It's these stunts that are giving the sport new interest and excitement, new competitiveness and renewing old interest and spawning new kites to play with.. After all how long can circles and squares keep your interest?

Although I must admit after spending a million hours to learning to fly and stunt my kite well, I'm a little disappointed that now one can buy a new "trick" kite take it out of the bag, sneeze, and bingo an axel or whatever! It seems that builders are designing in characteristics that have been carefully designed out of kites for years! (like the tendency to turtle, for one)

Don’t get me wrong, these kites are great……I could have saved hours if I'd only known to wait!

Hours, I've been known to get up to 40hrs a week in the summer. I don’t call it practice, that sounds like work, I "play" with my kite.

As a self employed contractor I can always "find" the time to play, though my tax guy says my business now looks like the hobby!

The winter months I can only seem to get in 10 to 15 hours a week! Yes there many benefits to living in the California

I find these new trick kites a lot of fun to play with, but for me there are trade offs, I love my kites! But I fear that the state of the sport is swinging towards "trick kites". Trick kites on 20 or 30 feet of line flopping around like birds with broken wings...... . I don’t know?!, Fat boobs like me and our " standard style great flying kites" may be left in the wake, ....... I guess this is progress.

I think time on your kite is what makes a difference find a kite you like and buy the ultralight ,the standard and the high wind versions and play with these till you know them instinctively the stunts will come easily.

It makes sense that if every time you go fly you use a different kite, you will never "master" any of them

And for those of you that think a stunt nut can’t fly a straight line, I was pretty tough in masters precision last season, finishing 5th at the nationals I may have done better if someone hadn’t stepped on my kite between heats……. I plan to be tougher this year! And keep my eye on my kites.

Its ballet that eludes me for now, I can’t seem to get out of the middle of the pack, course the "Pack" consists, imo, of the best flyers in the world.

Flying in the San Francisco bay area means flying against greats like Miguel Rodrigues, Kobi Eshun, John Morrison, Michael Weingand, Peter Betancourt Akira Suzuki (darn he moved back to Japan!) and Steve Thomas. Steve by the way for those of you that don’t know invented the axel and helped start the trick phenomena. Miguel’s influence in kiteing is legendary!

Kite choice for tricks , like choices for other types of flying is a personal thing. But for me the kite must be tough, real tough! I fly California wasps with Skyshark frames . I also must beef up the bridles as so many of the pop type tricks are hard on bridles and I was breaking the top bridle connection in only a hour or so!

I now shorten the top line a couple of inches and make loops out of three or four hundred # line and larkshead the bridle to these, no more breaks.

Speaking of breaks the Skyshark response 15 rods simply don’t!

As a precaution against premature disassembly, we use bands cut from bicycle inner tubes on the rods at the center T and on the leading edge connector. Here we use wire ties on the connector itself to hook the bands to.

So there will be little for line to catch on, I also shorten the standoff that extends past the top of the sail to the bare minimum, and use small bands there too.

We also have replaced the bungie chords at the wing tips with these bands of inner tube, no knots.

Most important of all, to be a good "stunter" ya gotta think of your kites as tools. You can’t be afraid to break em’.. If you don’t want to get em’ dirty, hang em’ on the living room wall and turn on the t.v.!

         

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This page was last updated May 26, 2003 01:37 AM