Wing's clean now...

Well I had a chance yesterday to get out and kite the wing some. Generally speaking after taking a flight, especially a sandy flight, one needs to take the opportunity and get the sand and or insects out of one’s equipment. Yes it’s been something like four days, but in that time one can pretty much assume any of the insects will have died and all that is needed is to remove their little carcasses. This I have now done. You see, if you don’t remove the little insects, in all likelihood they will decompose and when they do they will damage the wing. I know this because it one point I put the wing down on an ant bed and the end result was one little cigarette burn sized hole that had to have come from a decomposing insect. If it wasn’t it was the ants ate the stain caused by a decomposing insect and either way the result was still the same. It was an easy repair as they make rip stop tape for just such a purpose but doing so makes you a little less confident in your equipment condition. Because of this learning experience I am now much better at being sure that the wing is clean and clear within a few days of flying it. Usually immediately after a flight you’re busy packing the gear up rather than inspecting it because you have flown so long in the day that conditions don’t give you the chance to inspect. Read that as it’s too dark to see the wing.



So I tried a new way of cleaning the way down and that is flying it upside down. Normally I would have just laid the wing out flat on the ground and step by step and flipped it over in such a way that everything in the back of the cells would come out the front. That wasn’t the case this time. Instead of all the time consuming playing in flipping, I simply set the wing up to kite and did so with reverse controls using a technique I had seen a year or so ago and had good results with that. Having a second person would have helped but it can be done with one. After getting all the sand out of it I took a few minutes and kited it free hand. This is without using a harness and control (for me) isn’t as good. I have seen people kiting FreeHand use the wing and actually do back flips using the harness hook-ins as if they are Olympic rings and letting the wings support them as they perform. By no stretch of imagination is this something I could do. At best I’m able to move the wing a bit side to side jockeying for position and getting it restaged for flight. Kiting FreeHand can also be a safety tool. If you cannot kite the wing safely without a harness, Winds are probably too strong to fly in.



So the wings all clean, the weather’s beautiful, if I didn’t have somewhere to be tonight, I know where I would go…