Hardwater Kiter

Snow kiting in New England is a bit of a “Love/Hate” thing for me. On one hand we have several options for places to ride and most of them are only 10-20 minutes away, which allows us to pick and choose our riding areas based on wind and surface conditions. So, we get a lot of sessions in. When you live in the mountains one lake may be dead calm but a 5minute drive to the next one and you have wind and having that kind of ready access leaves you a bit spoiled and unmotivated to travel very far to ride. That is the “Love” part. On the other hand our wind is often punchy, mean and in every direction at once or it’s the definition of “light and variable”. Yup, “Hate” right there. The shifty/punchy makes for pretty hard flying some days but it’s better than no wind at all and I think it makes us better kiters. We’re also isolated. We have tons of riding but very few snow kiters here (see “Love”) and little access to events without a lot of driving. Kitestorm is the closest kite event...

Kitestorm 2010 by Susan Staples Peter Lynns are phenomenal kites. Admittedly there’s a little learning curve when it comes to flying them but I challenge you to find anything that has such fine flight qualities. A lot of people like to spout off about how great their “XYZ” kite is compared to a Peter Lynn but usually when you ask them you find they’ve never flown one, only flown one briefly or only seen someone with minimal kiting skill fly one. At the same time people think I lack objectivity because I’m a Peter Lynn team member. My response to this is I ride for Peter Lynn because I ride arcs, I don’t ride arcs because I ride for Peter Lynn. Peter Lynns became my kites of choice well before I was asked to join the Peter Lynn team. I really believe they’re the most underrated performance kites out there and I really think the current incarnation, the Charger, in the right hands, can go head to head with anything. At least on snow I’ve found this to be the case. Moore Rez. But ...

On Champlain. by Curtis Savard http://www.curtissavard.blogspot.com/ Is two months too long between blog entries? Yeah, yeah, I know last year I was a little more on top of things blog wise. What can I say? This has not been the best kite season and as a result I just haven’t been feeling my “Kite blog muse”. Really, this season has sucked on a level of suckness that I have never seen. If my first kite season had been like this I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it. To write about the frustration of what this season has been for us here in northern New England would have totally cost my blog it’s PG rating. There’s no way I could have described the weekly events and crappy sessions without dropping F-bombs like a squadron of B-52s. And since I found out just recently that our friend and local Bridgton Flysurfer disciple Paul Morse’s mother reads my blog I’m really glad I didn’t go off the deep end and write a slew of distasteful entries. My first magazine interview. But the ...