Kitemares happen! Someone just lost a toe as a result of hooking up his safety wrong.

A lot of kitemares may be avoided by gaining a complete understanding of the system you are using. Knowlege is power. The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared".

Here is the way I approached Kiteboarding 3 years ago. I made a model toy kite (it was an exact duplicate of my system). It even powered and depowered, when you hung it from the edge of a door.

During the windless, boring times I sat at a table with the model and played out every scenario I could think of....kite flipping through the lines every which way....releasing to the reride safety....safety line wrapped around bar...one line breaking. It really helped me when I got on the water. I could quickly figure out what was serious and what wasn't. It was especially good at showing me which types of line twists could be untangled on the water, and which types were hopeless or made worse by an attempt to straighten things out.

I recommend that everybody make a model of their kite control and safety system.....especially beginners.....but also anyone who is using a new style system. When you are out on the water, you can not analyze your system, since there is too much to think about already. Some people are fortunate and can visualize complex scenarios in their "minds eye", but most people can not.

If the guys who got into trouble with the old Slingshot bar system had played around with hooking the snap of the safety into the different rings, maybe they would have been impressed enough with the consequences, to "red flag" the action in their mind, and possibly avoid ever doing it.

The "puppet kite" is also good to use to demonstrate to your "normal" friends what you are compulsively rambling on about with all the "kiteboarding" this and "kiteboarding" that talk.

Here are 2 pictures showing the kite powered and then flagged.

That's pretty cool!

I also made one for myself (out of paper) when I first
started kiting. It helped me visiulaize what the lines were
doing when the kite crashed and was 'leadind edge down' in the water,
and which lines I needed to pull on to help get it restarted.

That's a C-Shaped kite...

The new trend is Bow. I would make one of these to practice too..

P

to bastardize a great old saying:

Playing with tomatkins puppet kite is like fucking a fat girl... it's fun until your friends catch you doing it!

I suggest instead of wasting time with that thing you use this software:

http://www.flysim.com/kitesim/kitesim_features.html

and build an interface with your computer that uses a full size bar. You could probably take apart an old joystick and cludge somthing together. At least the sim does things that are similar to how a kite behaves in wind and you get man credit for breaking stuff (old joystick).

That's great, it makes you realise how much you rely on feel both wind and bar as well as sound, its a good program though.

Dazza

Yeah, I agree. The thing that's cool though is that you can see how the kite kinda bounces around and the way it physically moves through the sky. Of course the first time you go out for real and have a good yank you'll realize that the simulation was lacking

http://www.flysim.com/kitesim/kitesim_features.html

WOW!! Now, that's tinkering! You raise the bar for all of us.

Sooooo.....with my little puppet kite in my pocket, I must return to my village in shame......I've been served!