Lost Kite Gear At Sea ... Now What?

[ricki]

I had trouble finding a "non-emergency" number of my smart phone, twice, for the USCG. I could have called 911 but wanted to avoid that for a routine report. The other time was to report a partially disabled sailboat limping along the coast, just to make them aware of it.

Anyway, in the USA the Coast Guard numbers for the entire country are at: http://www.uscg.mil/hq/cg5/cg534/RCC_numbers.asp


I wanted to emphasize the two runaway kites shown in the photos above were both lost in squalls. The second kite was ripped from the beach from an obvious storm cloud moving off shore from inland due to inadequate anchoring. It is best to just put your kite away or deflate your leading edge and roll the kite up if a squall may hit. At least take two lines off one wing tip and heavily anchor your kite against gusting wind & direction changes which are common with squalls. How many on here have lost kites in these sort of conditions from the beach?

The first kite was lost because the kiter stayed out too long as an obvious squall came too close. Squalls can kill the wind, leave it unchanged or boost winds to dangerous levels in seconds and/or change the wind direction sometimes violently. In this case the wind dropped first and shifted offshore another common phenomena. It was light but strong enough to pull a kite offshore with someone attached to it. I won't go into the other options the young kiter had to deal with the situation, there are dozens of other posts discussing those considerations for self-rescue in offshore winds.



NEVER stay out kiting so long with an approaching squall as you can be messed up by a wind drop, direction change (kiters have been killed by this alone) or worse nuclear gusts which have killed and maimed plenty of riders. Always do proper weather planning and monitoring when you kite, some ideas on this are at http://fksa.org/showthread.php?t=9528