Cleethorpes Kite Festival 2005

Cleethorpes Beach - 14th May 2005

Another year, another Cleethorpes. I was looking forward to this festival for two reasons, firstly because it's more or less my 'local' festival but also I would be able to attend for the full Saturday (previous years were half days only). The week before I was eagerly checking a variety of Internet weather sources to see what the weekend would hold. To my joy the BBC's weather site had a nice full sun symbol for Grimsby, with a 18mph onshore wind. Great!

Of course things are never as good as that in real life - Saturday began a rather dull, windy and strangely cold day. The drive up from Sheffield was uneventful - even managed to remember turn off the M18 onto the M180, and so avoiding the brief, but annoying trip to the M62 I made last year. I arrived, parked in the public car park (since I had no car park pass - I had left it too late to ask for one), and clutching my kite bag, beach shelter, and rucksack registered in the tent for 10:00am. It was at this point I realized I had left my sunglasses in the car!

The beach wasn't too busy so I had a pitch closer to the leisure center end than in previous years. The first problem was how to pitch the beach shelter since as it was an onshore wind it meant I should really have the shelter opening facing the sea-front - but since I was by myself I was nervous about my stuff being stolen I had the shelter partly facing the sea (i.e. the wind). And of course lots & lots of sand was blown into the shelter during the course of the day.

Given the wind felt like it was into the 20mph (although my wind meter tried to convince me it was only 16mph) I thought I would start with the Custom Vented Revolution 1.5 - after flying for a short while I noticed that I wasn't the only Revolution flyer on the beach. The chap next to me was flying an 'official' Vented Revolution - in the spectrum colour scheme (much nicer than Revolutions usual sail patterns) so we ended up flying a little bit together and talking about how expensive Revolutions are in the UK.

Before lunch I then decided to try the Airbra - this was my disaster for the day. First I messed up re-connecting the lines from the Revolution to the Airbra so I actually got left and right mixed up. This of course caused the Airbra to spin wildly out of control and crash onto the next group of people. Who very kindly held the Airbra until I was ready to launch - which of course then span wildly and crashed on them again. I then realized my mistake (Doh!), changed the handles over, tried the launch again - and this time the Airbra span wildly, standoffs fell out, and then crashed on the same people. Rather embarrassed I decided the wind may be a little bit too strong for the Airbra and got out the Papillon quad line instead - which looks fragile, but actually performs very well in these strong winds. This caused a number of people to ask advice about it since HQ have just started making the Papillon commercially, but in it's single line incarnation. Sadly I couldn't offer much help as I hadn't actually seen the HQ Papillon close up.

Lunch was a sandy affair with all the sand that had drifted over everything - ended up with Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato and Sand sandwiches, with Peppered-Salami and sand, and a chocolate bar with sand. Washed down with a coffee with extra sand (caused by placing the coffee down whilst I showed someone something and when I turned back I had a nice head of floating sand - still drank it though - I needed to warm up!).

After lunch was more Papillon flying, but I also got out the Freevol LX - another high wind quad line kite. Both of these performed extremely well and were good fun to fly. Eventually swaping back to the Vented Revolution and ended up trying some team flying with two other Revolution flyers on the beach - not as easy as it looks when done by the experts, but still very satisfying to do!

And what of the other kites? Given the strong wind there perhaps weren't as many kites in the sky as expected, but there were a fair number of nice single line kites up - I was especially taken by the train of small white kites, and the black & white star kite (I forget it's exact name now). I was also impressed (yet again) by the Vented Skydancer that made an appearance at one point - it's amazing how the main spar almost bends in two during flight, then straightens out again.

At 5:00pm it was time to call it a day and to try and get rid of the sand from the shelter, coat, rucksack, & kite bag (the thing that ended up with the most sand in it was actually the Flexifoil Fury - which had not been out of it's bag all day!) and return home tired, but happy.