STACK boot camp

It has been in the pipeline for quite a while, but Flying Fish finally subjected themselves to a STACK boot camp! These coaching weekends can be tailored to specific needs, with the coaches coming to you. When we met at Minchinhampton Kite Day with our coaches-to-be (Keith and Vee, of Airheads fame), we discussed what we would most like to get coaching in: landings, half-axels, and taking our figures 'to the next level'.

Vee and Keith arrived Friday night, ready to provide us with two full days of pair-flying coaching at our primary flying site: Stoney Cross Plain in the New Forest. Needless to say, we made sure our coaches were well taken care of outside the flying sessions. After all, you don't want to be subjected to a boot camp run by people who are cranky due to lack of sleep or food (or, worse, both), do you?

Weatherwise, we really hit the jackpot: bright sunshine with hardly a cloud in the sky all weekend. Light winds (1-6mph) on Saturday and a stronger, though variable, breeze (7-18mph) on Sunday. On day 1, we alternated between T5 Cubans and T5 Taipan ultralights, and on day 2, the T5 Taipan Standards and V1s came out to play.

As I said above, our boot camp would focus on landings, half-axels, and figures; plus anything Keith and Vee felt they could help us improve on, given they've seen us fly time and again at festivals. Starting with landings, we're not consistent with them, and that really is a weak aspect of our flying. Sometimes we hit them fine, sometimes we really fluff them, and it's all a bit too random. Not surprisingly, the stronger the wind, the more we struggle. So, first, Vee and Keith took us through the different possible landings, explained the crucial aspects of each and under which conditions which landing is most appropriate to use.

And then, of course, they got us to try things out. And as this is meant to be a boot camp, the call for so many push-ups was replaced by: "OK, both of you: five proper two-point landings each; loser makes the tea!"

Flying half-axels we've basically taught ourselves, but we're struggling more with these as the wind gets stronger. Keith and Vee got us to pay more attention to the set-up (especially when flying them synchronously), and to fly them from every direction: horizontal, diagonal, vertical (going both up and down). From vertical down is definitely the hardest, as there is this ground racing towards the kite!

And so on to figures: to get to that next level in scores, we need to start paying more attention to the spacing in the grid, in addition to flying the shape. And there are two figures which we don't particularly enjoy flying, and so they tend to get ignored .... Obviously, I'm not going to say which ones, as that might just influence STACK in creating this year's shortlist ... Anyway, we got to fly these figures again and again, with pointers as to how to make them easier to fly. Don't think they'll ever become our favourites, but we definitely feel we got a bit more of a grip on them.

In addition to all of the above, we flew our technical routine and competition ballet, and got feedback on both of those. The changes we made to both technical routine and ballet in terms of technical difficulty, following feedback on our routines at last year's Nationals, were noticed and appreciated, so we were very happy with that. And then we got plenty of tips on a wide range of aspects, from creating a specific warm-up routine, to general arena craft, and to pointing out of a few bad habits, which will take some time to unlearn ...

Final session on Sunday was simply play-time: Flying Fish and Airheads joining for fun 4-(wo)man flying. We learned a few new 4-kite patterns ('Airrex minus centre', 'fly-through', 'jitterbug', and 'Airheads cross'), at least some of which we will no doubt try out with our own team, L-katz, in due course.

In conclusion, this boot camp was very very useful, and I would strongly recommend it to any dual-line pair or team in the UK, whether you're a new pair/team, or want to get 'to the next level'. Teaching yourself is possible of course, but getting specific pointers from experienced flyers works so much better. What worked especially well for us, lucky enough, was to have very light winds on the first day, and then the second day with stronger winds. This forced us to adapt what we learned the day before to the change in conditions. Of course, we didn't become expert landers in one weekend. Or fly all figures with consistent 90+ scores. We now need to work on everything we were taught and incorporate that into our flying over the coming weeks and months. The boot camp really gave us specific tips and tools to do just that, but our heads were spinning towards the end of the weekend with the effort to digest it all.

We got a lot out of it, and very likely more than we realise at the moment. Vee and Keith: massive public thank-you for the time and effort you put into this weekend!


Picture credit of the T5 Taipan in the air above Keith and Lex: Vee Griffiths.