'Kites Connect' Festival

Back at the Dunstable Downs, for our second appearance at the 'Kites Connect' Festival, following our debut here last year. 

Focusing, as always in my festival posts in this blog, on the sport kite arena, the pairs and teams performing were basically the same as last year.

Kicking off the day was Fracture, flying Fulcrums as a pair (Josh and Harry).

Add a few more quad flyers (Matt, Chris, Simon, Graham, Phil), and you have The Quad Mob. 

Switching to dual-line kites, Simon Franks performed again as a one-man kite pair. I really like the "Come fly with me" cover by Ruelle that he flies one of his routines to ...

Of course, a kite festival at the Dunstable Downs wouldn't be complete without the Airheads! Like last year, they flew as a 4-strong team (Pete, Vee, Keith and Doug).

Especially their tail routines are always a delight to see (although I normally see them from below, being one of their regular ground crew).

And then us! We flew as part of a 3-strong L-katz (sadly, Lisa couldn't fly with the team this festival).

Finally, of course, we flew as Flying Fish.

We mostly flew make-it-up-as-you-go-along routines, to a range of music tracks. But I do want to highlight one specifically. Years ago I had the idea of creating a routine to 'Bolero', inspired by Torvill & Dean's ice dance routine from the 1984 Winter Olympics. For all kinds of reasons, this idea never progressed, but we decided to finally make a start. We didn't have any choreography so just made it up as we flew, to test out whether we could fly to it in principle. The verdict after the weekend was a clear 'yes'. Next step is to choreograph a routine with moves and patterns that are inspired by ice dancing. The 'Bolero' track we flew to is the same edit that Torvill & Dean used in Sarajevo in 1984, by the way.

If you have the Airheads, Flying Fish and L-katz together at a kite festival, a mega-team is pretty much a given (and we were joined by Simon Franks on Sunday).

In all, we flew 26 routines during the weekend (12 with Flying Fish, 12 with L-katz, plus twice in a mega-team). My brain was ever so slightly frazzled at the close of the festival! 

I want to conclude this blog post with a lovely random encounter we had Saturday evening. We'd gone to dinner at a Thai restaurant near our B&B, still wearing our Flying Fish shirts. When we left the restaurant, a girl of maybe 10 years old came in with (I presume) her mom. As the girl saw us leave, she said: "Excuse me, did you fly kites at the Downs today?". "Yes, indeed we did." we said. And with bright shining eyes, she said "I saw you fly, I really liked it!". Reminded us of Violet at Minchinhampton Kite Day years ago. Ultimately, that's why you fly at kite festivals, isn't it?

Picture credits: Simon Hennessey (L-katz); John Saberton (L-katz); 'Facebook' (Flying Fish); 'Instagram' (mega-team)