Tuesday 5 August 2014

Malmesbury Kite Festival

Malmesbury turned out to be a festival of two halves. On Saturday, we had persistent rain until about 1pm, and then some brighter weather with one front after another coming through. Our Flying Fish banner pole snapped in a strong gust, and another one blew over one of the organisers' marquees! The original arena schedule went out of the window at the start of the day, quickly followed by several updated versions ... We did get some flying done in the quiet spells, with, believe it or not, our T5 Cubans.


Sunday gave us a really nice sunny day, although the wind remained variable. Before our first slot, we flew our Taipan Standards, but then quickly changed over to the Taipan V1s for our main "Ruthless Queen" routine. For our second routine of the slot, to "Adiemus", we switched to our Peter Powells, but, exactly as we launched, the wind dropped, so it was back to the Taipans. Second slot of the day was Taipan Standards again for both routines.


There were no other teams present at the festival, but Dave Salmon (of Sky Symphony) flew a one-man-two-kites routine ...










... followed by Dave Green flying a one-man-three-kites routine.










Various single-line flyers were present of course, among which our fellow countrymen, the Sky-Flyers; more photos can be found here.

A highlight of the festival for us was meeting up with the Peter Powell gang, including 'the man' himself. Mark gave us the chance to fly a triple-stack of their new ultralight version; lots of fun to fly!


They then tried very hard to convince us that it would look great for Flying Fish to fly a routine with a pair of these stacks ... hm, it sure would, so maybe we'll get a pair of these ultralight stacks one day. Please don't tell anyone, especially not the Peter Powell boys, but I've already played around a bit with sail design, and Mark said he would soon be able to supply silver-coloured tails, which will look great with the sun shining on them ...


From Flying Fish, Dave Green, and the Peter Powell bunch: hello from Malmesbury!

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