Yea, this is a safety blog, why the heck am I talking about kites?
Well, it started with a beautiful, sunny, windy Sunday and ended with four burnt fingers, two cut fingers, one just shy of needing stitches, and a LOT of antibacterial ointment, the good kind with the painkiller and some cool pirate bandages.
Intrigued? I would be if I weren’t a writer with a right (dominant, for me) hand covered in skulls and crossbones (Girlchild wanted a pirate party last year and these were left over party favors), and aches.
We went to fly the kite today. My husband is a kite fan, so we have some fancy ones, and today Girlchild and I were flying the rainbow galleon with 25-foot tails.
It took a few minutes to get it up in the air since it was a bit windier than we’d expected, then, suddenly, it was off! It was off so fast I had to take the reel from Girlchild because she was on the cusp of losing it.
Boy am I glad I did! The kite went nuts, up,up, up; the string was flying off so fast I could feel the friction from the reel handles in the palms of my hands. I’m not sure, now, exactly how it happened, but all of a sudden my hand was over the center of the reel, string soaring away, and it caught my fingers.
I now have friction burns across all four fingers on my right hand, cuts in the ring and little fingers with the cut in my little finger nearly ΒΌ-inch deep. The only reason I can see that this deep cut did not bleed is because the friction burn cauterized it as it cut. It hurt. A lot. An “I had to apologize to Girlchild for a word I said” kind of hurt.
I am so thankful it was me, though. If Girlchild had gotten her little hand caught like I did there’s a good chance she could have lost a finger. As much pressure as there was on the kite string it was basically acting like a cutting wire. I tried to wrap the string around a park bench so I could look at my hand, one of those rubber-coated steel benches, and the string cut through the rubber coating all the way down to the metal.
What did I learn today? Well, sometimes it’s NOT a good idea to fly a kite.
-If you go to fly and, once the kite is up, the pull pressure and resistance are so strong you cannot let a four or five-year old child hold the reel, you need to reel it in, the wind is too heavy.
-Check out your kite string when you buy it, and if you’re not sure about the pressure it can withstand, ask. I heartily recommend going to a hobby shop for kite supplies. Our string broke as I was trying to reel the kite in. I also had several moments while I was reeling where I was afraid the reel itself was going to break.
-Get a good reel. I love our reel, an old-fashioned one with a center that looks like a thread spool and two long handles on either side. This is good because it allows you to use both hands/arms to control the kite without trying to get a two-handed grip on a one-handed reel. LOOK FOR A STOP. I realized, too late, that there was no stop or lock on our reel and the only way to stop the kite pulling more string was to hold hard to the handles so the reel could not spin or let the kite take it all and hope the knot on the reel could stand the pressure. I didn’t have much faith in that last one so I just held tight.
-Don’t fly near power lines. I knew this before today, and we didn’t, but when the kite got loose it headed across the field, across a divided highway, and into a drainage ditch-right next to a nexus power towers and lines. We got incredibly lucky that the kite didn’t tangle in any of these on it’s descent.
I’m going to go change my bandage now. Until next time, stay safe!