High Flying
Kites

About Us

When I was a kid I was always happy to see March arrive.   For whatever reason March was kite month.  I guess that was the month that the wind was supposed to blow.

Way back then there were only two kinds of kites available to me, the regular triangle ones and box kites.  I never did master the intricacies of the box kite.  But I gave the standard kites hell.

Just about every non school daylight hour was spent flying a kite.  One practice was to get it as high as you could and let it go.  Then the trick was to find it again.  Usually the string would catch in a tree or on something else and it was easy to recover.  Sometimes, however, it didn't catch on anything and then I was in for a long long bike chase.  Many times I never would find the kite.  I always wondered if it was found by someone else who would fly it again.

Back then there were only a choice of a few designs printed on the kite so the chance of knowing your kite if you ever saw it again were next to nothing.  Today one can have a kite made not only to the design one wants, but also you may design the pattern printed on it.  Today if is possible to truly have a personal unique kite of one's own.

I became re-interested in kites during a trip to Beijing a few years ago.  One of my first stops was Tiananmen Square.  I was surprised to see many people, young and not so young, flying kites.  The more I toured Beijing the more kites I saw.  It seems to be a national pastime. 

The pinnacle of my observations came the evening we were going to have dinner at the top of the CCTV tower.  They have a wonderful restaurant in the round where you can see an ever changing view as the whole restaurant rotates as you eat.  Before we ate we went up to the observation level at the very top (excluding the TV transmitter tower).  It was about a quarter of a mile up in the sky.  This picture of the CCTV tower was taken from the ground with a 800 MM lens.  The picture of the base with a 24 MM lens.  It is a huge structure.  I was amazed to see several kites not far away that were considerable higher than I was.  They could have been half a mile in the air as far as I could tell.  If you look at the more or less circular towers starting at the lower center of the picture and moving in a curve to the left, they are 40 stories high.  That will give you an idea of how high we were.

I just had to include a picture of me on this page. Here I am with Joe and Sammy at the Great Wall.

Kites are important in China, as well as most of the far East, with many, many people flying them as a hobby.  Every day I spent in China I saw dozens to hundreds of kites in the air.

On the left here are the vying for the title of festival queen.  I guess they have imported that custom from the US.  It is just another example of how seriously kites are taken in China.

Upon returning to the US I started selling kites via the Internet and mail order.  A couple of years later I found myself "downsized" and decided to open High Flying Kites full time from a store front.

Since then life has been one big party.  I have traveled to over a hundred cities for kite festivals and around the world searching for strange and different kites.

This is a kite I saw in Canada at a spring festival.  The sections throughout the red parts were open and funneled air through them.  It was an interesting kite but I didn't think it flew very well.  But what do I know.  It won a prize for originality and all I got was a stupid tee shirt.

I say another pointy kite on the French Rivera  I did not get to see how it would fly.  All in all that was a pretty bad festival.  The wind would refuse to blow for days at a time and then blow with gale force winds.  Few kites ever got to fly and fewer still survived if they did get airborne.

One of the most bizarre kites I have ever seen was at the San Diego pier one September afternoon.  It was a week before the scheduled festival and I guess they wanted to make sure it would fly before the contest.  Unfortunately it flew all too well.  They had just launched it (it was so big it took two people to handle it) and just as they were deciding their next move a big gust of wind came along and took it out to sea.  As far as I know it was never seen again.

This last example is the strangest design I have ever seen.  I don't think these people were actually kite enthuse, I think they were space scientists testing return parachutes for landings on other planets.

They spent more time taking readings and entering them into their laptop computers than actually enjoying seeing the kite (if indeed it should be called a kite) in the air.