What would be a good way of demonstrating dual-line sport kiting to one to half a dozen or so non-kiters or non-dual liners at a time? There’s no ghetto-blaster available, and no kite festivals nearby. Usually the flying spot precludes using 40 metre lines.
What has worked for you?
The background to my question is that over the past few years, there have been 3 or 4 occasions when I have been asked to give an informal demo. The aim was to give them a feeling of what dual line sport delta kite flying was all about. (Maybe it shouldn’t have been the aim?) So for the last two occasions, I tried to give a history in the demo – starting off with basic turns, then figures, then introducing the stall and axel, flare and 540, multi-axels, controlled stalls from half-way up the window down to two-point landings, half-axel, cascade, slots then the backflip and lazy Susan, and so on (fades, joining tricks together). – The audience is very polite and show their appreciation, but my feeling is that they get bored within 10 minutes. And letting them have time on the kite just convinces them that it’s probably very skillful, but they not keen for more, even when they have gone from repeatedly crashing to mastering take-off and level flight after ~10 minutes. – From the last occasion, the most positive feeling I got from them was at the end when one asked about how to take-off with the kite nose-away, belly down, and I managed to demonstrate the ground pancake to fade take-off by pulling on the lines ~6 feet away from the kite and 6 feet from them.
In contrast some weeks ago a group of half a dozen attendees on an office “team building” course, asked me to take the kites out on a very stormy day: winds 18mph gusting to ~40mph, and they stuck it for 30 minutes, even the ones who didn’t have a go on a kite. You could feel the happiness and enthusiasm coming off them. We had in the air one 1.2m foil and a vented and heavily wah-padded and nappied dual line delta (no time to assemble more kites before we had to continue with the course).
I am posting the question on this forum, as the demonstrations are to people living in England, and what they expect, and what they actually enjoy, may be a cultural thing.