Sunday, August 26, 2012

Kite Flying

This post will be a little out of the ordinary for me. It's about kite flying.  

While crafting is my passion in life, kite flying is my son's.  When we mention flying kites to people for the first time, I'm sure they have visions in their minds of small, diamond-shaped kites that you have to run with in order for them to fly.  Not so for us.  We learned to fly from a wonderful man named Blaize, otherwise known locally as The Kite Man. He takes kite flying seriously, but in a fun way  :)

Between Blaize and my son, Cade, they likely own about 400 kites, and yes, half of those are at our house  :)  We have bins of kites, piles of kites, and 3-D kites hanging from the basement ceiling.  We fly using kite crankers, hoop winders, and fishing rods.  And we fly them high.  My personal line goes 1000', and so does Cade's.  But Blaize has a line that is 4000' - it's too heavy for me to even use!  We often also fly more than one kite on a single line - a little risky, but so much fun.

This fall, we'd like to invite our fellow local homeschoolers out to fly kites with us.  It's really fun, and you'll learn so much - you'll learn about wind speed and direction, wind layers, wind shadows, distances, knot tying, and we are even starting to make our own kites, which involves measuring, shapes, and angles.  But first, you can just have fun flying, the learning will happen all by itself  :)


We like to "dress up" a kite using ribbon streamers on the sides.  The type and length of tail you use depends on many factors including wind speed and type of kite.  This kite is almost a stunt kite and so needs lots of tail to keep it steady in the sky.

Have you ever seen a boat fly?  This Go Fly a Kite pirate ship looks a little unreal up amongst the clouds.

 Cade, with his largest box kite - it doesn't seem that long ago that he could stand inside it!
 The rainbow duster bi-plane, with moving propeller.
 The Solaris kite is one of my favourites, even though we almost always need to pull it up using a steady delta kite - unless we fly in the steadier winter winds but that gets a little cold for me :)
 The Sunset Diamond is absolutely beautiful when the sun hits it from behind, causing it to glow.
















And finally, our fabulous 9' Delta kite.  If the wind was too strong, this kite would lift you off the ground!  We only fly it in lighter winds, when other kites, with less wingspan, won't fly.  It's wonderful to watch it climb high in the sky, and once, it even flew in the clouds  :)

1 comment:

  1. Really Nice Kite And Kite Flying Activity You show throu your post. I appricate your this post and such we get nice information from your blog. Hope in future also we have this kind of amazing news from your blog.

    Kite Flyers Club India
    Kite Cutting Competition
    IKF 2013

    ReplyDelete