Lost Kite Gear At Sea ... Now What?

[ricki]

A lost kite on Thursday which I could barely see about 1/2 mile offshore. I assumed the kiter was still with it and beginning to panic as he moved offshore with the westerly wind shift with the shelf cloud. I learned once I made it back to the launch area that the young kiter abandoned the kite when the wind died and swam into shore on his own. Too bad about the lost kite but what else should you do?


Your board or kite go offshore without you, now what? Well, you can hope the information you wrote on it may see it returned to you if it is found. This has happened before surprisingly enough.

What else should you do? Notifying the authorities, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) or rescue group in your area comes to mind. Not to put out a massive SAR program to locate and recover your gear but for a different even more important reason. When a kite or board shows up with no other information, the authorities usually have to conclude preliminarily anyway, there may be a lost person to go with it. This kicks them into search mode wasting substantial resources particularly if you are onshore somewhere trying to get over your lost gear.

CALL the authorities, tell them what you lost, approximately where, when, what it looked like, etc. and assure them no one was lost with your gear. The fewer false search and rescues the authorities go through the better off things will be for the kiting community. Excess false and in some cases real rescues are actually a problem in some areas but that is another story.



A poorly anchored kite blows offshore from the beach in a squall a couple of years back.
(more about this at