Saint Honore 2009 Day1-1

Originally uploaded by wdrwilson.

Saint Honore was fantastic! The people are wonderful and put up with my non existent french skills. Friday was fantastic with near perfect winds. Saturday brought strong winds up to 50 km/h, but that didn’t stop AWITA from flying (and ripping) their PL giant inflatables. Sunday was light wind but was flyable almost all day!

This picture was taken on the road to the B&B we stayed at, a wonderful view of the airport where we were flying. I have never flown kites at a working airport before… we even had a visit from a CF-18, that was pretty incredible. I will post more pictures later, right now we are on the ferry between St. Simeon(sp?) and Riviere-du-loop.

Came across this cool video today. It’s great to see local flyers profiled.

Kite Surfing and Buggying on Conrad Beach - Nova Scotia, Canada - Watch the best video clips here

Barry Ogeltree (whatakite) on the kitebuilder.com forums offered to cut the fabric and prepare a kit for 50, yep fifty 75 sq. ft. John Waters Bulldog flow form style kites (10 ft wide!). Barry has a huge shop in Texas and has the man power and the space to take on a project like this (Thanks Barry!). After a couple of months of discussion, planning, and cutting Barry had all the dogs out to their new owners. I finished mine up last week and took it out for a quick test flight at lunch one day last week.

Dave and Izaak helping with launch…

Bridle adjustments…

BitterJewler signed up for the Fled workshop and built a great looking kite. The Bee drogue is great! ( and it doesn’t spin like I predicted it would LOL)…

I have posted some of Juan’s videos before, (the double start just a few posts ago). This time Juan has built a great Chinese centipede kite with a traditional Dragons head. Juan crafted all the pieces him self and the video walks through a series of photos of the build as well as some great video of the kite flying.

You can check out more at Juan’s blog. solocometas.blogspot.com

Harold Ames over at the kitebuilder.com forums posted a link to this video, I thought it was worth sharing. Really interesting to see how he balances each panel. The finished kite with the spinning eyes and a the color transition of the discs is great…

I just finished posting the final instructions for the Kitebuilder.com forums Fled workshop…

While I was writing the instructions for the workshop I was playing around with Google Sketch Up. Mainly to see if I could create a simple rendering of the fled for use as a colorizer. I ended up going a bit overboard as usual, and while I am no Sketch Up expert I thought this was pretty cool. (I am just impressed that I could build the drogue LOL).

Cool little video documenting the process of building a smaller version of the double star…

The Fled MKIII workshop that I am leading on kitebuilder.com starts today.

Here is the week one write up (registration with the forum may be required)

Kite Stack

Originally uploaded by Meanest Indian.

Looks like the International Kite Festival held in India this past weekend was a big success. Over 31 Countries represented.

Check out the deshgujarat.com for some great photos and some more links to past events.

Even some great shots of good friend Cliff Quinn with his amazing double start facet kite.

Lot’s of great pictures on flickr, try searching for Ahmedabad Kite Festival. That search turned up the picture in this post which is from one of my favorite photographers on Flickr.