Gary from Ride Engine introduces the Re-Tractable Leash — the first retractable leash actually designed for wing foiling and parawinging, keeping your board and wing safely separated after a crash without the bulk or snap-back of old-style retractable leashes.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro: Gary from Ride Engine on their new Re-Tractable Leash, released about a month ago
0:33 Old-school retractable leashes existed, but weren’t built for kiteboarding — not something Gary would recommend for kiting
1:00 Wing foiling, and more recently parawinging, made a retractable leash make real sense — but nothing was purpose-built for it, so they designed their own
1:36 The big benefit: keeps your whole kit further away from you after a crash, instead of snapping your board straight back in
2:09 Around 1.8m of Kevlar-reinforced webbing plus another metre of shock cord — roughly 3m of separation when you go down
2:26 Less board-to-wing contact means less risk of a hole through the canopy or leading edge, and fewer tangles
2:51 Spring tension is deliberately tuned so it doesn’t snap straight back at you — gear stays out at a safe distance while you sort yourself out, then you reel it in
3:23 Built ultra lightweight and low-profile, using a compact worm-gear spring inside a small circular case, so you forget you’re wearing it
3:55 A unique dual-stage bungee: soft for the first third, then noticeably stiffer for the last, acting as a shock absorber on a high-speed crash
4:44 Three attachment configurations: waist, calf, and a DIY “base leash” kit
4:57 Waist version uses a non-mechanical, neoprene-covered buckle that won’t fail or come undone mid-crash
5:47 Calf version lets you separate your wing leash (waist) from your board leash (calf) for maximum spread between everything
6:17 Stays taut rather than slapping around — less underfoot during foot switches, no cord banging the board while pumping
6:38 The DIY base leash: the retractable unit plus hardware to mount it wherever suits your own setup — a stash bag, a hard shell harness, you name it
7:38 Available now
7:47 Wrap-up: thanks to Gary
More info: https://rideengine.com/pages/re_tractable-leash
