SNOWBOARDING HAD JAKE BURTON and Tom Sims, tenacious innovators and rivals who took their sport from extreme to mainstream in the mid-eighties. Kiteboarding has Forman and Nuzzo, best buddies whose mission is to aggressively pollinate the planet with legions of new riders and seed a global Real diaspora. Founded in 2001 and based in Buxton, a clapboard fishing village on the Outer Banks, Real employs 18 full-time instructors who churn out more than 7,000 new riders each year. Real dominates the industry: It teaches more students and sells more gear than any other school in the world and has so much cred that when it suggests improvements to manufacturers, they listen, altering kite and board designs and rigging setups.

In May, after my BVI adventure, I make my first trip of the season to the Outer Banks and hook up with

The learning curve for kiteboarding is akin to that of snowboarding. The first three or four days, you get the crap kicked out of you, and then, suddenly, something clicks and you're riding.

Forman and Nuzzo to ride a legendary "downwinder" into an intricate maze of waterways that weave through wetlands, reeds, and low-lying islets. In howling 25-knot southwesterly winds, we rig up on a narrow beach. "Whatever happens, don't let your kite crash," Nuzzo warns me. "If you go down, it's a three-mile slog through a swamp to reach the highway." The trouble isn't necessarily that I might crash the kite but, rather, that a line could tangle or equipment could fail, preventing me from riding.

Later, in the granite-and-hardwood-trimmed kitchen of Forman's newly renovated four-bedroom house, Nuzzo commends me for surviving the ride intact, while Forman—a chronic multitasker—preps steaks for the grill, mixes three Manatinis, and breathlessly recounts his life story.

"I went to college and majored in economics, but I wanted to take windsurfing sessions, not internships," says the native of Babylon, New York, who, at six foot two, has a booming game-show-host voice and is an architect of mayhem renowned for such stunts as stacking 20 picnic tables in Pamlico Sound, setting them ablaze with gasoline, then goading kiteboarders to jump over the inferno. Nuzzo is Forman's counterbalance. Born in Cheshire, Connecticut, he embodies the laid-back surfer-dude persona and works mostly behind the scenes to ensure that the Real cogs remain sufficiently greased. When I ask them about their operations, Nuzzo begins a sentence—"Everything we do is a product of our..."—and Forman finishes it for him: "check-and-balance system."

Not long after Forman, then a total windsurfing junkie, graduated from Massachusetts's Tufts University in 1990, he moved to the Outer Banks to live the life. In April 1998, he was working as a sales rep for Columbia River Gorge–based North Sails Windsurfing when he discovered kiteboarding. About a year earlier, a company called Wipika had started selling the first consumer kites, licensing the patent from French windsurfers Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux. "The first time I launched the kite, its pull felt like being shot out of a cannon," he says. "I had no idea if I was ever going to stop."

It didn't take Forman long to pick up the sport. Whereas windsurfing can take years to master, the learning curve for kiteboarding is akin to that of snowboarding. The first three or four days, you get the crap kicked out of you, and then, suddenly, something clicks and you're riding. Once you learn to safely control the kite and hone your board skills, it's just a matter of putting the two elements together.

Forman introduced Nuzzo to kiteboarding in 1999, when his sales job brought him to the Middletown, Rhode Island, shop where Nuzzo was teaching windsurfing. "I told Matt to check out kiteboarding," says Forman. "He did, teaching himself to kite while wearing a fat wetsuit over the winter in New England, which was absolute insanity." Forman and Nuzzo became fanatics, kiteboarding whenever they could. Neither expected to give up windsurfing, and both hoped it would make a comeback. But kiteboarding changed all that. "It was clearly a superior sport," says Nuzzo.

While still at North Sails, Forman began moonlighting as a kiteboarding instructor, but he soon had more students than he could handle. Nuzzo was his pinch hitter, regularly making the 13-hour drive from Rhode Island to help with lessons. Since there was plenty of work for both, Nuzzo moved to the Outer Banks in March 2001 and began conspiring with Forman about how to turn their newfound passion into something that could pay the bills. "At the time, there was a surplus of gear and a surplus of people who wanted to try the sport," recalls Forman.

"But there was nothing connecting the two." Nuzzo continues. "Kiteboarding was about to do exactly what we just saw happen in windsurfing—it was getting too technical, too high-end, and there was nowhere you could easily learn the sport. We knew that if there were no consumers, there would be no industry."

Neither had entrepreneurial experience, but in July 2001 they opened a joint checking account, each plunking down $100, and convened in Forman's basement to brainstorm a name for the company. "Real" was born from the notion that its exclusive focus would be "real kiteboarding," says Forman, "rather than just some guy at a windsurfing shop who teaches a few days a month." The following weekend they created a Web site and set up an 800 number. They started running three-day Zero to Hero kite camps and offering private lessons. They also sold kites, boards, and harnesses—maxing out their credit cards to pay for inventory. "My dad thought we'd gone off the deep end," says Forman.

It would be another year before they earned enough to pay themselves a salary. "But we were growing fast," says Forman. They leased a 1,400-square-foot former bait-and-tackle shop in Buxton and converted it to a retail store and business office. "We also needed housing for our employees, so I convinced the landlord to rent us the apartment upstairs. Seven people lived pig-piled into that apartment for five months."

Contrary to what you may think, these guys aren't just beach bums with lucky timing. Everything about their business is the result of an anal-retentive attention to detail and a relentless branding crusade. In the BVIs, I'd barely stumble out of bed and Forman and Nuzzo would already be circling our three yachts in a dinghy, holding their daily planning meeting. A few minutes later, Forman would be back aboard, barking orders to load up the dinghies for day trips to Anegada, kiting expeditions to remote beaches, surf sessions on local breaks, or snorkel excursions to nearby reefs. Real was also using the trip as the backdrop for its latest instructional DVDs and conducting a photo shoot for its Web site and brochures. And field-testing the latest gear. As for branding, it's all about Real's trademark hue: in-your-face fire-engine red. It's the color of its offices, lesson center, staff uniforms, Forman's Nissan pickup, and Real's fleet of 12 jet skis.

Perhaps the most clever marketing tool of all has been Forman and Nuzzo's use of jet skis, which help funnel a huge number of students through the school by allowing coaches to stay out on the water to help relaunch kites and shuttle students upwind to maximize riding time. "Those guys pioneered the use of jet skis as a utilitarian device," says Jeff Logosz, president of Slingshot, a leading kite manufacturer. "If you wanted to learn to snowboard without a chairlift, it would take you a long time. Real has invented the chairlift of kiteboarding."