I was out on my F-arc 1200 (I love this kite and it's big brother ) yesterday in some shifty and gusty winds. The wind was 5-20mph with gusts up to 25. It was too gusty for a board so I decided to static jump. I was getting some pretty good jumps, some were near vertical. I got a few jumps were instead going downwind, I went upwind. They were like the glides snowkiters do down mountains. But here's the part that puzzles me. I was on flat ground and wasn't running upwind. I was running perpendicular to the wind using the standard jumping procedure. The only way I can thing of for this to happen is the kite overflew, then I started moving upwind to get under the kite and my inertia kept me going in that direction. The f-arc amazing L/D might have something to do with it too.

Has anyone else ever experianced something like this? It happened a few times so I know it wasn't a 1 in a million occurance.

Yup. In this you can see from the apex down, I'm going backwards... I wouldn't call it 'upwind' but you are trading altitude for airspeed and getting some glide time in, which means you cover some ground too.

Yeah, and its wicked scary the first few times. I think it is similar to the big glides. Flying backwards is floaty but will scare you when you dont expect it

Is there a way you can purposely jump into a glide without rideing down hill or is is luck?

Most of the time its when my hangtime exceeds my momentum anf i glide backwards, but ive never done it on purpose, its always been accidental