Tuesday 5 June 2018

Basingstoke Kite Festival

I've lost count of how many times we've flown at Basingstoke Kite Festival. Being only a 35 minute drive away from home, it's the nearest kite festival for us.

Weather was sunny all weekend, especially on Sunday. Wind was light and erratic on Saturday, and almost absent on Sunday; more on that later ...

In terms of pairs and teams, Basingstoke 2018 saw essentially the same line-up as last year:

Team Spectrum:










Amalgamation (as a 3-man team now, rather than a pair last year):










Dunstable Downs Old Gents:










And then of course, Flying Fish! Like the other pairs and teams, we struggled with the erratic low wind (but it's Basingstoke, so we didn't expect otherwise). On Sunday, when there was virtually no wind, we tried out flying our Inner Spaces (flown to The Cocteau Twins' "Ivo") and our Kaijus (flown to traditional Japanese music). For both, that was their official festival debut and it worked out pretty well for both pairs of kites. Means we now have some alternatives to our T5 Cubans (which we flew on Saturday, as well as in an extra third slot on Sunday) to fly at festivals when the wind is really low.



And just to illustrate how erratic the wind was: during our first slot on Sunday, we ran out of arena in both routines, but this happened at opposite ends of the arena. Yes, the wind had turned 180 degrees in a space of a few minutes ...

Few more photos of the festival can be found here. Do you like our new fishy 'wind swimmers', by the way? Saw them at the Go Kites stand and they just cried out that they wanted to be part of our festival base camp ...


Picture credit of us flying: Carl Wright

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