Rob Lukin may struggle to walk every day, but that does not stop him from flying down the beach at up to 90kph.
For the past 12 years, the Port Lincoln man has been doing the extreme sport of kitebuggying.
"I guess I am chasing the adrenaline," Mr Lukin said.
"You're milking it for that extra bit."
Difficult to master, the sport requires piloting a three-wheeled kite-powered vehicle, often at high speeds.
But the 59-year-old, who is is part of Extreme Kites, a group of kitebuggying enthusiasts, has plenty of patience and perseverance.
Solo world traveller
It's that tenacity and zest for life that saw him backpack around the world in a wheelchair for two-and-a-half years and become the first in his family with a university degree.
But it was not the life Mr Lukin thought he would be living.
Mr Lukin is from a Port Lincoln fishing family and, in his 20s, spent holidays heli-skiing in New Zealand, camping, surfing and pursuing extreme sports.
But a trip to the Murray River at 24 left him fighting for his life.
He was struck down by encephalitis, suspected to have come from a mosquito bite.
It left him paralysed, but after months of rehabilitation, he learnt to walk and talk again.
"It damaged all my brain stem, so all my motor stuff," he said.
The first thing he wanted to do was get back to full-time work.
"It took me a few years, but I managed to go to uni, and … I got my computer science degree," he said.
Mr Lukin said he worked for Motorola as a software engineer.
"I loved that job," he said.
"I never got bored any single day."
A whole sector was made redundant, so he took the payout and headed off to travel around the world for a year.
He didn't come back to Australia for two-and-a-half years.
Mr Lukin stayed at backpackers and hostels and sometimes under stairwells and on park benches.
He travelled with a trailer hooked on to the back of his wheelchair until he was mugged in Spain, and it was stolen.
"They did me a favour — I had too much stuff," Mr Lupin said.
His sister Lisa Wiseman said her brother had a positive attitude towards everything he tackled.
"I've never once in all the years heard him sit back and go, 'Poor me. Why did this happen to me?'" Ms Wiseman said.
"After he got sick, he played wheelchair rugby. He just hasn't given in.
"He's just said, 'Well, I'm going to find what I can do'.
"Now he's got his kitebuggying, which he's just brilliant at — I think he's up there with some of the best in the country, and he loves it."
'Can I do that?'
Mr Lukin was taken with the sport after he first saw it in 2010 at Port Douglas.
"They had a buggy there, so I said, 'Can I do that?'" Mr Lukin said.
"And he [the pilot] said, 'Why not?'
90kph top speed
Now Mr Lukin travels between Port Lincoln and Queensland, chasing the right winds and smooth beaches.
He used to set up the buggy and pack it down himself, which took him about an hour.
But after injuring his shoulder he has got some help to set up so he can spend his energy on flying the kite faster.
"My personal best is 90kph on a beach down near Wilsons Prom," he said.
"It's very windy down there."
However, it is not all smooth sailing, with Mr Lukin falling off the kitebuggy a few times — but it doesn't seem to faze him.
"One time, I broke my back. I had a stress fracture in three vertebrae," he said.
His assistant Axel Molnar said kitebuggying was an extremely difficult sport, with "three or four things" that needed to be done at once.
"He's got the kite up in the air, and he's controlling that with his hands … at the same time he's got the kite running parallel to the beach, and he's reading the wind any direction that it might change as well as … steering the actual buggy with his feet," Mr Molnar said.
"He doesn't have a lot of control in his feet, so to be able to do all that while doing this with his hands, while also thinking where everything is going — you can't even comprehend how long that would take you to learn.
