Its been a while, for which I apologise, but some of us have been away enjoying the delights of wine, beer, food and kites at the 28th international kite festival of Berck Sur Mer in France.
Its a dirty job, but someones got to do it, and this year we stayed for a whole week, travelling out on the Desnesday and returning on the Tuesday, the day after the festival had officially finished. While there, we had a real mix of weather with some gloriously sunny weather, some cloud and strong winds, some very turbulent conditions and even some rain. But whatever the weather managed to throw at us, we survived and kept on flying.
As we don't officially register with the organisers, we aren't officially allowed to use the arena spaces, so we fly outside the arenas. This isn't usually a problem during the morning as the tide goes out so far that there is plenty of room. But after lunch, when the tide is in, there is no space, so we stop flying until the water has gone away sufficiently. So our usual format for the day is fly, lunch, wander/siesta/fly, pre-dinner drinks, dinner. Of course, this year there was a major change as the Bar de Bains was closed. I did meet with Natalie and Christophe, the ex-proprieters, on the beach, who explained the position (politics basically). They are extremely disappointed that the building now stands empty and unused, a monument to political pig-headedness. But we were able to find another bar on the esplanade, and once we had broken the staff in, they got used to our presence every day. Unfortunately, the vantage point isn't so good, so we cannot see everything going on "sur la plage".
Thursday was a very good day for kite flying.. A light breeze in the morning meant it was a low wind kite day. I tried to fly my suruga, but it still had a habit of being unable to recover from a dive. Time for some more modifications. It wasn't helped by breaking one of the ties for the rods. Friday the wind was much stronger. But Janet did fly her Kiteability replica. By the afternoon, everyone seemed to be struggling with the conditions, and the cold.

Saturday was a much better day again, and we all managed to fly in the morning. More adjustments to the suruga, it seemed to be much more stable, at least it had stopped diving into the sand at every opportunity. Saturday night is night fly an fireworks. Some of us old fogies headed off to bed after dinner, whilst others headed to the sea front to wath the display, which I'm told was spectacular.
Sunday, a good morning flying, but the it started to drizzle, then drizzle turned to heavy rain, and we all ended up soaked through to the skin and with very wet kites. However, in the early afternoon, the sun came out and it turned into t-shirt weather. By now, lots of the teams had already left. The Al-farsi team, and Andrew Beattie had left on Sunday morning, along with a lot of the German fliers. So some of the arenas were starting to look a bit empty. I always think it is a shame that on the final Sunday of the event, the beach starts to look a bit sparse, when a huge number of locals are coming into the town to enjoy the event. What it does mean is that there is now space in the arenas for us to fly. So I took my kites out to dry them, which didn't take long at all. However, the wind was now off-shore and very turbulent. Very "interesting" flying conditions. All the large kites were getting thrown about the sky and suddenly hit by down drafts, which would collapse lifters, and leave a lot of tangled messes.
Monday, and the wind had turned to on-shore. The breeze had dropped to light again, and conditions were just about perfect. We all managed to fly kites and dry them out and enjoy the sunshine. Heather managed to fly eight of her flo-tails which created quite a display. The final set of modifications to the suruga seem to have worked, it is now flying quite well, and performing in light breezes too, which it wouldn't do before. By now, we almost had the beach to oursleves as most of the teams had left or were in the process of packing up to go. It means that the afternoon arena performances become extremely curtailed. The two line megateam has dropped from over 20 to about 12 pilots sadly. By lunchtime, the breeze has picked up and the sea mist has rolled in to provide a lot of cloud cover. The temperature has dropped again as we head off for the bar for one final time.
And so our trip closes. Tuesday morning we need to say our goodbyes to our hosts and head off for the journey back. On a parting note, the Scratch Bunnies won the World Sports Kite Championships for the third time in a row, and decided to retire from competitive flying as a team. We met some old friends and made some new ones. The famous film star from the hotel was away filming yet again (You have to be there to understand). I managed to fly every kite I had with me, but then I only took a few, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Jurgen is looking forward to welcoming us back next year.