Vapouround magazine Issue 03 | Page 171

FYI Competitive vaping is getting more popular all the time as more and more people try their hand at producing the largest and most dense vapour clouds possible I f you go to any vaping event it is pretty certain that one of the first things you may notice are the cloud chasers. Cloud chasers are not the shy and retiring types who like to blend into the background. They do everything to all but scream “Look at me!” or, to be more precise, look at the huge clouds of vapour that I am able to produce. Cloud chasing is certainly very impressive. One moment you could be talking to someone beside you and the next they have disappeared behind an enormous wall of white vapour. Stand too close and you are likely to be engulfed in the same cloudy shield yourself. According to Wikipedia cloud chasing, or extreme vaping, is: “The activity of blowing large clouds of vapour using an electronic cigarette.” Some cloud chasers are content with producing big clouds but others want to take it to extremes and be better and more skilled than all around them. The rivalry that developed between vapers to see who could produce the largest clouds soon gave way to competitions where people would compete with each other to exhale the largest clouds possible. Of course where there is a competition there is an audience and cloud chasers are watched by cloud gazers with both groups attending regular competitions held throughout vaping communities around the world. The craze began in the west coast of the USA and these days the competitions can be huge with the International Cloud Championships in California, and the World Series of Vape, in Las Vegas attracting cloud chasers and cloud gazers from all over the world. This has also spawned a community of professional vapers who consider it to be a sport in its own right and competitors can now win thousands of dollars in prize money. Cloud chasing is also not without controversy within the vaping community. There are those within the overall vaping community who maintain that cloud chasing can give vapers a bad name, especially when it is done in public. They say it can lead to negative media attention and that it can serve to alienate the wider non-vaping community. Certainly there is a big difference between those who enjoy vaping to get a nicotine fix and those enjoy vaping in order to produce huge clouds of vapour. In fact while the majority of the noncloud chasing vaping community would have nicotine in their e-liquid, this is not necessarily the case with cloud chasers. Many cloud chasers do not use nicotine as it is the clouds which interest them and not the nicotine hit. Instead the so le VAPOUROUND MAGAZINE ISSUE 03 171