B-2

It's been well over a year since my last post in this blog. The main reason for that is that I was out of action for quite a while for medical reasons (this is not the place to go into more detail; if you know, you know). And that meant no competition in 2024, and no Flying Fish performing at kite festivals.

I'm only now slowly getting back into pair-flying, as well as flying in our L-katz team; I definitely don't have the stamina yet to fly as long or as much as I used to, but things are very slowly improving.

So there hasn't been much to report for quite a while, except for one thing ... 

And that one thing is that, since the last blog post in September last year, we acquired a new set of team kites, called B-2, and made by Adam Pallas. For the last few years, we have been closely involved in the development of these kites, flying prototypes, providing feedback to Adam, etc. Here are some pictures of these prototypes:

Standard

Vented

Light

I must say, it was good fun testing out these prototypes, finding out their upper and lower wind limits, playing with bridle settings, etc! Note that the upper spreader goes through the sail and a t-piece behind the spine. Upper spreader and spine being connected like that results in a very stiff frame.

As we very much liked the way they flew, slow and steady, with easy (half-)axels, we ordered the full set for Flying Fish! Each set has three kites: light - standard - vented. The light goes as low as our T5 Cubans, and the standard has quite a wide wind range: we flew it together with both our Impulse UL and Impulse Mid-vent and it coped fine with both. The vented kite comes with both icarex and mesh patches, four of each per kite, and can also be flown without any patches. This makes it a very versatile kite, it essentially being five kites in one, from a heavy standard to a mega-vented, and so able to deal with a very wide wind range. So, with only three B-2 kites, we cover the full wind range we'd ever fly in. All kites also come with weights to add to the spine or wing tips, and the leech line is adjustable.

As you can probably imagine, lots of discussion on the colour patterns! In the end, we decided to go with mostly black kites with a swash of our individual colours, as black kites look really sharp in the sky. 

So here are Flying Fish's B-2s!

Light:

Standard:

Vented:

And in case you were wondering, yes, L-katz also has a full set of B-2s ...

Of course, testing the single prototypes doesn't give any direct information on how they perform in team formation, but they definitely fly together, in pair and team, as we were expecting them to. Here's to many more hours flying our B-2s!

North Shore Radicals

Top of the Line North Shore Radicals are the classic team kites, and they have several world championships under their belt. In the past, I've already posted on several other Top of the Line kites in our quiver, namely Hawaiians and Spin-Offs. What about the classic NSRs?

The first North Shores we got were these 'rainbows':

These are not original Top of the Line North Shores; they were made and marketed by a US kite shop, Cutting Edge Kites (the shop doesn't appear to exist anymore). They have modern spars and fittings, but the sails are sewn by Pam Kirk, who was one of the people sewing the original Top of the Line sails. So they do have some original North Shore Radical 'DNA' in them!

They handle and fly pretty much like original Top of the Line North Shores, including the famous NSR roar!

Going off at a bit of a tangent, what we also have in our quiver is this "Weston Shore Radical". Based on an NSR, it was made years ago by a kite friend, who passed away, for another kite friend, who also passed away recently. The kite ended up with us, and has special meaning, as you will probably understand. The reason behind the name, by the way, is that they often flew at Weston Shore in Southampton.

Staying with home-made kites based on a North Shore Radical, we have a set of four of these 'Point-Nine Shores'. Made by Josh Mitcheson, they are basically 90% scaled down versions of a North Shore. We have this set of four (pictures show three, but we have four) to allow us to give interested people a taste of pair/team-flying. Due to their reduced size, they pull less than a classical North Shore Radical (thus making it easier to handle for people new to team-flying), but still make some noise!

None of the kites above are original Top of the Line NSRs, of course, so what about those? First of all, we have, on loan from STACK, a set of six North Shores (i.e. three pairs), previously flown by the Punchline team.

A pair of North Shore Konas:

A pair of North Shore Radicals:

And a pair of North Shore VIPs:

Twisted Bridle, our sister pair in L-katz, also have three pairs of NSRs on loan (which used to be flown by Airkraft), allowing us to fly North Shores with the team; imagine the noise!!

So that was the situation until quite recently, when we were basically given two different batches of team kites. Together, these batches contained four Top of the Line North Shores, plus an original sail. The sail was a 'neon' R-20 sail, which I really liked. Given that one of the North Shores in the batch had the same colour pattern as one of our modern Cutting Edge kites, I decided to swap the sails.

The frame of this kite is not original; the spars are thinner and lighter than normal.

The kite flies absolutely fine, and feels and sounds as a North Shore Radical should, but best to consider it a unique 'light' Radical (the sail is not a Kona sail, so I'm not calling it a Kona).

The neon stripes look fantastic when the sun hits them!

Both recent batches of kites included a North Shore VIP, and, purely by chance, these two kites had the same sail: black with single rainbow stripes (V-15).

They flew together perfectly matched from the word go, without any need for bridle tweaking! Quite possibly, the previous owners never changed the bridles from their factory setting. 

Indulge me, North Shores are always fun to refuel ...

The final North Shore Radical from those two recent batches has an R-13 reverse sail.

Unlike the 'neon' NSR, which I'm happy with flying on its own (especially given the lighter frame), I very much would like to find this R-13 reverse NSR a fitting flying partner. An obvious good match would be an R-13 like this one (picture credit: Bill Lancashire):

Fingers crossed I'll be able to get my hands on one!!

Gonks go a-flying!

Lisa, one of the members of our L-katz team, made these adorable gonks for us, in team colours!

Let's follow them on their first kite-flying adventure.

Ready to fly ...

... and launch!

Trying some follows and infinities. 

That didn't go half-bad, did it?

I think they did amazingly well. Never having flown a dual-line kite before, they managed to fly as a pair, executing simple patterns. All that in their very first kite-flying session!

But .... there is more! As there are two more gonks, they can fly in a 4-gonk team as well!!

Watch this space ...

Credit for gonks and the first and last gonk pictures: Lisa Daubney

Double Hellcats!

Hellcat kites were made by Peter Hall in the 1990s. This particular one is an ultralight which used to belong to a dear friend of ours. After he passed away something like two years ago, his entire kite quiver came to us ... Our friend used 'Hellcat' as his name on kite fora, so whenever we fly this kite, we are reminded of him. 

The kite has a wing span of around 1.70 meter, and is a really nice kite to fly in very low winds. 

Hellcats aren't exactly common kites, so when the opportunity of getting my hands on another ultralight Hellcat presented itself, I didn't hesitate for very long ... especially as it was orange/blue, so matched the orange/black one we had pretty well. 

Here are the two Hellcats side by side at home just after the 'blue' Hellcat arrived. 

So now it was waiting for a day with very little wind, which came soon enough.

Ultralight Hellcats really don't need much wind to fly; 2-3mph and they're quite happy. As you might expect from such a small kite, they're quite twitchy.

Time to fly the two Hellcats together!

Clearly, they're not team kites (they're not designed to be), but it was nice to fly them together, and be reminded of our friend like that. 

Some of his ashes were scattered around the bench we normally use as our base on our regular flying field, so it felt only appropriate to take a picture of the two Hellcats there. 

Rog, you'll never be forgotten.