Recently in Kiting Category

A week ago I was in Hoylake, England to watch the Scottish team compete. I took plenty of photos and video of the event (with multiple cameras). As usual France, The Netherlands and Germany had most of the top 10 pilots. Maggie did very well against many of the German pilots. Fortunately at least one Scottish pilot (#38) did manage to beat Kevin (#42) who moved to the England team last year.

I don't have any GPS track logs from a pilot this time as I needed it myself to track the time of all the video cameras. The large blob of red and orange in the bottom right is the caravan area where I took all the race photos:

A week ago I was in De Panne, Belgium to watch the Scottish team compete. I took plenty of photos and video of the event. Scotland didn't do too badly, even managing to beat a couple of other countries, but The Netherlands, France, and Germany had the top 10 pilots.

Based on GPS track logs it looks like I didn't actually walk to France on the Thursday as the course stopped short about 100 metres from the border:

Red parts are slow, green (turning to blue) parts are faster. The maximum speed was 38 MPH. The French border is the line perpendicular to the course at the bottom left.

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Instead of returning home from London on Friday, by coincidence the Middle Wallop Kite Festival was on that weekend so I took a train to Hampshire and met up with Kevin & Leah who moved there recently.

After a short drive to Wallop we were left waiting until after 1am for our accommodation (a motor home) to arrive from Scotland because it was stuck in a really bad traffic jam north of Oxford... fortunately we had some late night entertainment watching an AA man get into a car with the keys locked in the boot. He survived people tripping over him and the jack that was holding the car up too.

It rained on Saturday morning but the sun came out later and the weather on Sunday was much better. Plenty of sun to burn me while I took a few hundred photos. I'll have to try and remember to actually use sunscreen next time. I left early on Monday morning for the 8½ hour train journey back home.

I was going to buy a new camera soon... but for the first time in 5 years I've finally found a use for the viewfinder and some of the newer compact cameras lack one. It's impossible to take burst shots of someone moving past you in sunlight using only the display. The Canon IXUS 300 HS can take 240 FPS video but without being able to aim it quickly that might not be very useful.