We don't help ourselves

I was sat on the beach today and the wind was blowing quite strongly (it was 20 to 25mph while I was there) watching the kite surfer (I was actually trying to photograph them but with the wind buffeting me about and the fact my lens was not big enough........). Anyway one of the kite surfers went to his car and produced a wind meter, what followed next was a failure to read the manual for the wind meter as nobody knew which button to press to get the correct display, but it also revealed another problem, what scale should you display the wind speed in?? should it be as I have above mph, or should it be kph? but as kite surfing is classed as sailing then it should be measured via the Beaufort scale or knots, but then these guys are athletic so should we measure the wind like they do for athletic meetings, meter per second?????

If we are going to measure something that moves from "a" to "b" why do we need so many different scales to measure how fast it moved between the two points?? One of the web sites (its a sailing web site) I use gives me the option to have the wind speed in four different scales (MPH, KPH, Knots, Mtr/s), another web site (general weather) will let me enter the wind speed in one scale and it will convert it into the other fours for me. You watch the weather forecast (well the one I see anyway), the inland wind speed is measured in mph, but when it is measured over the sea it is measured via the Beaufort scale! Why are we trying to confuse ourselves, can't we have one scale that we use to record the wind speed and stick with that??

Unfortunately which scale to measure wind speed is not the only thing we don't learn lesson from. One of the most important aspects of safety in kite surfing is wearing a leash so that if you have to release the kite (let go) it won't blow away from you. You would think that with the kites costing upwards of a £1000 that the flyer's would be ever so keen to wear a leash, well apparently not for one flyer who lost (as in let go) his kite this morning, his kite proceed in the down wind direction (e.g. the direction of the wind), across a main road before impaling itself on a block of flats. Unfortunately I missed the action as I was facing the other way having just received a call on my mobile. First I knew about it was when I nearly got trampled by other kite surfer rushing to the wayward kite fearing there was a kite flyer still attached to it. A few choice words were offered by the would be rescuer concerning the safety of the flyer.