After a long day at work I managed to squeeze in an hour or so on the field. The weather was incredible for being in Norway in September. About +23C, sunny and a swift and reasonably steady breeze swept across the big field at Ekeberg. There wasn’t much people around. Even the cricket players were absent and I had the field almost to myself. Goodie!
The wind was a bit on the strong side, so I decided to take the Nirvana HW out for a spin. It was a good choice for the conditions with winds at 6-8m/sec (which is approx. 15-20mph).
I started out with some sloppy presicion flying just to feel what the kite was like in the current conditions. It felt pretty good and soon I was warmed up and started too fool around with a few tricks. The Nirvana HW is an Insane machine! Whip it over onto its back and just let the kite rotate – almost by itself – down towards the ground. Followed by a quick recovery sweeping the grass with the wingtips makes up for a good looking trick.
From Insanes, Rolling Cascades are well within reach. So … I did a few of those too. They came in nice and slow or a bit faster with somewhat more aggressive input.
Almost by accident I suddenly stumbeled over a very cool combination, a …. well…. hmmmm…. … Rolling Ladders??!
They’re kind of a combination of Jacob’s Ladders and Rolling Cascades and they go something like this…
From the top of the wind window you start out like you would for a Rolling Cascade. You whip the kite over onto its back and pull to initiate the rotation. But halfway through the rotation you pull the kite smoothly over into a Fade, rather than go for the full (Rolling Cascade) rotation.
As soon as you have hit the Fade you follow up with half a backspin (rotating the same way as your broken Rolling Cascade). Then you pull out of the fade – just like a recover – but rather than doing a complete recover you go directly into a new broken Rolling Cascade, but now in the other direction.
It takes a little timing to bring all the elements together, but it’s actually not as hard as you might think.
When you get it right and manage to link three, four of them alternating the directions they looked mighty cool!
Why not give it a go the next time you hit the field!?
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This article was first published at AERIALIS-DOT-COM on October 15th 2006
