Hi everyone, as there has been a lot of interest, the Kite Rescue and Resuscitation session will be going ahead this Friday afternoon.

We have pulled together resources from Surf Life Saving, Kite Surfing WA other interested parties so this will be a great 1 hour(ish) session for everyone interested in kite safety.

The session will be in three parts.

Christian from ActionSportsWA will be presenting a discussion on best practice around rescue techniques for kite related incidents.

Steve Claudio, Vice President of WAKSA will give a bit of a spiel on the new laws regarding safety equipment for kiting outside 400m and the Be Safe Kiteboarding Guidelines.

David Reid from TISLSC, who is also Discipline Lead of the Undergraduate Paramedicine Course and Co-ordinator for the School of Medical Sciences at Edith Cowan University will take us through First Aid responses and Resuscitation techniques.

David is a brilliant guy who also crews as paramedic on the Westpac Rescue helicopter and has been involved with marine rescue for many years - there is not much he has not experienced.

There will be an opportunity for everyone to have a shot at pumping the chest of a mannequin and be given direct feedback on how to improve your own resuscitation techniques.

Given what we intend to cover, this is obviously going to be quite high level but as a lot of rescue and resuscitation is about doing the best you can with the situation at hand, it more about giving you a framework on how to approach a situation.

Details are as follows:

Date and Time: Friday October 16 at 5.30pm
Location: Trigg Island Surf Life Saving Club - Training room - (enter via the courtyard at the back of the club)
Cost - Free

Note that the bar will be open for all attendees after the session and the club has great priced drinks.

Hope to see you all there.

Serious kudos the crew who have organised this event - great idea & well thought idea.

Recognising that you can't please all the people all the time, could the organisers give some thought to running this event again, but possibly on a weekend day - the time & location of this event precludes me from getting there unfortunately - a weekend repeat would be really appreciated.

cheers

Juddy

So Juddy, my thought was that if it went well, we could perhaps arrange another one with one of the Surf Clubs SOR, maybe Leightons or Freo or something like that so that crew SOR can also go.

We can learn from this first one and maybe run each year at the start of the year.

Thanks for sharing the slides - easy to follow and very informative.

Any chance you could consider a 2nd type of presentation and publish the slides? ... how to rescue an injured / unconscious kiter when there are no boats around, only other kiters?

Recently here in SA we lost a long standing member of the kiting community who supposedly suffered a heart attack whilst kiting and drowned. I don't know details, but I hear his mate really struggled to bring him to shore - finally assisted by passers by ... two inflated kites ... one unconscious kitesurfer ... no other help to be had on the water.

Clearly the comments about releasing the kite of the injured party makes sense in all scenarios, but some tips on how to rescue your mate when there's no boat around would also be helpful.
Cheers

A big thanks to everyone that came along last night and made it a really worthwhile exercise.

Special thanks in particular to Christian and Steve, and in particular David Reid and the Trigg Island Surf Life saving club for the venue.