The Blog of Harald

As part of the Canal days celebration in Port Colbourne, the Niagara Windriders host a kite festival. This is our third year attending; we usually make a weekend of it, spending Saturday in Niagara Falls (or at the water park in Hamilton), and then spending the night in St. Catharines or Welland. The Colleges there rent out student residences cheap during the summer :-)

Anyway, I joined the Toronto Kite Fliers over 5 years ago, and this the first kiting event I’ve been to that has had to deal with _rain_; a pretty good track record!

The event was supposed to run from 10:00 to 16:30. It rained until about 13:30. Several intrepid fliers ignored the rain and flew anyway; the winds were actually pretty good! Strong (but not too strong!) and steady, enough to lift even wet kites. Gareth got into the action, ignoring the rain completely to fly his dinosaur diamond and our new mini-delta for about 30 minutes. 7-year-olds can ignore wet more easily than we old-timers, I guess :-).

Unfortunately, when the rain cleared, the wind died almost completely. It was alot of effort to keep even light-wind kites in the air. We managed one Rok battle by all thinking uplifting thoughts, and a couple of teddy bear drops. The stunt-kite guys were doing better, partly because they have more light-wind kites to play with…

We finally packed everything up around 4PM. Still, it was a fun day! Everyone was quite cheerful despite the rain, and we all got to fly _some_ kites, and meet up with old friends…