KAP is Another One of Those Hobbies

My wife and I have expensive hobbies. I'm a home shop machinist. She's a jeweler. We both do photography. We both like to fly kites. And now I'm combining the latter two with KAP.

"No problem!" I thought. "I have kites, I have a camera, I have a radio, it's gonna be easy!"

Hahahahaha! Oh how naive I have been. As life turns out, the kite I've never been able to get to fly well still doesn't fly well. Last Saturday the kite pulled a 180, screamed for the ground, and wound up in a kiawe tree (think of a mesquite tree, lengthen the thorns, and you're there). Recovered, flew again, things got stable, put on the rig, flew it to about 50', then the kite dove for the ground again. KAP rig in the kiawe this time, the kite out on the lava. Recovered, packed up, and moved to another beach. Stable as a rock. GREAT! Nope, the kite pulled a 180, the KAP rig hit rocks, the kite hit asphalt, the line was draped over all kinds of scrub.

So I fielded some questions on the KAP forums. The consensus was that parafoils are notoriously hard to tune, finicky, and yeah, what I'm seeing indicates an out of tune kite. Rather than frustrate myself and lose my rig with the thing, I started looking at replacements. Lots of good advice there, too. I'm planning on getting two Sutton Flowform kites. One's an 8 square foot kite (to replace my smaller parafoil with a slightly larger sail - great for Waimea). The other is a 16 square foot kite (to replace my 14.5 square foot parafoil... the one that's giving me fits.) Throw in a thousand feet of #250 line for the FF16, a 9" hoop winder for the new line, and my price is up to $200 US.

Sigh... And here I thought I'd finally found an inexpensive hobby I enjoy. NOPE!

Good thing is I just got notice that an article I'd written three years ago actually got published. I ran through the article as printed, compared it to the payment schedule from three years ago, and figure it should be around $240 for the article. Egads I love how life turns out sometimes. I hope to get the check in the next few days, and will order all the new kite gear the same day. 'Till then I'm grounded.

But being a tinkerer and being unable to let something go just because it's "broken", I'm still planning to tune that parafoil. I may never hang a camera from it again (in fact I mean not to). But if I can get it tuned, it'll be one more skill I know I can pick up, and I'll have a kite I can dedicate to flying with the kids.

Tom