Likewise, the Polish pilot Czepiela is a regular on the Red Bull Air Race circuit and became an internet sensation in 2023 for landing his plane on the famous (and tiny!) helipad of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah in Dubai.
This latest stunt took two years of planning to ensure the safety of kiter and pilot.
'I was flying back from America and we had headwinds during the flight, and I actually came up with the idea: if a slow plane is now flying against the wind, I can jump over it,' recalls Walker. 'The last few years we've been preparing, one of the key things for me was that I can jump over Luke consistently so I've done thousands of jumps with height measurement devices and drones to prove that I can always clear the gap. '
With the 'Cape Doctor' gusting at more than 50 km/h on January 16, and the Atlantic Ocean whipped into a frenzy of waves to get Walker airborne, the pair knew they had found their moment.
While the aircraft's airspeed was 35 knots (65km/h) the headwinds of 25 knots (51km/h) meant that the plane was only moving over the water at a speed of seven knots, or 13km/h; the speed of a fast game. That allowed Walker to line up his run, pick the perfect wave and catch some air.
'We had the perfect kicker and timing. Luke was flying low, I jumped over, did the loop with my kite, and looked straight down into the cockpit. Everything came together,' says Walker, who jumped to more than 15 meters above the ocean, clearing Czepiela's 'CubCrafters Carbon Cub' aircraft with room to spare, and splash down safely.
"You're trying not to stall it and the aircraft is not very manoeuvrable," added Czepiela. 'Then I look to the front, and there's a dude on the water with a kite above him. He pulls and flies over the plane. It was very surreal.'
Check out the video of the feat below:
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