I was using a Protec Ace Wake however these plastic buckles are fairly common on water helmets.Morph wrote:is it really usefull an helmet? I ve tried it once but it really wasnt confortable.
I never heard someone crashed it's skull with kitboarding and i'm very timide myself so I don't think I need one. Any sugestions?
Thnx
Unfortunately, there have been quite a few head injuries in kiteboarding including some fatal ones. You can read about some of them HERE
There is NO guarrantee that a helmet will save you from injury or even assure your survival in a bad enough impact. Still, in many impacts they can do a tremendous amount of good. Helmets are far more resilent than our relatively fragile skulls, which would you rather bounce or scrape on things? If you picked your skull or do, think again.
One of these days, helmet use will likely be fairly common in kiteboarding. The problem is that people will need to see a fair amount of blood letting to compel them to undertake this simple precuation. Any volunteers for suffering some head impacts? Some among us will have such head injuries whether we volunteer or not. So, gear up now or blow this off until more nasty avoidable injuries occur. Tough decision or so it would seem.
The best safety is using good judgment, gear, knowledge and experience. Helmets and impact vests just improve the odds, sometimes a lot.
A question came up in another post, I thought it was worthwhile to copy it here:
quote="fourperf"]You will hit your head kiteboarding[/quote]
how so bro?[/quote]
Let's count some of the ways. Many of these have little to do with experience by the way. Not everyone will suffer head injuries only some of us. Now tell me who, in advance, OK? That way ONLY the guys that are going to get bashed will need to bother with lids, simple!?
- Sudden strong wind gust
- Rigging too large a kite for conditions
- Sudden change in wind direction
- Rigging your lines in reverse
- In the OLD days using a board leash, although the board could easily miss the helmet and could hit your throat, spine, torso, wherever. Not a lot of people use leashes anymore anyway, right?
- Miscontrolling your bar
- Launching your kite with the bar upside down
- Having a jump extended on to shore
- Being knocked over by a wave
- A line tangle on launch
- A line snag on launch, say with a stick
- A line tangle caused by strumming in stronger winds
- Having an assistant screw up an assisted launch or landing, releasing too soon, throwing the kite, loosing thier hold on the kite, slipping, grabbing the wrong part of the kite
- Slipping on the bottom and falling over at speed
- Trying to climb up some rocks to exit the water
- Chicken loop breakage
- Someone tangling their kite lines with yours and releasing their bar
- Being uplift lofted when your kite passes over a vertical surface in onshore winds.
- Someone grabbing your bar or lines unexpectedly
- Jumping a hard object and having the wind change or merely setup the jump wrong
- Hitting a floating limb or other flotsum
- Having a wave propel your board or someone elses into you
- Jumping using a kite on land
etc.
That is all that I can REMEMBER for now. That is these have ALREADY caused people to be injured and in some cases killed. None of these are made up. The victims have ranged from newbies to some VERY experienced kiteboarders.
So, who needs helmets?