Saturday, 18 January 2020

A kite game!

Some years ago, I got a small Rhombus 'Fisch Fighter' kite, which flew surprisingly well given its very simple structure and material.


Shortly after I got this particular kite, I became aware that the kite was also sold as part of a 'kite game package'. Took me a few years to get my hands on that package (no thanks to Rhombus, who never bothered to reply to my emails), but I did succeed in the end!

The full package consists of two 'fighters', a lifter kite, and a hoop with a fish 'wind vane' attached to it. That hoop is the key of the game: aim is to fly the fighters such that their noses go through the hoop.


The hoop is meant to be on the line flying the lifter. We tried both the lifter that was included in the pack (a small yellow kite) and a larger Go Fly a Kite Shark. The small yellow kite struggled to lift line and hoop, whereas the larger Shark had no problem with this. However, the Shark bucked quite a bit in the blustery wind, which didn't help keeping the loop in one place ...



One of the two fighters included in the pack is almost identical to the 'Fisch-Fighter' we already had; the only difference is in the little nose ball, which is black rather than blue. The other fighter is a bit more shark-like, but with an identical frame.

We first flew the two (near-)identical Fisch-Fighters together ...


... followed by the two that were included in the package.


And then to the aim of the game: trying to fly the kites such that their noses entered the hoop. This was far from easy, as it's quite difficult to judge distances that way (we flew the kites on 25m lines), so it involved quite a lot of walking forwards and backwards. What also didn't help was that, due to the prevailing wind, the position of the hoop constantly changed. But, with some practice, we did get pretty close and succeeded in pushing the nose through the hoop once or twice.



I don't expect STACK will make this part of the annual National Sport Kite Competition cycle, but it's fun thing to try and do something different!

Thursday, 2 January 2020

Double Bullet!

In the early days of our kite-flying, when we were exploring what types of kites and what kinds of kite-flying we liked, we got ourselves a Flexfoil Bullet 2.5. Flew it a few times, and it sure gave us a good upper body workout.


As we gravitated more and more towards dual-line kites and pair/team-flying, the Bullet didn't come out to play ... That is, until I saw another one listed on eBay recently, as-new, and for a very reasonable price. Having two Bullets would allow us to do something different when pair-flying ...


So after the second, green, Bullet was put through its paces on its own, it was time to try out flying a pair of them.


Flying a Bullet and taking pictures at the same time proved almost impossible, but, fortunately, a fellow kite-flyer just happened to be close to where we were flying, and took a few pictures (thanks, Andy!).



Turned out that the two Bullets didn't fly exactly the same (the purple one is a tad faster). I did manage to get a bit of video footage, using a head-mounted phone camera; here it is, warts and all.


With a bit more practice, we can surely see ourselves flying a pair of Bullets at a festival.

Picture credit of us flying the Bullets: Andy Taylor