Please come out and cheer for the Squadron in the Rokkaku Challenge. I think we’ll give you a lot to cheer for — we usually put on an energetic and noisy show, and we’ve been winning a lot. To brag a little, last year, our various teams won at Smithsonian and Wildwood and took second in the AKA Nationals, and I won the individual combat in the Nationals. So I can promise that your enthusiasm will be well placed and rewarded with action.

I’ll continue posting info and follow-ups here, so check back in. You can also find more details about the festival’s schedule, children’s events, and rules at the Smithsonian Kite Festival website.

Read ongoing festival news at our twitter feed, MidnightSquad, which is also shown on the right side of our home page.

A week and a half from now, Saturday the 27th, is Smithsonian! Join us for a good time, a good crowd, great events, and maybe another Rokkaku win!

• Kite-making workshops: a mini ‘Celtic Shield’ kite and a Korean fighter kite made with a 6th-grade classroom perspective. Great lessons in bamboo, miniature work, the use of art pens, mass production of kite materials for cheap, and how to teach multiple subjects to children using kites.
• Kite-making competition: I made a Tyvek delta over one night and dared enter it against some amazing kites. The best part was the sheer bravado of the oral presentation that was All Complex. Now you have no excuse not to make kites — you cannot do worse than I did.
• Fighter kites: Did not enter any fighter kite competitions, despite wanting to — conflicted with the kite-making too much. But Carol & Bruce Jarvie invited me to the fighter-kite skills competition — contents that don’t involve line touch fighting. Very interesting.
  Did get help balancing my fighter kite from Kenneth, another AKA member, and this Indian-American guy who was simply on the field to play soccer!
• Sport/stunt multi-line kites: Didn’t compete at all — I’m really not ready to even make a hash of this yet. But I got to play around with a couple of my rigid two-lines, including the Prism 3D I acquired at the Sunfest auction.
• Pin-collecting: I can’t say I’m addicted yet, but somehow I really liked getting the nice pins for showing up at the mass ascensions. Will show these off later — these might make good Squadron propaganda giveaways at festivals.
• Rokkaku: The rain & snow held off, and we had great individual & team battles, one after the other. Definitely, definitely show up with separate sets of line for each battle next time.
• Banquets & Shmoozing: While I still didn’t hang-out nearly as much as I could have, I pushed my personal sociability limits as much as I could. The banquets are well worth it for the community and shmoozing is worth it for the knowledge. If you’re trying to make or do anything with kites, these are the people to talk to. I spoke to kite makers about sewing and gluing, fighters about technique, KAP salesmen about KAP ideas I’ve had (and which maybe no-one is doing)… more later.
• Sleep: Ha ha, not a lot of that.

Also, Gary Engvall is bloody marvelous. The man drove at least an hour & a half out of his way at midnight after the awards banquet just to drop me at the airport, then turned around & went back. Fantastic.

rok battle-lost heat 1 but won rest.Wwoods champs!

Congrats to the Midnight Squadron team for winning team rokkaku at the Wildwood International Kite Festival!  I’m sure Complex will give us the tip-by-tip when he gets online next.

Please follow at midnightsquad’s Twitter feed to see what happens

I tried again Sunday morning and got some great pictures. Unfortunately there were no other kites out so early, but I got some great sunrise and strolling-on-the-boardwalk shots.

I’ve posted 15 of the best at

http://tinyurl.com/cggvhf

Thanks Joanne and Cindy for allowing me to hang a camera over their heads!

http://twitter.com/midnightsquad
or for the more specific MIKE-only tweets

We should have an individual rokkaku contest tomorrow!.

Meet us at Capitol College at 9 PM to fly on the old racetrack field.

As usual, be quiet & polite b/c they’re letting us fly there, and we don’t want to disturb the students housed nearby.

We’ve got an earlier event, too — a Rokkaku duel demo with the Bam’s Kung Fu of Laurel!

Obviously, if you’re interested in Kung Fu, this is probably a good chance for you to talk to the Bams about that, too. I’ve found they’re very approachable. I’m interested in what a champion sport karate & kung fu master has to say about our dueling (besides “train regularly, already!”).

That’s two events this Saturday — there’s a Fullish Moon Kite Fly on Saturday night.

The field was great, tough, and fierce. The weather was friendly to us — the ugly dampness soaked our line, protecting us from Harold Ames & Charlie Don’t Run’s skilled slicings, and the light wind was familiar from our usual low-wind Low-Down Dirty Kite Fights.

Iron Kite spooled and Complex piloted, while Kalika Chris coached. We lapped the field 3 times, and finished last in the air in the first and third heats.

More later!