plummet wrote:Well this has been a useless thread. I asked what customised safety gear the snow kiters use and i get the paraglider police.
Im not jumping off massive mountains and gliding hundreds of feet off the ground. i'm jumping off a very small shallow sand dune with clean wind. I'm limiting myself to several feet off the ground. So in reality i'm not jumping any higher than i would on the flat. just gliding longer.
So.. . . . . please discontinue the paraglider police and if you do have your own personalised safety devices post them up.
Hi Plummet. I felt the same way when being lectured by The Masters of Safety. I am a middle aged kiter and I do little glides once in a while. Biggest I ever go is enough for two slow rotations, and I try not to get so high that if the wind bubbled I would break something. (For some reason the fear of busting my head in prevents me from gliding backwards, when snowboarding. I am afraid of heights.) I like to be rotating low so I can come in a bit hot and only want solid, fast, clean landings on rail or I feel like I blundered it. Dangling for me is not something I want to do for very long. I double harness and use a larger thicker waist harness for a "Turtle Shell" effect if I don't get all the way around and come in sliding on my back, and just a very light climbing harness looped over the hook.
The parts that fail are the swivels and the QR could pop, so I lock that off with just enough tape to make it stay unless I ask it to release. The swivels get uber-loaded climbing up and once one failed because I had let it get full of sand, and then climbed steep sticky snow, so now I have removed that variable. (It loaded it so hard that the stainless steel line separator/ring connector thing snapped.) I have a special "Ruben Pro Bar" that has ultra ultra thick 20m lines and has a giant, doubled up chicken rope that is 1/2" thick (1/4" Amsteel doubled back through itself.) That part of the equation is pretty much accounted for by trial and error.
Plastic skatepads over the knees if there's any rocks hiding in the snow. The nature of windy ridges is they tend to be pretty boney at the top. I mostly ride waves so I tend to be toeside a lot, and habitually drag that knee at times. One rock could sure destroy my knee-cap. I suppose in sand dunes that's not necessary. Sounds soft anyway.
The best safety device for me is, like you, flawless thermal ridge-lift with no voids or bubbles. Sort of have to test the waters on that, being invisible. I hate crap and prefer control over plastic armor. Bottomless fresh fluffy snow in the landing zone, void of any hidden rocks is a wonderful thing. Then you can huck a bit more with very little risk of injury. In higher wind this is sometimes hard to find, it doesn't last very long. N-Zed must have some. Ahem. Second best is a slight windpack that you can slide on. I wear an oversize, ultra slippy, insulated vintage nylon "windbreaker" jacket that has no friction on packed snow, it works a bit like a vert-ramp skate boarder uses the giant knee-pads for failed attempts. Maybe that would apply on sand? It comes in handy when I under-rotate and am coming in heelside, I just lift the board up and slam on my side/backside, sometimes I just bounce up and get my rail in. I always wear a helmet of course (fingers crossed). And stay super low!
PS. Loved that youtube you did with a massive Orca bodywhomping your local spot. The commentary was absolutely classic. I'd be up in the Dunes too after that one. Could you re-post or bump that back up so I can see that again? Thanks! DH