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Kites: Index > Festival Gallery > 2000 Gallery > Weymouth
Sun, sea, sand, wind!
The first international festival of 2000 that I attended, on the beach at Weymouth (it was the almost windless event last year that helped form the 'tetrahedron flyers').
Having arrived early, the first kite I launched was the Baden Powell 'Levitor', with its new 5mm carbon fibre spars, which took off easily in the light morning breeze; but I will be replacing these with 6mm soon, as they didn't like winds over 10 knots much . I then spent the next hour or so building up a 64 cell tetrahedron - unfortunately there was not quite enough wind to launch it.
I managed to enter the altitude sprint at the last minute with the Levitor, and reckon that it was possibly the second highest non-fighter kite - there was a Roller that looked like it was just a little higher.
The sea breeze started to pickup around lunch time, and although the tetra did launch it was soon brought down again - primarily because of another kites tail caught over 2 corners, but also because the wind had swung such that the Pavilion theater and docked ferry were causing a lot of turbulence - even trying to fly a 16 cell variant later in the afternoon (by which time the wind had picked up to >15 knots) was not safe due to the turbulence.
(This wind also picked up the fine sand very easily, so I apologise for not getting many pictures of the kites that went up later in the afternoon; I did not want to fill my camera full of sand - the amount that had already blown into my kite bag was enough!)
Kites: Index > Festival Gallery > 2000 Gallery > Weymouth - top
