Self-Rescue: Pack Down and Get Home Safe

Secure the bar, sail in, pack down, swim

Where you should be starting from

You did this once, in a lesson, and never again. A supervised pack-down in waist-deep water on a school kite, ticked off the sheet, and a year of riding since on the assumption that it's in there somewhere. It isn't. A procedure you performed once, under instruction, standing up, in calm water, is not a skill. This is the one you want to be a skill. Every "if it all goes wrong, secure the bar and self-rescue" line you've read assumes you know what that sentence contains. Here it is in full.

The concept: four options, expiring in order

You have four ways home and they go stale from the top. Relaunch and ride in. Fail that, flag the kite and sail it in on the wind. Fail that, wind everything down and swim with it. Fail that, float, signal and wait. Each rung asks less of the breeze and more of your body than the one above, and nothing you do puts a rung back.

Downwind is the only free direction. You can't sail upwind under a flagged kite. You can't swim upwind in a harness at any speed worth having. So the first question is never "how do I get back to my car", it's "what is downwind of me, and can I land on it". Choose the landing you can reach, not the one you want.

Calling it early

Ask the three questions out loud. Is the wind building, holding or dying? Am I closer to shore or further from it? Are my hands still working? Say them aloud, because under stress the question you skip is the one with the honest answer. A dying breeze catches people: a kite in 8 knots (15 km/h) looks exactly like a kite in 18 right up until you ask it to pull you somewhere.

Take a transit before you decide anything. Same trick as board recovery: line up two fixed things on shore, a tree in front of a house, a mast against a roofline. If they slide apart you're moving. If they hold station you're not, however hard you're working.

Self-rescue isn't what you do when it's all gone wrong. It's what you do to stop that happening. One you choose is dull: some swimming, a soggy walk, mild embarrassment. One you're forced into starts from a worse position and gets worse. Every rider who's been properly frightened out there can name the minute they should have called it, and it was always earlier than they did.

Phase by phase

Preparation: stop moving and look. Ten seconds, nothing else. Wind direction, what's downwind, how far, what's in the way, how much light is left. Pick the landing before you touch anything: every decision after this one is harder to change.

Secure the bar first, always. Sheet out fully and let the kite flag on its safety line so it stops pulling and lies down. Then take that line above the bar and pull it in hand over hand, winding the slack on as it comes and keeping it under tension so it can't spill, until the kite is next to you. Loose line is the most dangerous thing in the water with you: thin, invisible, and under load it doesn't so much tangle around your leg as bite it. Lock the ends by wrapping your leash around the bar.

Sail it in, if the beach is downwind. This is the step people forget, and it saves more swimming than anything else here. Grab the leading edge, lift the near wingtip clear so the canopy stands up and takes the breeze, tuck the edge against your shoulder and lie back. You'll make walking pace, steering a few degrees either side by raising or dropping the tip. Slow and undignified, and in 15 knots (28 km/h) it covers ground you would never swim.

Feel for the sail working. Done right there's a steady shove through your shoulder and a small bow wave at your ears. If the kite keeps flipping and pushing you under, you're holding it too high and scooping wind into the canopy: drop the tip until only a small triangle stands clear. Nothing at all means the kite is flat and you need more tip up.

Pack down when the sail runs out. When the wind dies, or the beach isn't downwind, finish the job. Wind on every remaining line, flip the kite onto its back, roll it wingtip to wingtip into a sausage with the canopy inside, and trap the bar in the middle of the roll so nothing escapes. Don't deflate it: inflated it's a float you can lie on and the biggest thing anyone will see. Then tuck the roll under your chest and kick, aimed downwind at the landing you chose. A long, boring, cold job, and boring is what you bought by going early.

"Your head from 300m away is a coconut in a field of whitecaps. Your kite is twelve square metres of colour."

Being seen, and the one time you let it go

Spread it if you're waiting, roll it if you're moving. Rolled up it's a float; flat on the water beside you it's a flag, already deployed. If you're going nowhere and want to be found, spread it and stay with it.

Both arms, slowly, over and over. One arm waving reads from shore as a bloke saying hello. Both arms raised straight above your head and lowered to your sides, repeated slowly, reads as someone in trouble, and keeps reading that way for as long as you can hold it. Start early, while your shoulders still work. Once you're seen, stop swimming and let help come to you. If a boat comes in, keep your lines and kite clear of the propeller: it can steer and you can't.

The one time you let it go. You keep the kite because it floats, sails and signals, right up until it stops doing any of those. If it's dragging you into a break, onto rocks or under the surface, if lines have found your legs and you can't clear them, or if holding it costs more than it gives, cut it away with the hook knife on your harness and swim. Nobody comes unstuck letting go too early. They come unstuck holding on one more minute because the kite cost real money and the water hasn't frightened them yet.

When it goes wrong

The lines you wound on are spilling everywhere. You wound them slack, and now there's line drifting under you. Rewind tight, all in one direction, and lock the ends with the leash before anything else. Loose line is the part of this that hurts people, and the part everyone rushes because it feels like admin.

You're sailing but you're not getting closer. You're trying to hold a course across the wind, and a flagged kite doesn't do across. Take a transit. If it isn't moving, neither are you, and the answer is a different landing, not more effort at the one you want.

Your hands stop working halfway through the pack-down. Cold and adrenaline, in that order. There's no fix out there; the fix was leaving twenty minutes earlier. What you can still do is simplify: forget the tidy roll, get the lines locked so they can't reach you, hold the kite, float. Almost nobody gets into real trouble in one dramatic moment; they get there by continuing to do a thing that wasn't working.

Next session

One focus: do the whole pack-down on purpose, in waist-deep water, with someone on the beach who knows what you're up to. Wind every line onto the bar, lock it, roll the kite, and swim 50m (165ft) with it under your chest. Time yourself: that's how long it takes warm, calm and standing up, and the real thing is none of those. Do it once a season. Everything else in the how-to library quietly assumes you can do this one.

Should I deflate the kite?

Generally no. Inflated it's buoyancy and it's visible, and dumping the leading edge is slow work with hands you may need for something else.

Is it different in waves?

Yes, and worse. Whitewater fills a canopy, drags it, and makes a spread-out kite a liability instead of a flag. Inflated, it becomes a sea anchor that drags you through every set. Start your pack-down further out, before the impact zone, and be quicker to abandon the gear. In a break the only thing worth saving is you.

Do I need a hook knife if I've got a quick-release?

Yes, they solve different problems. A quick-release stops the kite pulling you; it does nothing about a line already wrapped round your ankle, and that line is still attached to a kite that's still moving. Put a knife on your harness, check each season that it hasn't seized, and know which pocket it lives in without looking.