WSIKF 2008

It is Kite Festival time once again. This is the Washington State International Kite Festival, held in Long Beach Washington in August. We go there every with some other folks from the Goat Hill Gang, our home kite group.


The festival organizers allow kite clubs to set up displays on the beach adjacent to the flying areas. These include a lot of colorful banners, most of them home-made. The only bad part is that all of the stuff has to be taken down every evening and set up again the next day, which is a lot of work.


The club area gets pretty crowded and this year we got squeezed out of space we normally occupy. That turned out to be a good thing because we found a better one. The photo above, taken early in the morning before the spectators arrived, shows our camp with the primary flying area in the background.


Goat Hill Gang attendees include (left to right) myself, Joan and our fur-kid Mr. Zax, Marti, Rod, Lynn, Jim, Deb and Marion.


WSIKF always attracts some serious kite enthusiasts with big show kites. These can cost up to several thousand dollars each.


These big guys are called Flowforms. The largest ones are called "252s" and "454s" to designate how many square feet of area they cover. There were a lot of them this year.


Big "figure kites" are another crowd-pleaser.


All of the sunshine in the preceeding photos is a bit misleading because this year's Festival was the wettest we have ever attended. We had rain on all but two days of the week, sometime accompanied by high winds. On the final day we waited in the rain for the last of four mass-ascension events so we could complete the pin set that goes with it. The event was ultimately canceled but we got the pin anyway.