It was a pretty dark and dismal morning. The rain had been on and off through the night, but ceased just before I arrived at the beach. Pleasant temperatures though, close to +20°C. Not bad for a overcast Norwegian summer morning. ????

The wind – most importantly – was nice and pretty stable. Coming in from the sea at about 5-6m/sec (11-14mph). Perhaps a little on the lighter side for the Skiron, but you know, you cannot change the wind, only adjust your sail!

I was really excited for this test flight after fitting the Skiron with sail battens. I hoped for an improvement in the kite’s general flying characteristics, further reduction of sail flutter, improved reversed flight and stability. I had also hoped for a bit more wind, because after all this is a kite for the more blustery days.

So… up, up and away! ????

Yes, definitely in the lower part of the kite’s wind range. A little pumping required to bring the kite up into some more winds and then it was smooth sailing! ….eh…. Flying!

First into figure of eight variations. Yeah, this felt good. Light, but not too light on the lines and a decent sized wind window. Good tracking and with the right input pretty constant forward speed was accessible.

Inverted hovers felt pretty solid too and the sail battens definitely had added stability and predictability to the reversed flying!

I felt spins being more controllable too. The feeling of oversteerishness (a word my spell checker didn’t know) was very much gone. Deciding the speed of the spins was definitely easier now.

So to cut a long (?) story short, it seems like the battens have added stability to the sail and improved several of the kite’s characteristics.

Have in mind though that more testing must be done to fully establish the improvements. And I surely need to fly it in stronger winds, which will have a direct impact bon the kite’s flying.

But so far this is moving in the right direction!