Airborne At Last

My kites should've arrived Saturday, but there was no notice at the post office. I checked on Monday, but no notice. So Monday night I used the USPS tracking page and... Yep, it had been delivered Saturday morning at 6am, but I never got my yellow card to tell me it was there. So Tuesday morning I asked if I had a box, and sure enough there it was. NEW KITES!

By the time I got back to my car, the rain had started... The fates love me.

So I spent some time installing the PeKaBe blocks (which are great) re-rigging the tails to fit onto the Flowforms (which was dead-easy) and finding some way to put a thousand feet of #250 dacron line onto a winder (I used an extension cord reel from the hardware store). Yep, still raining.

It rained the next day, too. So I drove home at the end of the day and... no rain! No rain?! No rain. I grabbed the kite bag, grabbed some kids, and almost sprinted to the pasture near my house only to find... It was full of cows who'd probably bolt at the sight of a great big flying mattress, and probably poop on my gear. So I threw kids in the car, threw my kites in the back and took off. I drove until sun-down, and one after another I had no-go flying sites (no wind; wind, but helicopters; no wind; wind blowing into power lines; wind shift, and the power lines moved to the other side, so back into power lines; rain). The fates love me.

So finally it was clear this morning. I had some time before an appointment, so I launched. The new kites are outstanding. The wind was gusty, so I can't say they were rock solid (no kite would be in gusty wind) but it was pull and lull in turns, not wild gyrations all over the sky like the older kites! I threw caution to the wind (har) and hooked up my rig. A quick gear check and I was airborne again! Click click click... click click... click... Five minutes before my appointment I walked the kite down, put the gear away, and took off. It was a good two hours before I got to look at what I'd captured on camera. I loaded the card, opened it up, and... Quicktimes? Somehow my camera had been set to movie mode. ARGH! The fates love me.

I went back out at lunch (of course) and made sure the camera was set to photo mode. All in all things worked out well. There was maybe one keeper out of about thirty images, but I learned a lot from my mistakes. I have some wind-induced tilt to the rig I need to think about. I found a sports mode setting on the camera that gives significantly faster shutter speed, making for fewer blurred shots. I found out that KAP movies make me nauseous. Even when I did them on purpose the second time. Too much motion.

All in all, though, I'm stoked. I have some stuff to try out (sports mode, check rig balance, try to get more travel out of my tilt servo), I have an utterly unphotogenic site to test at, and I have a weekend full of beautiful beaches to look forward to with my hopefully newly developed technique.

Maybe the fates really do love me after all!

Tom