I've been in a pretty nasty run of depression on and off for the last few months. Friday it finally got the point where I really wasn't able to function any more. I couldn't smile, couldn't laugh, almost couldn't form words with my mouth. I've been there before, and absolutely positively hate it.
The weather has also been just plain horrid of late. I can't chalk this up to SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). It's not like the weather kept me housebound, it's just been bad. No wind for kites, the volcano is pumping out way more sulfur dioxide than normal, so the air is too opaque for landscape photography, my shop is a mess, and it's like all that was interesting in life just got sucked out, leaving this empty, aching shell behind. I know I already said this, but I absolutely positively hate it.
Today I took my son down to Pu`ukohola to try to photograph the black tipped reef sharks from the air. But for once the wind models didn't match reality, and I couldn't even get a kite to stay up, much less loft a camera. I think the morning would've been a wash if my son hadn't found this nasty, rusted out old file buried in the sand as I packed my last kite away. I scratched enough rust away to realize it was a Nicholson 10" mill bastard file. It was a nice file! It was just absolutely caked with rust and looked like junk.
The spark went on! Electrolytic rust removal! "Hey, want to see a neat trick?" "What?" "Wanna strip all that rust off and see what that file looks like?" "Sure!"
We drove home, and I set up the electrolytic rust removal rig. A while back I wound up having to strip rust off enough stuff to justify making a nice hangar bar for my tank, so suspending the file in the bath was no problem. I even got to impress my son when I drank some of the chemical (it's baking soda and water). An hour later the rust was gone, the file was clean, and now I'm going to fit it with a handle so it can be his file. Hey, finders keepers!
Strangely, by this time I was feeling a lot better. I could smile. I even laughed.
In the afternoon the kids had a date at a friend's house, so I threw all my gear in the car and took off. I only got about half a mile before I realized what I really really needed to do.
I needed another fix. I'd had a shop fix stripping the rust off that file and sweeping up while it was in the tank. It helped. The shop got cleaner, I got to actually DO something, and my son has his first metalworking tool. But I needed more.
The past few months I've been trying to expand my kite aerial photography. I've DONE beaches. I've DONE reefs. And most of my non-beach stuff has been... well... I would describe it as awful, for the most part. I'd like to do more architectural KAP, but most of the architecture on the island is in Hilo, and most of that is in an area that's almost unfliable because of the wind in that town. It's as if KAP had abandoned me. If you can't get good KAP you find bad KAP, and that's what I'd been doing for months.
That's when it hit me: I've had a KAP project I've been putting off for one reason or another since November of last year. The time had come. The time was now: I was going to fly at the summit of Mauna Kea. The wind was a reasonable 20 knots, which at almost 14,000' above sea level was closer to the force you'd get from a 15 knot wind.
Problem is, you can't use radios at the summit. Oh sure, we use radios inside the domes, but we have a set of frequencies we can use, and we don't step outside those bounds. Cell phones mess up the radio telescopes. My KAP transmitter? It'd be like shining a spotlight at one of the optical telescopes. Huge no-no.
In January I'd picked up an AuRiCo, or Automatic Rig Controller. It's a PIC-based board that drives the rig in any number of patterns for doing automatic KAP. No radios, no EMF emissions (aside from running DC motors), no nuthin'. Perfect.
But I'd never tested it. Oh sure, I hooked it up at home long enough to realize it drove my shutter servo backward from how I had things set up for radio control, put it away, found out how to reverse the servo, and had never picked it up since. I was going to drive to a remote site with unpredictable wind, fly a rig I'd never tested, and that was how I was going to feel better?
Oh hell yes!
I put the AuRiCo onto my KAP rig while I sat parked next to the weather tower. The anemometer was ticking over nicely, and things looked pretty stable. I had to make a small tweak to the shutter servo's arm to get it to make good contact, but with that one change the AuRiCo driven KAP rig seemed to be going well. Out the door!
For the next four hours I launched, tweaked, re-launched, tasted the wind, smelled the clouds, and flew higher than the birds. And for several hours my Flowform 16 was the highest thing in the Pacific. I wound up flying from three locations, and saw some of the weirdest wind I've ever seen in my life. From one location my kite consistently flew lower than my feet, even with three hundred feet of line out.
At a third location the Flowform couldn't generate enough lift, so I switched to my 6' rokkaku. For some reason the sail had shrunk by more than half an inch! My guess is the low humidity made the ripstop contract. While I was packing the Flowform, the rokkaku inverted and flew straight at the ground with the camera upside-down and hurtling toward the rocks below.
A quick note on the rokkaku design. It's a fighter kite. But it has some give. If you set it up to be unstable, it's a lightning fast fighter that responds instantly to changes in line tension. If you set it up to be stable, it's usually nailed to the sky. PERFECT for KAP. I try to set things up to be as stable as possible without making it so stable it can't fly. But for some reason it decided to invert. My guess is it was the over-tight sail causing grief, taking my usually very predictable tuning and turning it back into a fighter kite.
The normal response for this situation is to let out line until the kite turns right-side-up, then tension up to let it climb for altitude. But I'd clipped it off to my anchor while I pulled the Flowform down! I couldn't pay out line!
I jumped for the line, pulled in a few arm lengths (making things worse since it accelerated the kite and the camera toward the ground), then let it out in an effort to get the kite pointed skyward again. With probably 600' of line out, it reversed with the kite less than 50' off the deck and climbed back to altitude. It took my heart considerably longer to stop slamming me in the chest.
At the end of the day I had well over three hundred pictures to sort. It's strange not having any say about what the rig is pointing at or when the shutter will trip. But it's not a bad feeling. I got to concentrate on flying the kite rather than the camera, and the sense of serendipitous discovery at the end was well worth the price of setting aside control for a day.
The final tally? Two near catastrophic accidents, one close call on downing the Flowform, lots more high blood pressure and stress than I should probably have been summoning for myself at that altitude, and... And more good KAP pictures than I've had since December. If you haven't watched the pilot episode of Firefly, do. You'll understand why I say today was a good day.
It was like a weight being lifted from my soul. I'm not depressed. Not right now, anyway. And not feeling like I'll back-slide tomorrow.
At work any time we have a problem we try to do a root cause analysis so we know we've nipped the real culprit in the bud. It's harder to do on yourself. Machines can be taken apart, looked at, prodded, poked, and tested with a meter or calipers. The human mind is tougher to work with. But in this case I think I found my root cause: I'm addicted to hanging cameras off of kites. I'm addicted to seeing the pictures come rolling off the chip afterward. If I can't get my fix, I get messed up in the head.
So what does that say about geeks in general? Are we all simply addicted to the activities that bring us pleasure? People joke about internet withdrawl, but maybe there's more to that than we think. Are we all just addicted?
My take? So be it. I hope to get out tomorrow, too. If not with the kites, then with the 4x5 and a tripod. What can I say? I'm a geek.
Tom
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