Skewered by a windsock pole

I ripped my wing today while kiting.


Lesson: Avoid these when kiting.

I was playing around in the gusty wind at Torrey, having a great time actually. One time when I inflated my wing I was lifted about 15 feet off the ground by a strong gust. That would have been fine as I was playing and having some fun, except, I laid on the brakes all the way. That would have been fine too except I didn’t notice that I had moved all they way across the LZ to the workout area where there are (were) 2 windsock poles.

As about aggressively as possible the wing came right down on the pole. Robin came to the rescue right away clipping the lines that held the pole to it’s post so we could get my wing down with no further damage.


Here’s the damage.

I didn’t expect to fly today. There was no wind at my home in Carlsbad and some whispy cirrus were the only clouds high in the sky. I decided to have lunch at the gliderport as I often do. When I got there the conditions were unbelievable: steady 12-15 mph wind, due west. I was so excited I couldn’t wait to get in my harness. I think that was my first lesson: No matter how excited you are, no matter how much you want to fly, calm down and assess the situation.

Also, it was a bit cold today. I was thinking about buying a flight suit. I’ve never wanted one before and in retrospect I was wondering why in the world I was thinking about that so much. I think my intuition was telling me not to fly. To calm down. Do something different.

The wing is fixable. There’s a guy at Torrey who fixes wings, Steve Stackable (they call him Stack). He landed about 10 minutes after I did and did nearly the exact same thing. He landed on the other pole that was standing next to the one I took down. I’m not sure how to explain that.

Stack came over and looked at my wing. He said “No problem.” Gabe suggested that he a use fluorescent pink patch.


The repair shack at Torrey.

I stuff sacked my wing and put my harness back in the car, then went to take a few pictures for the blog. To my surprise Stack was in the repair shack working on my wing right away. He invited me in and we talked a bit. He’s a former professional motocross racer and lived for a time about an hour from where I grew up in Pennsylvania.


To repair the wing you replace the whole section from the stitching.

Apparently to fix a wing you take the bad section out by the stitches and then stitch a new section in. We talked a bit about that, motorcycles and Pennsylvania.

When I came back out Gabe said it was blowing too hard for me to fly. A bunch of guys were getting blown back way past the LZ. It could be a blessing that I never got up. I could have gotten in some serious trouble today.

It’s important to keep a great attitude about things, even disasters like this. It would be easy to be all angry and pissed off about damaging my wing. If I had I would almost certainly have missed the whole experience.