Basingstoke Kite Festival

At Basingstoke Kite Festival, we flew with the full line-up: Flying Fish, Wings on Strings, and L-katz. Weather was gorgeous during the entire weekend, but the wind wasn't .... On Saturday, it varied between virtually nothing and 16mph, resulting in kites falling out of the sky during our routines, because someone all of a sudden switched the wind off! On Sunday, the wind was not as gusty, but still liable to drop away completely without warning. Problem with that sort of wind, specially the way it was on Saturday, is that if you take a standard kite that can deal with the 12+mph wind, it'll drop dead when the wind goes down to zero; fly with a (super)ultralight, and it will explode in the gusts. Damned if you do, damned if you don't ... Still, we did what we could!

So here we have Flying Fish during and after their routine:

And the same for L-katz:

Unfortunately, because I was ground-crewing for Wings on Strings, I couldn't take any pictures of them ...

The other dual-line team present at the festival was Team Spectrum, doing their usual "Carl with two kites - Carl & Bryan - Carl with three kites" sequence of demos. Very happy that Carl flew his "Chi Mai" routine on Sunday! That remains my strong favourite of all the routines I've seen them fly over the years. As happened last year in Brighton, we ground-crewed for them, they ground-crewed for us (thanks, guys!)

Last, but most certainly not least, The Flying Squad also performed their Rev-routines, first with four, later with six kites in the sky.

Despite the fact that Team Spectrum and The Flying Squad have many years more experience than we do, they were also really struggling with the wind at times, which meant we didn't have to feel too bad not flying as well as we can.

Some more pictures of the festival, including a few of the prototype of the SuperFly UL, and some gorgeous single-liners, can be found here. I do, however, want to single out one kite here. Nothing whatsoever to do with team flying, but how often do you get a chance to have Debbie Harry on a leash? She pulled quite a bit, I must say!

Thanks Kelvin, for letting me fly Debbie!

Picture credits of Flying Fish and L-katz: Roger