Portsmouth Kite Festival

With the kite festivals at Seal Bay, Brighton and Bognor cancelled, Portsmouth was our first and last two-day festival this year. 

Weatherwise, it was a festival of two halves. Saturday was sunny with a brisk wind, which gradually increased over the day up to about 23mph. Sunday was overcast, with occasional rain or drizzle, and variable wind, from 11-30+mph.

As always in my festival blog posts, the focus is on sport kite pairs and teams. Let's do the quad teams first.

The Decorators were present with a 6-man line-up and flew their usual solid displays, whatever the wind threw at them.

Do have a close look at the line-up, though .... Chris Goff had joined the team for the weekend!

It was good to see The Flying Squad back at a festival again; it has been a while since I heard 'Hindi Diamonds'!

The BercKite Team from France had their debut at Portsmouth.

And the same went for The Quad Mob, a new UK team, who flew on Sunday only.

It was really interesting to see four quad-line teams having very different styles of flying and interpreting music.

From quad-line teams to a quadline pair: Guido and Luca Maiocchi (M&Ms) from Italy. Excellent displays with their 'emmenthaler cheese' quads!

So on to dual line pairs and teams!

Fenix Pair is half Dutch (Ingeborg Aarts), half Belgian (Stephan Fiers), and they have flown at Portsmouth before a number of years ago. Nice flowing routines, flying vented L'Atelier Avatar kites.

Fracture attended with a 3-man line-up, Matt Constable having joined the team recently. Using vented Fury kites, they have a much more aggressive style of flying, which suited the strong winds.

And then Flying Fish, of course! We flew our Airdynamics T5 V2 kites throughout the weekend, adapting them to the prevailing winds with the use of patches and brakes. Saturday saw us fly wearing our new outfits for the first time at a kite festival!

On Sunday, we flew our first slot with all patches on, as the wind had dropped a bit.

Both Fenix Pair and Fracture flew their routines before our second slot of the day, when the wind had really picked up. and their Avatar and Fury kites really streaked across the sky. Warned by that, we added back brakes, and that really made the kites very easy to handle. I do think our second Sunday slot, in the strongest wind, was actually our best one of the festival.

Like with the quad-line teams, the dual-line pairs/team showed clear differences in style, Fenix Pair and Flying Fish more similar to each other than to Fracture.

Of course, Portsmouth wouldn't be Portsmouth without mega-teams!

The quad-line mega-team brought together 29 quad flyers!

For the dual-line mega-team (on Saturday only), Fracture, Fenix Pair, Flying Fish and the Flying Squad joined together. A veritable F-team! Four pairs/teams meant four different kites: Furies, Avatars, T5s and North Shore Radicals, and not all flew on similar line lengths. To say the kites weren't fully matched is a bit of an understatement (especially the North Shores flew much faster than the others) and in the strong wind, that resulted in a crazy hectic mega-team! We did survive without major mishaps, though.

Several more pics of the festival, including some of the single-line kites, are here. But I do want to highlight one individual sport kite performance. Carl Robertshaw flew a moving tribute to Sinead O'Connor, flying his Fulcrum quad to her 'Troy'.

Picture credits: Franca Perletti (Flying Fish), Helen Ribchester (Fenix Pair, Flying Fish, dual-line mega-team), Chris Matheson (dual-line mega-team), Barry Savell (dual-line mega-team)

Kite Display @ Parliament Hill

Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, a new event and site for us! 

But that site did come with its issues .... Flying downhill, with the wind coming over the hilltop behind us, meant that our kites were in the wind shadow when launching and then suddenly in 15-20mph winds once they flew out of that wind shadow ... and because of the turbulence caused by the hill behind us, the wind would suddenly switch off (or even turn around 180 degrees) and the kites would just drop out of the sky. 

We were not the only flyers struggling! The big inflatables also kept coming down as the wind switched off or turned around ....

We tried to fly as Flying Fish, we tried to fly as L-katz, but we never managed to keep the kites in the sky together for more than 30 seconds ... 

We did try our best, but it just wasn't to be in these unflyable winds ...

UK National Championships 2023

Back at Dunstable Downs, after almost exactly a year, for the 2023 National Championships. Like last year, only a single round over the two days. 

Generally, the weather was sunny, especially on Sunday. As to the wind, on Saturday morning there was a nice 7-11mph wind, which then gradually dropped down during the afternoon, becoming more and more thermal. On Sunday, the wind was very blustery and variable, up to 17mph, but often falling away very quickly. 

More competitors than last year, several of which were new to competition! Let's look at the various different disciplines, leaving dual-line pair for last.

Dual-line individual had three competitors: Fran Burstall, Daniel Hoath and Josh Mitcheson. Josh took the title.

Multi-line individual had four entrants: Daniel Hoath, Josh Mitcheson, Vee Griffiths and Ryan Hoath.

Dan grabbed the title, and special mention should be made of Ryan Hoath, doing very well in his first ever competition!

Only one entrant for dual-line team, Fracture, in a new line-up: Matt Constable replacing Daniel Hoath.

For Matt, this was his first competition, and he did remarkable well, given he only had very limited opportunity to learn the figures, tech routine and ballet. Not surprisingly, Fracture became dual-line team champions.

Also a single entrant in multi-line team, The Quad Mob, consisting of Josh Mitcheson, Harry Neale, Matt Constable and Chris Purssell. First competition for Chris as well.

No surprise that The Quad Mob took the title.

On to the pairs! Multi-line pair first, with one entrant: The Flying Squad (Stephen and Daniel Hoath).

Of course, they became national champions in this discipline, but I do need to say their ballet is one of the best pair ballets I've ever seen. Full of content, using all hooks and cues in the music, and with a good dose of humour thrown in as well.

And then finally dual-line pair! Besides Flying Fish, three more pairs entered: SkyTracks, Fracture and Spark (two thirds of Flame, Fran Burstall and Barry Savell). First time we wore our new outfit!

As to our own flying, we felt we flew precision pretty well on Saturday morning (we were lucky to be scheduled to fly in the morning rather than in the afternoon), but really struggled with the variable blustery wind during our ballet on Sunday.

In the end, Fracture deservedly took the championship, with Flying Fish coming second, just ahead of Spark. We got some very useful feedback from the judges as to what we should focus on to improve.

All results are shown in the table below:

One final thing: following me shadowing Vee as field director last year, I now served several stints as official field director!

Quite enjoyed it, to be honest, and I think I did a decent job for a newbie!

Double Micron!

A number of years ago, we tried flying our Prism Micron 5-stack together with our singleton. It was fun to do for an hour or so, but of course not something for a halfway serious routine, so we never persevered with it. 

Until very recently, when we were given a bunch of kites, among which was a 'Prism Micron'.

Doubtful whether this really is a Prism kite, as there were no identifying labels anywhere on the kite .... maybe it's a home-made copy?

Copy or not, we tried flying it, and it turned out to be very very twitchy, clearly more so than the Prism Micron we already had.

Nevertheless, of course we had to try flying them together ...

And that showed yet again how twitchy the 'Micron copy' was relative to the Prism Micron. Just following was a real challenge, and so was taking pictures of the kites together while flying them. 

This picture really captured a rare moment when the 'Micron copy' flew in a nearly straight line!

Let's just conclude that they're not exactly team kites (of course, we knew that!) and that you won't see us flying our pair of Microns at a festival any time soon ...

Matrix: Flexi vs Carl - part 4

Final chapter in our pairing up of Flexifoil and Carl Robershaw Matrix kites! Following our pairing up of Flexi and CR UL/SUL, Standard and Super-vented kites, the final pair were the Vented versions. 

First on the lines, as usual, the Flexi Matrix

Flew fine, given the rather variable wind, but showed some oversteer: crisp corners were difficult to execute without a wobble.

Then the CR Matrix

Felt more crisp, and clearly less oversteer.

So next step, obviously, is to fly them side-by-side.

They weren't perfectly matched, and the difference in oversteer was more noticeable, flying them next to each other. Of the various Flexi-CR pairs we flew recently, these are the most different in terms of sail, as the surface area and the placing of the mesh panels is quite different between the two vented Matrices.

This was the final pairing, and it was fun and interesting to get a feel for them this way. Generally, the CR Matrices felt a bit more 'direct' on the lines than their Flexi counterparts. Quite possibly because the Flexi kites were clearly older, and with many more flight hours than the CR kites; the Flexi sails were clearly 'baggiers', the CR sails 'crispier' 

Streatham Common Kite Day

Streatham Common Kite Day is back! After an absence of three years, mostly due to covid, we flew there again for the first time since 2019. 

The usual line-up was brought together again for the arena displays:

And as to the wind .... well, typically Streatham! Very light (up to 4mph max) and infuriatingly changing direction a lot quickly; think 180+ degrees in less than half a minute .... Which meant that the choreography of most of our routines went out the window, and the main focus simply became prevention of landing .... 

Who were struggling with the wind conditions?

First of Carl Wright, the one-man Team Spectrum, flying (as long as the wind allowed) 2-kite and 3-kite routines (and, yes, including 'Chi Mai', my all-time favourite of his routines!).

Fracture was present, in a slightly changed formation. At one time, they were flying to live music, played by a local band, rather than their own routine music, making up the moves and patterns as they went along.

Twisted Bridle, our sister pair within the L-katz team, flew one-routine slots, and it was good to see them in an arena again. 

And then us, Flying Fish, of course. Basically flying our current technical routine to the 'Carmina mix', we've recently been using for that. Because of some difficulties with the PA system, we had to change the music for our make-it-up-as-we-go-along routine several times, but as it isn't a fixed choreography to music, it didn't really matter. 

Put Twisted Bridle and Flying Fish together, and you get L-katz. We flew our usual set of choreographed routines to 'Gloria Estefan' and 'Targaryen Theme'. As much as the wind allowed us, that is, because the choreography often turned into keeping the kites flying while not running out of arena ... 

Of course, if you put Fracture and L-katz together at a kite festival, a mega-team is unavoidable! We've flown in mega-teams at Streatham before, in 2015 and 2019, and in both cases, the mega-team consisted of six flyers and kites. This time, due to Carl Wright joining in as well, we had an eight-strong line-up, to my knowledge the largest mega-team ever at Streatham!

Even though we really struggled to keep things going, we did fly basic patterns and gave the public an idea of what flying eight kites together looks like. And we must have done something right: after we finished the last of the two mega-team performances, one member of the public told me we'd brought her to tears .... Seeing eight kites flying together in formation was so beautiful that it made her cry ...

And that is what flying at a kite festival is all about!!

Picture credits: Helen Ribchester (Flying Fish); Paul Hill, Carl Wright (L-katz, mega-team)