Chipmunk kite

When the Powell boys and Luke went to the Canary Islands at the end of last year to do some serious kite testing (tough job, but someone ....), among the kite-related pictures they posted on their Facebook page was also this one:

This cute little animal is a Barbary ground squirrel, or Barbary chipmunk. They occur naturally in Morocco and Algeria and were introduced to the Canary Islands in the mid 1960s. They are thriving there, and have become quite tame, so are a real tourist attraction (even though the authorities prefer you not to feed them). 

When I saw the picture, my immediate reaction was "this chipmunk face would look great on a kite!" Talked to Luke and Mark about that idea, and guess what? They made a 'Chipmunk kite' for me!

And not only that, they also added a custom black/silver tail!

The 'Chipmunk' was very happy flying around, and the black/silver tail is a perfect match.

Now real chipmunks have a furry tail, don't they? So how about .... a furry tail was easily found on eBay!

Key question is of course how a PP kite flies with such a short and rather unusual tail ..

Basically, it flew absolutely fine, though a bit faster and maybe a bit more 'squirrelly'? 

I'll get me coat ...

Dutch pair!

Some years ago, I got myself a Mk III Stunter in the 'historical' Dutch colours: orange-white-blue. As we're often flying kites as a pair, my thoughts went to pairing it up with a similar Mk III, but with the 'modern' Dutch colours, red-white-blue. As I said at the end of that earlier blog post: any excuse to add to the collection ...

Thoughts became reality and here's another 'Dutch' Mk III, on the ground and flying.

As the whole idea was to have a 'Dutch' pair of PP Stunters, here's the pair sitting on the ground and flying together.

The kites are named 'ranje-blanje-bleu' and 'rood-wit-blauw'; guess you can figure out what that means even if you don't speak Dutch. I do need to find some suitable Dutch language music to fly them to ...

End of 2022 - state of the collection

I realised the other day I haven't done an 'end of year - overview of the collection' post since 2018. For the last few years, that was mostly because the growth of the collection has slowed down considerably. And that again is mainly due to there being very few old Peter Powell kites for sale out there that are 'new' to the collection. 

Nevertheless, I thought it was time to do another 'end of year' post again, but slightly different from the previous ones. Rather than showing pictures of those PP kites added this year, I'm posting some graphs showing the growth of the collection over time. If you want to see pictures of any in the collection, they can all be found here. 

First graph shows the number of Peter Powell kites collected over time (in days), since I got my very first PP kite in 2013, nearly 10 years ago. You can clearly see when I got a job lot of PP kites, which really kickstarted the collection. And you can also see the rate of new additions to the collection levelling off, simply because fewer and fewer PP kites available for sale are new to the collection.

In the graph below, I've split the collection in four different groups. Blue squares show the numbers of old Mk I / II kites. Green circles show the US-produced Peter Powell kites; diamonds, deltas as well as quads. Purple triangles show kites from the Caribbean Kite Company. And, finally, red diamonds show the modern Mk III kites. 

At the end of 2022, the overall total is 72. And just for clarity, I consider a stack as one kite as it is flown off one pair of lines (so the Cayman 6-stack counts as one kite), and don't count the 'Duct Tape Stunter', as that one merely uses an old Peter Powell frame. Looking at the breakdown, I guess the CKC part of the collection will always remain the smallest part, as they're really hard to find. And I wouldn't at all be surprised if the number of modern PP kites overtakes that of the US-produced ones; maybe even this coming year already ...

Team colours

Just over a year ago, I obtained a Mk III Stunter, black with flo green stripes when a dear friend retired from kite-flying and gave us his kites. Recently, it dawned on me that green is 'my' colour within the L-katz team ... and Irma's colour in that team is orange ...

You see where this is going, right?

And then of course both the 'flo green' and 'orange' kites together.

I think they look really well together! 

Watch this space, because I have a further plan with this pair of PPs ...

Xmas kite

As mentioned in my previous post, screen-printing has come to Peter Powell. To mark this change, a set of five special xmas kites was created, one of which (the 'Xmas tree') was customised for the 2022 PPKOG kite.

Getting all four others was a bit too much for me, but I did want another one from the collection. Although a 'Santa' kite stacked behind a number of 'Reindeer' kites would have been fun, I decided on the 'Stag' as that one would sort of match the special PPKOG kite when flown together.

Note that it also has a multi-coloured tail ...

Of course, we had to fly the 'Xmas stag' PP together with the PPKOG 2022 kite.

Flying both kites with (different) multi-coloured tails really adds to the spectacle, especially when flying them into multiple wraps.

PPKOG 2022 kite

It has become an annual tradition: a kite produced by the Powell boys, exclusively for members of the Peter Powell Kites Owners Group on Facebook. Such a PPKOG kite was issued for 2019, 2020 and 2021. 

The tradition continues in 2022! There have been big changes recently to the business with the arrival of Luke Young, and one of the changes is that a sail for a Peter Powell kite can now be screen-printed, basically incorporating any design you want. To mark this new dimension to Peter Powell Stunters, it was decided to customise one of the five special xmas kites and so turn that into the 2022 PPKOG kite. 

Here it is, sporting a special multi-coloured tail!

It flies as all Mk III kites do, and the multi-coloured tail adds a bit of pizzazz.

Did you notice the star with '50' at the top of the xmas tree? That's a nudge to 50 years of Peter Powell kites ... Expect a bit more on that soon ...

Razzle Dazzle

Been quite a while since we flew Peter Powell kites with our L-katz team! Yesterday, the wind was very good for getting PPs back in the air in team formation. 

We decided to try and fly a pattern called Razzle Dazzle, as we'd never flown that with Peter Powell kites before. First, we practiced it with our Impulse team kites, just to make sure we got all the moves right. And then we switched to Peter Powells, the 'Poppy' version to be precise.

Here's a brief video from yesterday. First, you see a Razzle Dazzle flown with our Impulse kites, and then the same figure with the PPs. 

Flying a pattern with tails, whether Razzle Dazzle or anything else, always presents the extra challenge of avoiding flying into another kite's tails. But we did pull it off, as you can see in the second part of the video!

And, talking of tails, the unavoidable aftermath ...