Kiteboarding and Cold Weather Precautions

[RickI]

This is an area in which I have virtually no personal experience, kiteboarding in truly low air and water temperatures. I have a fair amount of time in cold conditions above (frozen) water but that doesn't count. Of course, often it comes down to time and exposure and you can even succumb to hypothermia in South Florida, still you have to work at it a bit.

Considering some of the cold related comments about the two recent accidents in Holland and the fact that there is a large quantity of kiteboarders that ride in temperate and even colder latitudes, it would be good to focus in on things to do and not do at colder launches. I would think that there would be a core set of precautions that would apply to ANY potentially hypothermic kiteboarding conditions and then a second set that would be applicable to the sessions in the lower air and water temperatures.

So, over to you folks. What have you learned about having a good session, i.e. exposure clothing, emergency gear, rules of thumb, etc. at colder launches? I would like to update the Safe Kiteboarding Guidelines and Ten Ideas documents with what we come up with here.


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