St Mildred's on a Sunday

Today children we went to St. mildred's Bay near Margate, where it was cloudy and very windy. Given the conditions one had to be mad to fly a kite. But we are, so we did!

As usual arrived before Bill and when he arrived we headed off to Pav's for lunch. When we came back there were a few of the crew gathered. Heather had arrived with the Mind mental health charity kites that tehy wanted us to fly. Well we fiddled with a few and got some to fly reasonably reliably. Heather managed to get some photos for the Mind event next week.

With that over and done with, it was back to the more normal tasks of flying kites with assorted line junk. Problem was, finding any kite that was stable in the very tricky wind conditions. Deltas, delta conynes, box kites of assorted design all seemed to be darting across the sky. I really wanted to try some KAp, one to get some photos from above the sunken garden, and two to get out over the cliffs and look down on the bay below. The wind was in a favourable direction, but was I goning to be able to find a kite stable enough?

I decided to try the small 1.5 metre premiere rokkaku, heavily bowed, I managed to get it fling at a good angle and just about stable, so set about setting up my rig. I got the rig on the line, but then the kite was visciously dragged out of the sky by a delta. So with everything relaunched, I decided to try and find a gap through the kites and junk, only to get crossed by another delta, carrying pigs, frogs, etc. with it. This tangle was a bit more serious, and we had to come down to resolve it. It was during this interval on the ground, that I got a stunning photo of a ball of string!



Anyway, I found enough space to relaunch, but conditions were such that there was very little lift, and the camera was floating horizontally as I fed line. Occasionally the kite lifted, and more often than not, it sunk towards the ground. I did manage to get a couple of shots of the sunken garden.



You can take a look on my flickr page. Then I tried to walk kite and camera out over the cliffs. Well I got the kite out there, but only managed to get the camera as far as the cliff top path. The wind was extermely fickle and I was loosing all lift, so decided to call it a day. I didn't really want to dump the whole lot in the bay below. ANother time in better conditions, I'll have another go.