Yes, that’s right. It’s been a month since my last QLK post and, yes, I haven’t flown quad kites in this period either. I’ve been playing around with SLKs and doing a lot of kite aerial photography, but yesterday…!

I got the QLK-to-go-bag out of the hibernation and tossed it into the car along with my reasonably well-equipped kite rucksack and some video gear and headed for the beach. Based on the forecasted wind direction I went to the beach at Teibern with its nice little lagoon, sandy beach and great scenery.

I was expecting a bunch of kite surfers already being there exploring the winds, but when I got there I was alone on the beach. I soon understood why. The wind was a bit more westerly than I’d anticipated so most of the beach was in the wind shadow. Bummer!

However, if I walked up to the very end of the beach, I probably could catch some of the wind coming from …. well … around the corner. Not ideal by any means, but flyable.

I pulled the 3-dee out of its bag, assembled it and hooked it onto the flying lines. Up, up, and away … in truly interesting wind conditions. It was very variable coming ’round that corner. Everything from almost zero up to 9-10m/sec (20-23mph) in the gusts. Those conditions surely are challenging, but I managed to get in quite a few minutes of quality flying with the 3-dee despite it being a kite for low winds.

I was doing a lot of flic flacs and tried to do them close to the ground. It’s really easy to flare this kite. Just keep it in an inverted hover and flic your wrists and BOOM the kite will do a flat flare. And if you continue to control the line tension you can do several flic flacs as easy as pie!

You can also do flic flacs from an upright position, though these are a little more tricky. You need to get the timing right and if it’s too windy they’re difficult to link.

But hey! It’s fun!