Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Heads up! EH, you want your surfing kite back? If it lands in Joe Gilman's trees, near Kailua Beach, it costs you a case of beer for him to retrieve it.
Kite surfers crash
Kailua BeachSome residents want to ban
the new ocean craze, saying it is
dangerous to others who use
the popular beachBy Lori Tighe
Star-BulletinAnd that's for the easy ones. If it's way high, it costs four cases.
The latest ocean craze, kite surfing, is keeping Gilman stocked with beer. But he would rather have the kite surfers go fly their kites elsewhere.
Kailua Beach is becoming an Alfred Hitchcock movie, with giant kites crashing suddenly into sunbathers, swimmers and people strolling, say residents who want to ban the sport.
"From a psychological standpoint, it's very anxiety-provoking to think these things are going to come down on you at any moment," said Diane Cirincione, a psychotherapist who lives on Kailua Beach.
Cirincione and others want kite surfers off the beach permanently and plan to testify at the Kailua Neighborhood Board meeting at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Recreation Center.
"I think that's too extreme to ban kite surfing completely. That would be very unfair," said Carol Naish, owner of Naish Hawaii, which trains people in the sport and sells surfing kites.
"Some people don't use common sense," Naish said.
Families with small children should stay within the buoyed area reserved for swimmers and avoid the kite-surfing area, she said.Kite surfers practice their sport next to the buoyed beach, using kites up to 18 feet long with lines 100 feet or longer.
Kite surfers balance on a board similar to a surfboard and hang onto their kite as they bounce up and down on the waves.
The sport has reached a frenzied pitch at Kailua Beach, but Naish believes it will level off soon.
"It's a wonderful bay, and there's plenty of room for people to enjoy it," she said.
Kite surfing is beautiful to watch and even entertaining, agreed Cirincione, and residents have humorously tolerated it.
To see the windsurfers and the kite surfers clash, roll and tangle with each other has been hilarious at times, she added.
"It's a great sport; it just doesn't work on this beach," Cirincione said. "It is the problem."
A mother swimming had to suddenly dunk herself and her baby to avoid getting hit by a crashing kite, she said.
A kite hit a man in the chest while he was lying on the beach, jolting him.
"It's a good thing he didn't have a heart condition," Cirincione said.
Another time, Cirincione said, she and her husband were walking down the beach when a kite crashed 50 feet in front of them, causing them both to jump.
Cirincione fears a serious injury if a kite crashes down on a small child.
The greenery on the beach is also being decimated, she said.
Her own back yard has lost 40 percent of the ground cover in the past year due to kite surfers climbing and sitting on it.
"They climb our trees on private property to get their kites," she said. "This is not a safe situation."
Gilman, who's lived on Kailua Beach for about 40 years, said he first saw the Hobie Cats move in, then the wind surfers came and the two groups began fist fights for space. Now the kite surfers have arrived.
"What a pain in the neck," Gilman said. "The kite lines stretch 40 meters each, taking up a lot of space, and they're pretty dangerous. I saw a woman and a kiter get cut from the lines."
Kites have flown into his palm trees, snapped off his flag pole and decapitated his weather vane.
He began charging kite surfers a case of beer to bring their kites down from his trees.
"The beer is nice," he said, "but I'd rather have them out of my yard."