A new form of water recreation has been quickly banned on some of Missouri’s lakes, and might soon be banned on the others. It’s kite-tubing, which involves people climbing onto a large triangular-shaped inner-tube thing with a fabric bottom and being pulled behind a boat. As the boat speeds up, the kite-tube goes up in the air, as a kite would…. But the things are unstable and unlike a parasail, they do not float down Sometimes they crash—at the speed the boat is going. Sergeant Ralph Bledsoe with the state water patrol says he is compiling records of injuries…He says hitting the water from thirty feet up at forty miles an hour can break bones and cause severe internal injuries.. The Little Rock district of the Corps of Engineers has banned kite-tubing on the southern Missouri lakes it controls–Table Rock, Bull Shoals, Norfork and Clearwater and several more in Arkansas. Corps disricts covering other lakes in Missouri have taken no action, and the state water patrol can do nothing on non-Corps lakes. But Bledsoe says the information he is gathering could lead the patrol to ask the legislature to declare kite-tubing illegal in Missouri.

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