Kitesurfing gig suits free spirit

Nova Scotian enjoys job teaching sport in Caribbean

Dara Young’s former high school classmates have become doctors and lawyers and engineers. But her job makes them jealous.

Young is a travelling kitesurfing instructor in the Caribbean, working every day in one of her 25 swimsuits. All her possessions can fit in one piece of carry-on luggage, but her passport is filled.

Young, 32, was known as a free spirit and for her tendency to challenge authority while a student at Halifax Grammar School and Dalhousie University. She went on to become a chef and a partner in a Vancouver restaurant, so successful it was featured in the Globe and Mail.

“I went through some times when I wasn’t allowed to be a hundred per cent myself,” she said during a visit home to Halifax. “The real world is a little different than I thought, but I found a way around it, I got out of it and got out of the nine-to-five, by living in the Caribbean.”

Cooking is part of her new gig, which sounds like what someone would do for a living if they got to write their own job description.

“My boyfriend and I run kitesurfing trips, we take eight people and we cater to them completely,” Young said. “We teach them to kitesurf if they don’t already know, we cook for them, we clean, we party with them. So it’s like a mixture of everything I’ve done.”

A few years ago, Young was working at her restaurant when she decided she needed an escape. She had seen kitesurfing on YouTube and went to nearby Squamish to learn, but when the summer ended she wasn’t ready to stop.

“So I asked my partner if I could take some time off work,” she said. “He was like, do whatever you want, so I went to Mexico, Costa Rica and Panama and when I came back from that trip he offered to buy me out of the restaurant. So I kept travelling.”

After becoming an instructor, which took a year or so, Young started by teaching kitesurfing to beginners and now teaches more advanced skills, like jumping and tricks.

“But I still have tons to learn, it’s a fun sport that way,” said Young, who wants to equal her boyfriend’s teaching skills. “He’s better than me, he has 18 seasons under his belt and I have three.”

The couple’s office is a 47-foot boat that sleeps 10 people. Their boss owns three boats and handles all the bookings and paperwork.

“We get to just show up and have fun with guests all day,” said Young. “Anyone who wants to go on what’s called a kitesurf safari, anyone who wants to have kind of an extreme vacation. People do come along and just hang out on the boat or scuba dive, but for the most part everyone kitesurfs. We kitesurf every day and in between kitesurfing we eat, have some beers and listen to music at night, visit the locals on the islands. It’s a pretty action-packed time.”

Young and her British boyfriend, Mark Postles, sail to wherever their guests are arriving — sometimes Martinique, sometimes St. Lucia, sometimes St. Vincent — and take them to the Grenadines, where conditions are predictably good.

“Down in the Caribbean, the wind is stronger in the south and it lightens up as you go north, so the Grenadines is great for it,” she said. “We’ve also been to Guadeloupe we were at Necker island in the BVIs (British Virgin Islands) for a little bit until hurricane Irma happened. I’ve kitesurfed in Cuba, Turks and Caicos, I was in the Bahamas this year, Mexico, Hawaii, we didn’t sail to Hawaii, we flew there.”

Young says her body is deteriorating from years of working in kitchens but her current job, which allows lots of time for yoga on the beach, is a healthy one. She and Postles hope to one day run their own kitesurfing business.

“We’ve been looking at buying our own boat,” she said. “We’re trying not to rush it, because the boat is a pretty big investment and when the right boat comes along we won’t have to force it, it’ll just happen.”