Stories of my trials and tribulations around my weird life of computer game development and my hobby of power/traction kiting.
This blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect that of my employer or any other person.
This weekend was the RaceKites.com meet at Bolton-Le-Sands.
Journey Saturday started with a few of us, Bibbler+Suicide+Antler+myself, meeting up at the service station on the M62 ready to continue to voyage at 6am. It's been quite a long time since I've been active at that time in a morning but the motorways were clear and we made good progress.
We arrived at Red Bank Farm at around 7:30 to find some RK veterans were already there as they'd stayed through Friday night. We pitched the tents and generally prepared for the day ahead.
The campsite was on a hillside overlooking the bay and it made for a spectacular sight across the expansive sands we were to be on later.
There was very little wind at this point and the forecast hadn't predicted much more so it was a bit of a long shot.
Also, local info told us that we needed to get down on the beach early as our access route with the buggies through dry sea channels would be blocked once the tide started coming in.
It was an excellent turn out and I got to meet old & new friends.
Kiting Paul and I setup on the beach and we were off pretty quick as the winds were good and the beach was amazing.
I was flying my 13m Venom and Paul was on his 10m Access, both of us were in our RS Buggies.
It was a great day on Saturday and we both got speed personal bests of 30.0mph for Paul and 34.9mph for myself. Although for the most part we were pretty well matched for speed.
Slight downwind runs were definetly the fastest elements, and there was a turbo boost when travelling through the wind tunnel caused by the offshore winds running down a small valley and onto the beach. I also learned that cloud cover compresses the wind and accelerates it so it's something to watch out for.
It was really good to be going so fast and my venom 13m and atom 9m did me proud, with the latter just gaining an edge as it's faster at turning and pulling the bar in really is like pressing an accelerator - amazing! It's definetly opened my eyes to the power & versatility of SLEs, never mind the fact they're a damned site easier to relaunch than an arc.
Sunday was on the brink of a wash out as the winds struggled to come through, there were many cases where people just got stuck out on the beach when the wind just vanished. It was a strange site to see all those buggies and kites just parked, waiting in anticipation for the wind to return enough so they could get home.
I too got caught out there once when the wind disappeared, in the end I got fed up of waiting as it was lunchtime and my sandwiches were only a short walk away. Why sit baking in the sun when a short walk will get you some long earned food? So, I packed up my kite and dragged the buggy back to base.
My GPS told me I covered about 40miles on the Saturday and I dare say Paul covered about the same.
Sadly there aren't many pictures or video as we spent most of our time out flying!
It was a truly excellent weekend of buggying and I have the bruises to prove it. :)
After 7 weeks out of the saddle due to a broken wrist I took the chance to go out today for a fly. My wrist has been hurting like hell since the cast was taken off just over a week ago and I can only assume it's the muscles that have frozen due to inaction for 6 weeks. It's been immensely painful if I accidently flex my wrist but the pain isn't where the break was. It just hurts. :(
I bought myself a sports wrist brace that's been helping me gain confidence in doing more adventurous things in the knowledge that it will prevent my wrist from flexing should I fall on it again.
The weather forecast was hot, hot, hot! But, typically there was no visible wind at all. Despite the forcasted poor winds I popped over to Pontefract park to chance my arm thinking that light winds would be a nice re-introduction to kiting while recovering and I'd get to see some friends over there for a chat if nothing else. Even a light 5mph would do me.
The light (or no) winds meant the only thing in my quiver that would fly was the U-Turn Nitro 4.9m on handles as my Arcs need about 10mph+. The nitro went up and it was good to have a nice static fly around to ease me back in.
The wind started to pickup a tiny bit so I borrowed Paul's 10m Access and had a play with that and managed to board about 100m before the wind dropped again. It was good while it last and left me wanting more.
All-in-all it was a soft re-intro and no sign of any pain. I'm very happy and looking forward to next weeks big outing to Bolton-Le-Sands with the RaceKites crew. :)
