2008 Wildwoods International Kite Festival
Drachen Foundation - "Wildfish" Kite Workshop
By Ronda Brewer
The Drachen Foundation is a “maker of memories.” Over the years their generous support of various events has enabled a diverse and talented group of people to teach, share, and enjoy the varied aspects of the world of kites and the community of kiting. Over the years, my husband, Lindsey Johnson, and I have been involved with Drachen in a number of these events.
The challenge to present a workshop where learning and kite education was a priority and was intriguing to us. We wholeheartedly accepted the challenge and set to work developing presentations that would be fun and informative. At the 2007 Wildwoods International Kite Festival in Wildwood, New Jersey we presented the Phantom Star Kite. It was a hit. We had a great time there and had done our best to represent the Drachen Foundation in a manner that would justify their generous funding.
Evidently, we had proved our worth. We were very excited when we received the news we would be going back to Wildwood for the 2008 festival. What an honor for us to be offered a return trip. We put together a plan for the event that we hoped would again prove the value in sending us to New Jersey to share our techniques for building kites made of DuPont © Tyvek ©.
We knew we had to come up with something as innovative and easy to fly as the Phantom Star Kite. We played with a few designs but finally decided on an adaptation of a kite that Robert Trépanier had given to me several years ago. We didn’t want to copy Robert’s design so we did a number of modifications until we had a kite we knew would be easy to assemble, would fly well in a variety of wind conditions, and that we could claim as our own creation. We named the new kite, “Wildfish”.
Lindsey cut out all the “Wildfish” sails on his CNC (Computer Numerical Control) router using a special tangential knife. It was a lot easier and faster than cutting them all out by hand.
Of course we had to test fly our creations. What better place than at the beach on the beautiful Central Oregon coast? One of our favorite places to fly kites is at the D-River Wayside in Lincoln City. It is right at the center of town and it is just a few steps from the parking lot to the beach. On most days, the unobstructed wind blows in gently from the ocean. The sunsets are often spectacular and make great backdrops to awesome pictures. It is an almost perfect place to fly kites.
Because of all of the above, this is where two of the three Lincoln City kite festivals are held annually. The only drawback to the location is the occasional meandering of the D-River. For most of the year the D River, the world’s shortest river, flows along the North side of the parking lot and then goes straight out to the ocean. A few times out of the year, it takes a turn to the south and runs parallel to the seawall for several hundred yards and then turns west to join the ocean. Usually, it does this just before a Lincoln City kite festival.
The thought of flying our creations on our beach, then traveling across the country to fly them on the New Jersey shore was exciting to us. The “Wildfish” was fully tested and we were confident we had a kite that would perform well. We packed our supplies and shipped ahead what we could. Because we had been to Wildwood before, we knew what to expect and were able to take just what we needed.
After a slightly delayed flight and a challenging rendezvous with other kiters in Philadelphia, we finally arrived at Wildwood. We had time to get settled in at the hotel and then went to the Conference Center to organize our workshop supplies for the following morning’s kite building class. We also set up the information tables containing pens, patches, pictures, and fliers about the Drachen Foundation and PhantomStarDesign.com.
The organizers were wonderful to work with and they appreciated the effort we put into presenting our workshops. They arranged for volunteers to help with the preparation and execution of the workshops. The volunteers were incredible and worked as hard as we did to help everyone construct their kites.
We enjoyed working with the participants and knew we had exposed them to a unique kiting experience. Who knows?? Maybe someday, someone will approach us and tell us of their first kiting memory and that we had been a part of it. Wait a minute…. that’s already happened!