Streatham Kite Day

It's been three years since we last flew at Streatham Kite Day. In 2024, I was in hospital, recovering from spinal surgery, and last year, the event had to be cancelled at short notice. So it was good to set up base camp again on Streatham Common!

The arena schedule of the day was basically a 'rinse and repeat' of the usual gang. Several more fliers and teams had been invited, but were not able to come to Streatham, for various reasons. 

First, Carl Wright of Team Spectrum, doing his best to deal with the typically Streatham wind (bit more on that later in this post) while performing his usual routines flying two or three kites.

And then Flying Fish. We flew in three slots, three routines per slot ("Carmina Mix" > "Rise like a Phoenix" > "Adiemus"). While testing the wind prior to the event being officially opened, we decided to fly with our T5 Taipan V1 kites. 

It turned out through the day that that was the right choice, with an important caveat .... I already mentioned the wind being, shall we say, rather challenging ... Changing from 4 mph to 20+ mph in seconds meant that, on average, the V1s were the right kite to fly with, but most of the time they were either underpowered or overpowered, in equal measures ... An additional problem with the wind was that we often could hardly hear the music, and that made it rather difficult to fly to music and land right at the end (it basically meant continuing to play the music in my head and then call for the landing at my best guess of when the music stopped ...). 

But we did what we could under the circumstances, even if our routines were far from the most polished ones ever. Several members of the public told us afterwards that it was really impressive and they enjoyed it. And that's ultimately what it's all about!

Quite a few people coming up to us between our arena slots, asking us advice on getting their kites to fly. This really only happens at Streatham, and, of course, we were happy to help out where we could.

A few more pictures, including Keith 'Nasaman' Warner, are here. But I do want to highlight Alexander Wright, Carl's son, who got his own arena slot, with PA announcement, flying a dual-line kite. The future of Team Spectrum seems assured!

Picture credits of us flying: Carl Wright, Marie Coombs