Portsmouth Kite Festival

Portsmouth Kite Festival always arrives with a bitter-sweet feeling. Sweet, because it's the biggest and most varied of the kite festivals we normally go to. And bitter, because it's also usually the last of the season for us ... In this post, I will focus on the dual-line pair/team-flying, but lots of photos, giving a more general impression of the weekend, can be found here.

Team Spectrum was present, of course. I can hardly remember attending a kite festival where they were not flying. Because their slots consist of several routines (Carl flying two kites, Bryan and Carl flying as a pair, Carl flying three kites), requiring frequent changes of kites, we ground-crewed for them this weekend, and that gave me the opportunity to take a photo of their pairs routine with tails from a different angle.

The Flying Squad, although first and foremost a quad-line team, also flew a few brief 4-man (on Saturday) and 5-man (on Sunday) dual-line routines. 

Useful that their 5-man routine included a pattern that we're also starting to practice with the full L-katz team, so we could get a feel for how it's supposed to be flown!

But the highlight of the festival for us, and the performance we'd been most looking forward to, was Cerfs Volants Folie. Of course, we knew about them, and had seen video clips of them flying, but had never seen them fly 'in the flesh'.

Well, they really did not disappoint, and it was clear why they came 5th in the recent World Championships!

Their routine started off with three female members of the team (aka Cerfs Volants Folie Filles).

Once they'd finished, a 6-man team took over.

And then the girls joined in again, for a 9-man routine.

Finally, a few more flyers joined CVF, for a 11-man (on Saturday) or 12-man (on Sunday) mega-fly.

Spectacular and thoroughly enjoyable!!

Our focus in this blog is on dual-line team-flying, but I certainly don't want to finish without giving full credit to the quad-line teams. I already mentioned The Flying Squad, who put on a great quad-line routine, as did the Decorators, Fusion, Air-4-ce (who had to miss Saturday due to being stuck at Schiphol Airport; glad they could still make it on Sunday) and a team consisting of James Robertshaw, Carl Robertshaw, Chris Goff, and Gregory Reynes (if they have a name for their team, I missed it; sorry!). Lots of the quad flyers got together for a Rev mega-fly, which is always great to watch.

Can't wait for the new kite festival season to kick off again next year!