May 03 2010
Kites, and fishing with my dad
Whenever I go to the coast I fly kites. The destination has always been the coast with the waves, sand and tide pools. It hasn’t been kite flying. Flying is just something that you do when you get there, but that has changed.
After years of crashing and abrasive sand, my old stunt kites were wore out beyond repair, so I tossed them – at least that’s how I just justified the purchase of several new kites.
I wanted to step up from the cheap dual line kites that I had been flying, so I bought a Prism Quantum. The first time that I flew that thing it had me wondering what I had gotten myself into. Stunt kite flying is interactive. You establish a relationship with your kite. It tells you when it wants to fly and when it’s flying, it tells you when it’s happy. The Quantum growled at me the first time that I flew it. It didn’t just growl, it wanted to let me know that it might be in control, not me. I have never had to brace myself when flying a kite. I have never had to watch my footing to make sure that I didn’t get pulled over. That kite told me that I needed to pay attention to that sort of thing now. Talk about interactive. You have to use your whole body when you fly that thing. It’s cool.
Having caught a bit of kite fever, I thought that I might try a quad line kite. When asking around, I was told to do a search on “team iquad” and watch the videos, so I did. Do it for yourself so that I don’t need to explain why I bought a quad kite – a Revolution 1.5 SLE.
After flying dual line kites for years, I was feeling pretty good about myself at the first flight of my new Rev. It can’t be that much different from a dual line kite, but that thing brought me down into the depths of humility. All I could do was stall it and flip it over. I got to the point where I could fly it up and down, and then stall it or flip it over. I have a lot to learn about flying that kite. At this point it isn’t fun to fly because I have to think too much.
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Last Saturday I took my nine year old granddaughter and daughter to a place called by kite fliers, “Kite Henge”. It’s only about 1/2 hour away and it’s worth the drive – much better than 2 to 6 hours to the coast. What a great park!
Anyway, I couldn’t help but think of my dad that day. When he took us fishing he spent most of his time taking care of us. He loved to fish but he also loved to fish with us, even if it meant that he couldn’t fish much himself. I get that. I understand why he was willing to sacrifice his own fishing time so that we could have ours. You kind of have to be a dad or a grandpa to really understand, I think. It’s not really a sacrifice.
Rather than taking the time to learn to fly my new quad kite, I taught my granddaughter how to fly a stunt kite while I watched my daughter bring the Quantum into submission. A good time was had by all, but I am going to have to go back there, alone.
