My brother Frank, an engineering manager at KLA, is in charge of a regularly scheduled Fun Day. Almost once a month, the company sponsors an event like: juggling, yo-yo, ping-pong and this month's sport kite flying. The company pays for an expert to come in and teach (in my case, the money went for the kites, drat)
I was flown out and picked up by my brother and we drove to Shoreline Park. He had 35 Premier Jewel kites (paid for mostly by the company). The temperature was in the upper 70°s (excellent) and the winds were in the 10-15 mph range (just a bit higher than I had wanted, but certainly better than no wind at all).
With a few emails and phone calls I had enlarged the teaching group to include:
me
Allen Carter (and he brought his Prophecy with tube tail)
Cecil (a local excellent trick flier)
Britt (my son)
Shea (my daughter)
Rob (a good friend)
Richard (Shea's boyfriend)
Frank (my brother, who can fly a bit already)
From 4:30 to 6:30 it was a controlled sweet chaos evolving into over 30 new sport kite fliers who could all assemble/disassemble/fly/loop their kites. There were huge smiles all around. The ground was quite hard packed as the area we were using doubles as a parking lot for concerts across the street.
Even with all the hard crashes in strong wind, only 4 spines and 1 lower spreader broke, and we had replacement kites for those people as extras had been brought.
Hopefully, some will come back and fly at Shoreline again. Cecil and Vince encouraged everyone to come and bug them with questions if they ever were there at the same time.
All in all, things went better than anticipated.
I'm back home and was only in California about 4 hours.
I do miss Shoreline Park and flying with the regular gang.
Thanks for the help Allen and for letting newbies fly your gorgeous Proph.
Here's a picture of Cecil from several years ago:
