Saturday

Team Flame and Ex-Grads (Keith and Vee Griffiths) must have liked what they saw, because I was then asked to fly with them in a 5-(wo)man team.
Pretty chuffed to be asked to join flyers from teams that were 7th and 10th at the recent World Championships!
So in the air were three super-vented Fury kites (flown by Barry, Fran, and myself), and two Airdynamics T5 Taipan V2 kites (flown by Vee and Keith). I was very pleased to be able to fly along and not make a complete a**e of myself ...
And to round off the day, Barry and Fran asked Irma and me to join them 'for a fun fly', involving four triple-stacks of Warp 9 kites.
Small though these kites are, as a triple-stack they were fast, and pulled quite a bit, but we did manage to fly some basic patterns, including boxes.
We went home exhausted, but very satisfied with our Festival début.
Sunday

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The final of the day was to be a mega-team fly, and for this, L-katz joined Team Flame, Ex-Grads, and two more flyers (one of whom, Michael, is only 9 years old) for a 11-kite mega-fly. Among these 11 kites were three different types (Fury, T5 and Dream On), so the challenge was first and foremost to try and match speeds (the Dream Ons are smaller and faster than the other two kite types), and then see what else we could do. Some kites crashed out during the mega-fly (and, on occasion, came back in formation again), but Irma and I were very pleased to be able to keep flying throughout. Apart from the infinities and ladders, we flew boxes, round the world cycles, and threads. Sometimes it looks like a cloud of crazy mosquitoes, but keep in mind that the three teams involved had never flown together before, and no one in L-katz had ever flown in such a large group of kites:
As you can probably hear on the video, there was quite a bit of calling to each other, especially from Barry, who was flying lead. But the shout that caused some hilarity came from Vee. At some point, Irma had to dodge another kite, but quickly got back into position. "Well recovered, that man!" shouted Vee. "That man is a woman!", I shouted back. Despite the concentration needed, we had to laugh!
If nothing else, flying in an 11-strong team was definitely exhilarating, and a worthy end to two days of pair/team-flying for us.
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