Last weekend we were asked back by the nice folk from the Essex Wildlife Naze Nature Discovery Centre to put on a kite display and run a kite workshop for their kite festival. This is a lovely venue and the event is very popular. Unfortunately, this weekend the wind conditions were far from ideal for us. On Saturday morning the wind was very light and coming from the west which is a frustrating direction for us. The flying area is long but due to the cliff erosion, is now only 20m in width and we couldn’t get any height on our lifter kites. This meant we couldn’t get any of our big show kites in the sky. There was also little ground wind so the leaf blower was in constant use to keep the ladybirds and car inflated. Jonny managed to get his lightweight Manta Ray flying in the light wind albeit on a short line which needed constant control in the flaky wind. Luckily by lunch time the wind changed to a south westerly direction and freshened. This meant that we had the full length of the area and could get our lifters higher to fly some of our larger kites. The two large bears and the tiger therefore got an outing for an hour or so until we had a sudden wind shift back to the west. For safety reasons we couldn’t have the kites flying over the cliffs so these had to be brought down quickly. Oh, the frustrations of kite flying!
Unfortunately, Sunday wasn’t any better for wind. We started off with a very light north westerly wind which kept shifting between a westerly and north westerly. This again limited our ability to put up any large kites but we managed to fly some smaller kites. Jonny again got his lightweight Manta Ray flying in the light wind again on a short line which gave us at least one large kite in the sky. Around lunchtime we could see a large rain cloud over Felixstowe coming our way as rain was forecast for the afternoon. We watched its progress and fortunately it seemed to be just going to miss us and go out to sea. We didn’t escape completely from it as suddenly a very strong windstorm came through directly east off of the sea which over powered the kites and we had to very quickly get them all safely onto the ground. Fortunately, the strong wind eventually eased but remained easterly and apart from a few spits and spots the rain that we were expecting didn’t materialise.
Throughout the weekend the kite workshop was extremely busy with over 200 children colouring their workshop kites and it was so lovely to see them out enjoying themselves flying their kites. Many thanks to the EWT volunteers who helped in the kite workshop.
We were a little frustrated at the limited display we had been able to put on in the awful wind conditions but we still had lots and lots of nice comments from the public and hundreds of children had a wonderful time flying their kites, which is what it’s all about really.
There are more photos from the event in our photo gallery.
