Launching from Jet Ski

[cletus]

Anybody got some tips, lessons learned from launching from a jet ski? I would like to go out around Stiltsville and launch in shallow water from a jetski.

Any suggestions?

Cheers

[ricki]

Jet skies are banned in the Federal Park that includes Stiltsville unfortunately. The park boundary seem to stop south of Key Biscayne. You may even be able to grab some room on the extreme NW portion of the sand bar that goes under Stiltsville and kite down there anyway. Hassles, then again, ski's have been banned widely. I recall you need to have a permit even to bring them into the BVI.

A map of the park boundaries appears below:


More at:
http://www.biscayne.national-park.com/visit.htm

If you can setup on the sand bar someplace, you might want to practice this on the sand bar located to the west of central Key Biscayne first. Guys usually rely upon the ski for transportation with kites in bags and boards in the foot well. They anchor the ski off, then inflate their kite using the ski as a support for the pump in shallow water they can easily stand in. Then they tie off their inflated kite to a line leading from the back of the ski, run their lines out and correctly attach them, preflight prior to an assisted launch and up you go. Doing this in deep water gets a lot more tricky at least as far as manual inflation, the rest involves a lot of swimming without much in the way of waves. Remember that the cooling water intakes on a ski can suck up lines and seize your impeller pretty easily. Need to have the engine off when lines are in the water ideally. Still more precautions and tricks, maybe Neil, Paul or others that use ski's in instruction frequently will comment further.