Kite Flying

It seemed like the perfect kite-flying day — there seemed to be plenty of wind, the sun was out, and the temperature was finally warm enough to stand outside comfortably for more that 3 seconds. But it never quite works the way one expects.

We actually had two kites — my dragonfly kite, and a little “finger” box kite that I had put in Andrew’s Christmas stocking a couple years ago. Unfortunately we couldn’t get either one of them flying. We had more luck with Andrew’s little kite, but it never flew for more than 30 seconds or so.

We think we might need to modify my dragonfly a bit to get it to fly — the tubes holding the wings out only connect on the two ends of the wings and at the center of the kite. We’re thinking that we need one more connection between the spine of the kite and the tip of the wing, to let the wind take the wing better. We’re also wondering if the tail of the kite (which doubles as a storage bag for the collapsed kite) is too big for the rest of the kite.

It could also be that there just wasn’t quite enough wind to make the kites fly — it seemed to come and go.

We’ll probably try again tomorrow, or next weekend, assuming the weather stays nice and the wind picks up.