Catching the wind

The call goes out over Pleasure Bay: "Duxbury is blowing 22!"

Large swaths of nylon unroll on the sand. Pumps appear, to push air into the edges of the nylon, filling them out. Shoulders bend to slide inside wetsuits. Harnesses slide up and into place.

Feet wait near boards, pacing "like a boxer in the locker room before a fight," says beach regular Mike Hourihan.

Pleasure Bay, the manmade lagoon at Castle Island in South Boston, has become a New England hot spot for kiteboarding. Like their cousins -- and lagoon mates -- the windsurfers, they embrace a sport involving boards and wind. But where windsurfing comes from the more genteel, John Kerry-photo-op tradition, kiteboarding, also known as kitesurfing, is a descendant of the extreme sports world of go gnarly or go home. And Pleasure Bay is where locals are going to catch the wind.

The idea of using kites for propulsion dates to 13th-century China, but it's only in the last 10 years that the sport of kiteboarding has been refined, thanks to the development of safer kites and boards. This has allowed rider s to control the ir kite s with less chance of ending up in what veterans know as a "kitemare" that could get them killed (though it can still be very dangerous; several people die each year from kiteboarding accidents).

As the sport has grown -- estimates by kitesurfingschool.org, one of the best-known websites for the sport, put the number of kiteboarders in the world at up to 200,000 -- so, too, has the emphasis on finding the right spots to take advantage of the wind.

Duxbury and Revere Beach are popular spots among kiteboarders, but the specific geography of Pleasure Bay -- a manmade, oval lagoon formed by a walkway and a roadway that lead to Castle Island and Fort Independence -- creates the rare combination of flat water below and huge winds above. For kiteboarders, it is perfect.

A little over four years ago, Hourihan, 30, a paramedic from Cape Cod, was thinking of moving to Boston with his wife.

He was sitting in a leasing office at Harbor Point in Dorchester one day, after looking at an apartment he'd read about online, when he spotted kites off in the distance at Castle Island.

Hourihan had recently learned to kiteboard, and the sight of the kites was too much. He signed the lease on the spot, called his wife, hopped in the car, and followed the coastline until he found the beach. That's when he met T.

T's real name is Terence Stapleton. He's the one who seems to know everyone who walks by the beach and is the unofficial ringleader of the kiters.

Stapleton, a 43-year-old car salesman, is one of the former windsurfers who began playing with the kites at Castle Island six years ago. He'd taken some lessons during a trip to Aruba and came back hooked.

"At first it's hard," Stapleton said of kiteboarding, "but a lot of people came over from a windsurfing background because they can do a lot of crazy stuff a lot sooner."

Crazy stuff is exactly what clogs the pedestrian walkway encircling Pleasure Bay, as people stop to watch Stapleton and his posse -- about 20 regulars frequent the lagoon -- manipulate the kites to shoot themselves 30 feet in the air.

"We come here every afternoon to watch," says Eugenia Kanevsky, who lives just up the street from Castle Island. "These boys are unbelievable."

The boys -- and a few girls -- on the boards come from all walks of life. There's a huge international presence, with expats from Ireland, Laos, Norway, Finland, Israel, Guatemala, Brazil, France, Belgium, Bulgaria, and Russia.

The wind, the rush, the crazy stuff; the kiteboarders have all sorts of reasons for why they pump up their kites. But below the lollipop-colored nylon, there's something else going on.

"If you look at this place," Stapleton says, "it's really transformed. . . . I have all these friends that I never would have met before."

There's the Brazilian laborer and the hedge-fund manager with the private jet. The French mathematician and the used-car salesman from Southie. They're all part of a clan of kiters who leave behind their social status, and their significant others, to hang with the boys and engage in a beachbum form of locker-room talk.

But mostly, they talk about wind. They're all amateur meteorologists. The kiteboarders will spend their days at work tracking that wind on the Internet, from when it hits the buoy in Buzzards Bay and begins its march across the Cape, up through Plymouth and the South Shore.

Or they'll just call Stapleton and Hourihan, who live next to each other across from the beach, so they can lick their thumbs and stick them out the window and see if it's in that 18- to 22- mile-per-hour range that they crave.

When the wind hits Duxbury, it's almost time to go, and they'll wait and watch its final march.

The wind -- this perfect 22-mile-per-hour southwester that they've been waiting days for -- hits Harbor Point in Dorchester and battles through the brick colossus of UMass-Boston before shaking out the turbulence on the smooth, fast fetch over the cold waters of Dorchester Bay.

As the first gusts hit the sand at Pleasure Bay, the kiteboarders look up at the flag above the World War II memorial that is just off the beach. Old Glory is straight and true and pointing northeast.

"She's filling in," someone yells.

It's time to go. It's time to catch the wind.

Billy Baker can be reached at ciweek@globe.com.