Portsmouth kite festival panoramas

It's been over a month since I returned from my odyssee. I have finally put some of the panoramas I took during the first leg online; the Portsmouth International Kite Festival 2005.

Just in time for the festival, Tessa finished the new, spinaker nylon version of our Edo (the previous version of this kite was made of Tyvek). The kite made its maiden flight on the Portsmouth festival, like it's Tyvek predecessor before it at the 2003 festival. And like the Tyvek version, we had a lot of "fun" with the 17 bridle lines (each more than 30 meters), much to the amusement of some of the other kiters. Normally we have the bridles down, we can do this, but just not in Portsmouth, it seems. Anyway, the edo flew nicely, even in very low winds. And when an edo is not in the sky, it makes a very nice sunscreen (pano) ;-)

At the festival we were greeted by Bas Vreeswijk and Ruud Kugel, with their nice display of contemporary versions of traditional Japanese kites. The pano shows Bas and Ruud's inspiringly laid back attitude (whereas things can get a bit tense when Tessa and I are launching kites). Bas and Ruud helped us tremendously last year launching Pucca. They really showed us what a tail can do for a kite. This time, we also had Garu with us.

Garu sort-of flew at the Oostende festival, but not voluntarilly. In Portsmouth however, we gave Garu a tail of his own, and he flew brilliantly, much to our own surprise. More people must have liked Garu, since he is featured prominently on the frontpage of Aeolian.co.uk, one of the prime kite community sites of the UK. Woot!

Since my discovery of using tripods for panoramas in Sziget, I can now take panoramas later on the day. So here's a nice sunset with Wind Gallery, and a view of the fun fair not far from the kite grounds.

More kite-related fullscreen panoramas can be found on the new kite series page on fieldOfView.nl