La Neuveville

About this spot

Lake Biel is a Bern-water launch with named exclusions rather than a free-for-all: kiting is permitted on the canton's waters, but the bay east of the line from the Restaurant Gottstatterhaus to the Nidau-Büren canal, the St. Petersinsel shore and the Hagneck delta are all closed, so the legal room is a defined corridor and La Neuveville is one of the launches inside it. The spot guides describe the practical setup: park at Chemin de Saint-Joux on the edge of town, rig on the grass area behind the football pitches, and go in over stone steps into the lake.

The wind is the reason riders come to this shore. The bise arrives from the north-east — the spot guides give the working band as north-north-east through east-north-east — and on this stretch it comes in side-onshore, which makes getting off the bank and back to it straightforward, while the joran thermal adds knots in the late afternoon through summer. It is a small, shallow, reed-fringed lake rather than a big one, so the fetch is short and the water stays flatter than the open lakes, and the published surface averages run from 4.4 °C in February to 20.8 °C in August — a 4/3 mm suit from late spring to early autumn, a 5/4 with boots and hood outside that.

Everything that applies on Swiss water applies here, and the Bern police say so in their own kitesurfing notice: kiting by day and in clear visibility between 08:00 and 21:00, a buoyancy aid worn, name and address on the board, kiters give way to everyone else, 200 m clear of scheduled passenger boats and their landing stages, and the scheduled-boat lanes kept open. On this lake the reserve buoys around St. Petersinsel and the Hagneck delta are the hard boundary — they are visible from the water and you do not enter them — and there is no standing depth to rely on beyond the entry, so a board recovery means swimming it back, not walking it.