About a month ago, I was kiting off a beach down in Anna Maria Island, FL in some 20-25 mph wind. The wind started side-onshore, but had shifted almost directly onshore. I only had my 12m Cabrinha Convert with me that day and it was a bit overpowered. At one point, my harness was really riding up into my ribs and starting to bother me. I was about 30 meters off the beach and the water was about 3 ft deep and i decided to unhook to try to adjust my harness a little bit. Well, I had never unhooked before while flying the kite... I was holding the left side of the bar and unhooked the chicken loop with my other hand. Next thing I knew, the kite started into a death spiral. It was fully powered and I was just steering hard left because I couldn't grab the other side of the bar. It pulled me up out of the water in the first loop. I landed in the water, and before I could do anything, I was getting pulled up out of the water again as the kite continued looping. I didn't want to let go of the kite because I knew I wasn't hooked in and it was just going to fly away if I let go and there were lots of trees and stuff downwind. After the third loop, I landed on the sand and got drug about 15 ft to a line of sea outs. The next stop was the backside of a house about 40 ft away. At that point, I finally realized I had to let go because I wasn't going to get control of the kite. Turns out, I should've just let go in the first place, but it all happened so quickly, I didn't have time to think. I had my leash attached to the middle flagging line. As soon as I let go of the kite, it completely depowered and landed on the other side of the house in nice green grass.
I was pretty fortunate to only have a couple of very minor scratches from landing face first in the sea outs and I was even more happy that my kite wasn't damaged at all. It was a pretty scary moment and since then, I've always made sure to think about what to do should anything go wrong before it goes wrong. The worst part was realizing that I could've just let go of the kite when it first started looping and it would've just depowered and I wouldn't have been dragged at all. The other bad part was that my parents were down the beach watching me. I definitely gave my mom a pretty bad scare that day.
This incident caused me to realize that it's important to always be conscientious of what you need to do in case something unexpected happens, because you never know when that might be.