2026-10-04 · Field notes
What the wind did in September
A month of gusts, one record flight, and the day the Serpent got away from us for ninety honest seconds.
The month opened flat and southerly, which the anemometer read as 12 and our elbows read as 9. The Kestrel trains flew anyway; the train was invented for exactly such days, six kites stepping down a line like a hand of cards played slowly.
The middle of the month gave us the record: Petrel No. 4,188, flown by a visitor from Kesselford on 900 feet of line, held steady for eleven minutes by a thermal off the chalk that the wall chart annotates, in pencil, 'show-off'.
And then the 27th. The Serpent went up in 22 mph of westerly with a tail we had re-stamped that morning, and for ninety seconds it was the most beautiful object on the coast. Then the gust found the splice and the kite came down in the long grass, unharmed and unashamed. The wall chart entry reads: 'Force 6, one retrieval, zero regrets.'