Hardwater Kiter

This morning as I was making Molly and I some breakfast I was juggling calls from our friends Mat, Mike and Eric Heath a kiter from Bridgton Maine. Eric caught wind of our escapades yesterday and wanted to know if we we're heading up again and what the conditions were. Mike gave me a surface condition report and also noted that there wasn't any real wind but he was going to go up and give it a shot just to see how it is. I decided not to push my luck with the surface and there's not a lot of room in the field if you're on a big kite so I wasn't really up to going. After Mike called I got a call from Eric to let me know that he and Seth Merriam (another Bridgton kiter) were heading up to Crawford. I thought "Man, that's going to be tight." Molly and I decided to just hang close to home and go static flying down at Kennett. It was a beautiful day out there today and Mike was right, there wasn't much wind. But there was enough to fly in and ev...

PAYDIRT!!! I woke up around 5:00am and ran downstairs "Christmas Morning" style to check the weather radar to see what the deal was with the snowfall. I was excited and at the same time disturbed because I recognize it as beginning an all consumming morning ritual of waking up, turning on the weather channel, local weather, turning on the computer and opening pages from NOAA, Weather Underground and Ham weather. This routine will now go on every single day for the next five or six months. It's really a sickness. I called our friend Matt at his camp up in Errol and he said they had just a dusting but that it had snowed all day in Pinkham Notch. Then I spoke with our friend Mike Elliott and he said he saw about a foot plus up in Crawford and that the wind was insane. Between his report and what I was watching on the radar Molly and I decided to head up and see what riding was to be had. After loading up the Odyssey we headed up to Crawford. I'm psyched on the new rig!...

I just saw the weather report for tomorrow. Supposedly while we were getting drenched down here in the valley they were getting snow up in the notches pretty much all day. Tonight a cold front is heading in and the low is moving out so we should have some serious winds tomorrow and cold settling in and some snow too. I'm not sure what we're going to find for accumulation but I'm planning on going for a mini road trip and seeing if we can find someplace to ride without trashing our skis too much. I'm going to give our friend Matt Morrisette a call and see what's been happening up north of the notches. At least then we can formulate a reasonable guess. I'm jonsin' to ride. Last season Maine rider Randy Berube loggeg over 3000 miles for the season and local kiter named Jim Cline was on ice on Nov.27th last season. He got over 2000 miles in for the season and is goal for this season is breaking the 3000 mile mark. He'll pull it off no problem. Both those gu...