How To: Not Die: Parasailing

This write up contains some very useful information that could very well save your life and your friend’s life. (parasailing alone is for nerds)

Chances are you or somebody you know has been parasailing. Hopefully they were not a statistic as some unfortunately are. It’s not a perfectly safe activity. How safe it is depends on the equipment being used and the good judgment and skill of the captain. If you’re here reading this post I’m going to assume you have seen the video. 

The video is a classic example of a “line break”, something that is uncommon but possible. When the line breaks there are two possible scenarios and it all depends on how much wind there is. If winds are light you will parachute into the water and the canopy will land behind you and collapse into the water and the crew will come to retrieve you. This is usually a laugh it off situation (who doesn’t want to parachute into the water?!) Now the other, and actually life threatening, situation is when there is sufficient wind to NOT allow the canopy to collapse and fall in the water behind you. What happens is what you see in the video. You begin to get dragged backwards until you are stopped by the crew, the safety device (if used), or maybe you are not stopped until you impact something…

If you look closely in the video you can see us deploy..something, it’s called a “Chute Wrangler”. It did not work. At all. For unknown reasons. Even after attempting to bounce it on the water. That SHOULD have stopped us. This is a device I used to attach to every parasail flight with an explanation to the flyer. “Do you see this red strap attached to this red pouch above your head? DO NOT PULL THE RED STRAP! Only pull the red strap if we are chasing after you yelling “PULL THE RED STRAP!” 

I used to work on parasail boats before the invention of this device. The method of retrieval without this device involves driving up to the parasail and grabbing a line on the canopy, while it’s dragging your customers backwards through the water, with a boat hook and tying it off to the boat. 

That was our backup plan but in the video the other flyer wanted to arrest the canopy himself, so after seeing this I deflated the way in which I believed to be most effective. Grab lines from the bottom of the canopy and keep tension on them until the canopy scoops up water and deflates. Be sure it's not going to inflate and unclip yourself ASAP and get away from everything.

A few more notes about this stunt. The POV was my own. The other flyer was the owner of the company and on the boat were 2 other captains and 5 other crew members. This was a safety exercise. We knew the wind would be sufficient enough to drag us backwards after hitting the water and we intended to use the “Chute Wrangler” to stop us. As soon as I cut the line I realized I was headed for impact with a brand new knife in my hand. I calmly folded it away before we hit the water. I kept checking my hand because the aftershock from cutting the line was pretty intense and in the adrenaline fueled moment I wanted to know if my hand was injured. It wasn’t. I noticed that if you tried to fight the water it made it much worse. It was very easy to just float on your back. The moment you turn around you really need to keep your head above water or you could risk drowning by your head being held under by surface tension. I became concerned for my friend next to me when his head started going underwater and started to shut it down as fast as I could. Everybody was fine and we learned a lot. Hopefully you just did too!

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