The Black Rock Yacht Club

Summer is here and festival season is well underway, and if you like your festivals eccentric, few come weirder than ‘Burning Man’ in northwest Nevada. So what does a desert rave up have to do with windsurfing and what is the Black Rock Yacht Club, Kevin Pritchard tells tale.

- Kevin Pritchard

Yeah yeah, you’re going windsurfing at Burning Man. I know what you’re thinking, sounds like a big excuse to go party your ass off. Beautiful girls and rock and roll. Well, not so much rock and roll, let’s say tons of E.D.M. - Electronic Dance Music. But Burning Man is more than that, it’s a festival of creativity. Many of the artists and support crew can only be described as mad scientists, spending immense amounts of time and energy creating some wild thing that people can climb on, ride on, dance around, or stare at for hours on end. You cannot believe the amount of time, money, and thinking outside the box that goes into this festival. The art projects, the party palaces, the lights, the sound systems, the infrastructure; there is no real way to describe it. Whatever you think it is, or think it could be, multiply it times a hundred, and then a hundred again.

Amongst the planning of going to Burning Man for the first time, I asked everyone I knew about it. I got ideas and information, and comments ranging from “You’re going to have an amazing time!” to “Why the hell are you going there?” I started my journey to Nevada from Punta San Carlos in Baja Mexico. Yeah, you heard that correctly, from one of the most dusty, sandy, salty, desolate points of Northern Baja to the dryer, maybe even dustier Nevada desert with an international border crossing between. Talk about a drive. The 5 hours at the border didn’t help, neither did the nice border officer who put me in a secondary check for 2 hours going through my van looking for more, I guess dust, which made a long drive even longer.