Are you ready for it? It’s nearly here! A mere 3 weeks from this issue and Summer is upon us once more. This is easily my favorite season of the year, and as usual, I’ll fill it up with flying at various festivals over the next few months including a trip to Brookings in mid July. Having missed it due to work the last two years,m it’ll be fun to go back again. But, one thing I feel I must mention in regards to anything regarding summer and being out in the sun, do not forget your sunscreen and good, UVA/UVB blocking sunglasses. And a hat. Always wear a nice hat.
I’ve written about MIKE/MASKC elsewhere in this issue, however, I’d be remiss in not mentioning a Happy Birthday to the Rev Riders specifically. They got rolling last year at the MIKE festival and a year down the road, they are doing great. We watched a bunch of their routines over that weekend and enjoyed them all. Well done Rich, Laura, Sammy and Scott! Here’s to a greater second year! In a similar vein, iQuad just went past 4 years at the start of May. It’s been four years? That’s certainly mind boggling when I look back on it. We figure it was roughly 76 festivals, that are on average 3 days long. No attempt was made to figure out how many times we’ve wound out lines, though as a rough guess, maybe 1000? We’ve not kept track of broken rods or lines but, i’d call it surprisingly little for either. We’ll have to figure out something fun to do for our fifth anniversary.
I also did an article on this year’s Washington State International Kite Festival (WSIKF) in Long Beach WA, the third week of August and as an update to that, last count as of June 1st says we’re at 79 committed flyers. Uh, wow. I suspect we’ll have no problems at all making up the balance of flyers to hit a strong 100 people in a 10×10 grid. Simply keep your fingers crossed for good weather and we should be able to pull this off. I can’t wait to get down there. This will be the first year in a while when I haven’t been able to swing the entire week off of work however, I do manage to roll in sometime on Wednesday evening, so, I’ll get the best and busiest days in at least! If you haven’t take a read through this article previously and you are intending to come out, there is no time like the present to take a quick read again :
https://kitelife.com/magazine/issue71/revisions71/content.php
Due to a particularly lucky set of “right place, right time”, I’ve managed to wangle myself an invite to the Bintulu International Kite Festival, happening in late September, early October on the Malaysian half of the island of Borneo. It’s a long trip to get there but, I’m willing to be it will be worth every single minute of it. So, if you happen to be in the area, stop by and say hello! I’m hoping to meet up with as many Asian rev flyers as humanly possible while I’m there. I have yet to decide just what kites to bring, but, I’ll undoubtedly be taking nice ones and I am pondering taking a small stack with me as well, though not any manner of monster 12 Rev 1 stack like Sam Ritter’s… If I am extra smart, I’ll simply take a few travel frames with me so I can avoid ludicrous baggage charges on the trip there and back. A handful of standard sails, a mid and full vent, and I should be set! I may even take a peek at some of the new masterpiece kites out in the last while too. There’s Randy Tom’s Dark Lady kites, and soon to be on the Rev site, Bazzer Poulter’s Weave revs. He as had SOME free time in amongst sewing a small army’s worth of Zen sails.
Here’s an idea for a good activity with your Rev this summer. Find one person who has never heard of the kite and introduce them to it. Teach them how to fly, teach them safe flying practices and voila, one you are done with this, you have a newly minted flyer to fly with! If you do this a few times this summer, you could in fact create your own team as well and then a year from now, we can celebrate your team’s anniversary as well! Here’s to a really great summer for you and your family of flyers! And while you are at it, pop over to the Rev store and get some of the new Rev shirts that just came out. Designed by Carolyn Leshock, these new ones are likely the best looking shirts Rev has ever had produced, pick one up before they run out, just a quick call to Lolly will make it happen.
See you on a beach somewhere,
David Hathaway
