Re: TS Fay Idiots
A buddy said he thinks he had some sort of trouble using the emergency release on the harness.
Unfortunately it happend so fast and this guy was in a panic and it never got that far. Your friend is a bit wrong though. The way it works is that there are 2 primary types of kites. 4 and 5 line kites.
On a 4 line kite the front two lines support your weight as you get pulled through the water, they go through a control bar and attache to a hook with a no-release pin on your waist harness. Then the bar has the 2 back lines attached to the tips. These lines are used to control the angle of attack (depower teh kite by pushing out and power up by pulling in) and the steering of the kite. There is a safety leash that attaches from your harness to a safety ring on the bar setup. On 5 line kites a center line from the front runs from the kite through the bar and has a safety ring on it rather than on one of the steering or lift lines. Either way, the point is that if you pull the release on the bar system and the kite detaches from your harness, the leash pulls on the line with the ring and flags your kite out and kills the power. At this point you are attached to a flagged out kite via leash thats attached to one line. Again, different manufacturers are different, but for my gear I like redundancy. So i also have a release on my leash or a release on my harness that will break my connection to the leash as well. And I also have an easily reachable hook knife in my harness as well to cut lines.
The guy's release did not fail, he simply didnt react fast enough to reach for it even, his hands didnt even leave the bar.
Some manufacturers have releases that have had situations where they jammed under extreme load and if/when jammed with sand. There has been a bit of a consumer revolt to standardize the release mechanism. Luckily France has instituted federal testing standards so all brands must now pass those, so its a bit of safety.
Sorry for the LONG response, this has been a HUGE reality check for me.
