Avoiding jumping too far downwind of the kite

Anyone got any good tips for controlling your kite during big airs?

I've got a nasty habit of ending up too far downwind on my kite, losing all tension in my lines, and dropping the kite. Last night had to do a couple of tricky water re-lauches after flipping/inverting my kite after an air, not great fun.

Stok,

If you still have this problem you're probably not going that ''big'' and avoiding front stalling is mostly having to do with your take off technique.

You need a strong load and pop before you take off with the board pointing pretty much as close to directly upwind as possible just before leaving the water and getting that strong pull up with the kite. You got a good example in this pic below where the board is pointing in the opposite direction of the wind at the take off phase





Doing this you will travel much more vertically than horizontally. The problem is most beginners learn to jump using only the energy of the kite but not combining the energy of the board (load and pop). Because you don't pop enough your jump is sending you downwind too fast and you start to pendulum under your kite. This means you accelerate faster than your kite, therefore your lines go slack and the kite front stalls...

So spend some time learning to load and pop big without even sending your kite (keeping it at 45'). Flat water is best for this. If you don't get at least 1m off the water without sending your kite, your technique needs some improvement.

Other tips to prevent stalling are:

- keep the bar pulled in all the way during the entire jump
- tune your lines so your kite is oversheeting a bit when you pull the bar all the way (front lines 5-10cm longer than the back lines).
- keep the kite moving from 11' to 1' in a figure 8 motion when doing bigger jumps (more than 5 meters off the water and a few seconds of hangtime).
- Send your kite hard before landing
- when you get more advanced (10 meters + off the water) learn to downloop just before landing.

Hope this helps,

Christian

Cheers Christian for the great tips...