Lost Kite Gear At Sea ... Now What?

[ricki]

http://fksa.org/gallery3/var/resizes/Florida/Admin-File/album346/album348/Misc.-stuff/runaway%20kite%20GOPR0320.jpg?m=1370660570

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.


http://www.fksa.org/albums/album596/RUNAWAY_KITE.jpg
A poorly anchored kite blows offshore from the beach in a squall a couple of years back.
(more about this at

[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.

http://www.kiteforum.com/download/file.php?id=55058

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