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Old 01-24-2005, 09:07 PM
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ricki ricki is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Florida
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Default FOUR CLOBBERED BY A COLD FRONT!

A powerful cold front was predicted to move into Southern Florida bringing strong winds 30 to 35 mph out of the Northwest yesterday, (Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005).



Lots of riders had been following the forecast for several days in advance. An experienced rider had just arrived at the beach at about 9:00 am. The launch was on the west coast of Florida. He noticed a line of black clouds moving in from the NW. He assumed that this was the leading edge of the long awaited cold front. He noticed four young guys out on the water ranging approximately 15 to 18 years old, on 12 to 15 m kites with a max. weight of about 150 lbs. They guys were out in approximate 12 mph winds, in sunny conditions and were somewhat underpowered.

The experienced rider walked up to another guy on the beach who apparently knew the riders on the water. He pointed out the black menacing cloud line moving in and suggested that he call his friends into shore to land/secure their kites. The guy blew off the warning, saying “they’re good riders, they can handle it.”



All wind graphs are from http://www.ikitesurf.com/. The station shown is north of the launch area.

The leading edge of the cold front arrived at about 9:30 am, it rained for less than a minute and the wind spiked to 27 to 30 mph +. It changed direction from west to northwest from observations at the beach. All four guys were almost instantly lofted while riding in the shallow waters of the sound inside the sand bar. Some tried to keep their kites low to the water and succeeded in body dragging across the water at about 25 mph out of control. Other guys were popped to about 20 ft. off the water and falling back into a couple of feet of water.

NONE of the guys were seen to be attempting to depower their kites. Everyone of them was hanging on and riding it out, totally out of control. One guy had his kite hit the water, so he stood up and proceeded to try to hot launch the kite. He was launching too large a kite in overpowered conditions. He hanked too hard on one side of the bar, accidentally looped his kite and was lofted approximately 90 ft horizontally to land at the edge of the beach. His kite slammed into the trees. The kite was removed in a couple of dozen separate pieces from the trees. None of the riders were reportedly injured amazingly enough.
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