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My last two sessions have ended with the flagging safety on my 2013 Blade Unibar.

First one I had a bar wrap death loop which I might have been able to recover from but I decided to pop the safety instead. The kite continued to do 3 more slow death loops dragging me by my leash until it finally flagged out.

Then yesterday I had been doing a lot of jumping and some how my chicken loop came unhooked on landing later in my session and before I noticed the bar was out of my hands. I'm not sure how the chicken loop came out as I find the donkey stick on this bar to be very hard to manually undo.

The bar went up to about 2 meters past the divide between the grey line under the swivel and the white centre line. The kite (2013 Blade Trigger 10m in 20 knots of wind) went to the edge of the window on both centre lines and just kept pulling while on the water surface. The kite was pulling slowly but it was enough that I couldn't climb the flagging line to reach past the bar and grab a single line to properly flag the kite. Thankfully I had plenty of space as I ended up getting dragged sideways for about 15 minutes trying to climb up that line while being dragged through the water. By the time I finally reached the bar I was unable to reset it and the kite ended up powering up and putting me back at the end of the flagging line and I had to fight my way up the line all over again.

It took me about 20 minutes to finally get my kite flagged and start wrapping my lines. I came very close to having to let the kite go when I almost went over a freighter mooring buoy.

Can anyone else share their experiences flagging 2013 Triggers with 2013 Unibars?

I'd like to take my kite out to waist deep water and just pop the safety and reset a bunch of times but every time I try and reset in the water I've failed so far and that would mean I'd have to re-rig my kite every time.

Any advice is welcome.

looks like the hole of flaging line in the svivel is a bit tight

I think the mandatory beer with a nest like that is missing...

Can you send me a picture of where the grey line and while leash line join?

I think I can help

please email to andy @ kitepaddlesurf

Thanks

The bar wrap can happen on any bar and then if you are connected with your leash underneath the bar there is a good chance that QRing the kite will cause death loops because the 5th or mini5th is also wraped.

When your lines lose tension the chicken loop sometimes comes half off the spreaderhook. then a pull at a certain angle will make your chickenloop to unhook entirely. happens on any bar.
Every time you lose tension on the lines check if the CL is still fully on.
A mini 5th release is not intended to depower your kite 100%. if you want to roll your bar you need to first roll up one of the back steering lines for 3-4 meters till the kite is fully flagged then roll up all the lines together.

there is Nothing wrong with your bar.

eldadgold wrote: A mini 5th release is not intended to depower your kite 100%. if you want to roll your bar you need to first roll up one of the back steering lines for 3-4 meters till the kite is fully flagged then roll up all the lines together.

I've never heard anyone ever recommend flagging a 4 line kite by a steering line before. That sound like a recipe for death loops to me.

With the bar up the safety front line the kite should be depowered enough to allow me to swim/pull up the safety line without wrapping it around my hands (something I'd never do) but my kite was still pulling me at 3-4 knots through the water and was too much for me to climb. This went on for 15 minutes.

When I did finally manage to reach my bar I figured that because the safety was deployed and the bar was several meters up the safety line that I could just start wrapping my lines, but when I did that the kite flew back in to the air fully powered and I had to let the bar go and was back at the end of the safety line.

10 minutes later when I fought my way back up to the bar I put 4 wraps of only a single front line on the bar then proceeded to wrap the rest on to the bar and managed to bring my kite in.

could it be that when you were wrapping the lines, the 4th (safety)line slip back through the QR, to normal position?

EdiT. That is what probably happened. Before you start wrapping all the lines you need to prevent the flaging line to slip back throug the QR. As you sad you did that the secoind time.

It's hard to tell what happened in the middle of a 30 min fight against a kite in 20 knots but I don't think the flag line slipped back.

The main difference was the first time I grabbed both front lines, the second time I took only the flagging line. With the bar that far up the flagging line though I don't get why the kite still had so much power.

this story is getting confusing, i thought i knew what was going on but i dont anymore. the bar was a few meters up the "flagging line" "safety line" "leash line" "center line" "whatever you want to call it (it is called the centerline, there are 2 of them) but the kite was still able to "fly" and with power?? how was there tension on the other flying lines when the bar was a few meters up the centerline? was the bar simply not far enough up the centerline to take the tension off the other 3 lines? this could happen because of centerline twist causing the centerline that acts as the leash line to bind up with the other centerline and stop the bar from sliding out as far as necessary.

the comment about the mini fifth line is off. this bar is a single centerline leash system, it will fully disable/flag out a kite (any kite, any model, any year) 100%. there are many bars with this leash system in the sport right now.


good job to the poster dealing with the situation. regardless of what exactly happened, that is a situation (leash/disable system failure) in which a person might legitimately need to use the secondary release (on the leash) and that is why that is there. but you didnt, you managed to deal with it. if this happens to someone else, and you are in a situation where you are sucking in water, or have downwind obstacles, etc etc, this is when you use your leash release and let the kite go. dont wait, particularly in high winds, with downwind hazards, or if you are not in physical condition to take serious abuse while trying to save the kite (like the original poster is) aka, if you are an old or out of shape guy, just ditch the kite right away before it drowns you.

Hello Slappysan.

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention.
The design team discussed your issue, but it was difficult for them to understand exactly what may have caused the problem. In 20 knots of wind, the kite should have had more than enough power to pull the swivel through the safety line.

If you’d like, we can replace your bar with a new one and we can then send it to our design team for further analysis.
This is an extreme incident that should not happen and we would like to avoid in the future.

Sorry for the inconvenience this has caused.

Yoav