Hey, just a quick question.........
Do you guys dry out your kites after each session or can you roll em up wet???

Had my first go on an inflatable kite today, am still buzzing!!!!! Cant wait till the sum comes up tommorow so i can try it with the board!!!
Sick sport!!!

Cheers

Best to dry them out if possible.

Fresh water is especially bad, you start to get mildew on your kite if you leave it too long!!

I claim to have the hot oil on this. The reason I do is that I have had some disapointing life-spans from my kites, i.e. one year old kite flying like a dogone jellyfish after only one year.
After consulting industry insiders and other sailing guru's I gathered up this.
Wet kites are bad. Dry kites are good. But.......
Salt cyrstalises when it dries. If you looked under a microscope you would see tiny "cuts" in the fabric, when in effect creates the forementioned jellyfish-action, which is bad.
Also as mentioned in this thread was the mildew factor. Salt stops mildew, which is good.
So my advice is this. If a kite is used on fresh water (not so common in NZ) dry it to your hearts content and make sure you do because it will mildew.
If your kite is used on salty water, you may want to avoid drying it unless it is soaking wet and if it is just damp, just leave it. Or you could get really caring and rinse it before the full dry-out, but that would be a bit over the top to most kiters.
Or you could just throw it in a big sloppy mess into the back of your grubby old car for six months on top of rusty stuff and then drag it back out, pump it up to 10psi and head out in 30kts, up to you.

at some point its going to dry out!.... and not only do those little shards of salt lacerate the fabic but they do even worse things to the threads which do a fairly important job holding those inflatible bits in and are under a lot of tension at times! .... so best advice if you give a stuff is:
Use it in fresh water.... dry it well (stops the dye running as well)
use it in salt water.... rinse it after every sail in fresh and dry it well!

or the easy option is sell it quick after one year!