His senior year in college, Chuck Bernstein encountered kites being sold and flown in Maui, Hawaii, and became an instant convert. Originally drawn to the joy of the sport, he quickly saw kites as a great business opportunity. Buying $100 worth of equipment on the spot (“That was a lot of money then,” he says), he learned all about flying. The owner of the High as a Kite shop was John Harvey, who also had an establishment in Sausalito. Harvey took a shine to Bernstein and invited him to come visit him in California, work a week, learn the business.

Norwegian Bjoern Ludvig Moen was flying a ski-sailing kite recently when a strong gust of wind made it seem more like the kite was flying him. The giant kite lifted the 25-year-old some 30 feet off the ground until he let go and crashed onto a gravel playing field below. Wearing bulky cold weather clothing, he was battered but amazingly did not suffer any serious injuries.

Not much about the Spanish kite scene seems to be known in the United States, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fair bit going on. Rather, it seems to be a case of the Spaniards keeping a low profile.

It was a fine, breezy Saturday afternoon when I decided to drive the family to the park—me for some quality flying time, wife Sandra and daughter Kathryn for a duck-feeding frenzy. We duly arrived at the slightly soggy park and got ourselves sorted out into the variety of walking boots, coats, gloves, and scarves that are part of the dressing up procedure for winter weather. Hand in hand, Sandra and Kathryn headed off to the pond to feed the mass of ducks and geese that eagerly await such visitations.

“This afternoon has been fine and windy, and the boys have been flying kites, made of tough paper on a bamboo frame, all of a rectangular shape, some of them five feet square, and nearly all decorated with huge faces of historical heroes. Some of them have a humming arrangement made of whalebone. There was a very interesting contest between two great kites, and it brought out the whole population.

Kite fishing and its perils received an airing on prime time television when ESPN Outdoors last fall showed a personal adventure by George Poveromo, a network correspondent. Poveromo told about a Florida sailfishing outing. Poveromo and a pal were using live bait under fishing kites to tempt the West Palm Beach area’s feisty sailfish during their migration swim. The fish are very shy so bait presented from the sky and unassociated with an intrusive boat is effective.

Can one little logohead change a country’s image from the land of cold, sadness and vodka to the home of youth, playfulness and hope? An advertising agency in Warsaw, commissioned by the government to design one promoting tourism and trade, believes so. It has come up with a logo featuring a kite because, in the words of the agency, the “kite stands for youth, freedom, playfulness, and hope—-in any language, in any country.”

Ever the kiteflying pioneer, Jackie Matisse, of Fontainebleau Forest, France, late last year collaborated on the first high-bandwidth art piece ever created by computer. Working with the Amsterdam Science and Technology Center, Matisse contributed 12 of her very long, beautifully decorated kite tails to the project. Because wind speed was added to the equation, extensive calculations were required for these real-time kinetic art pieces (kites). Computer operations, mainly at universities, around the world each took on a single one of the dozen tails.

The hope that a cave painting in Indonesia might shed light on the antiquity of the kite globally (Drachen Journal No. 10, Page 18) has been stalled, at least for the time being. What is needed is scientific verification of age, a possibly complicated and expensive matter, although dating possibilities are numerous and wide-ranging.

Pierre Fabre, of Paris, makes spectacular kites, not just for their large size alone but for their images too. Classic examples on these pages, chosen from Fabre’s own photographic portfolio of 30,000 images, taken mostly in the Asian countries of Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Indonesia and China, as well as Brazil, make the point graphically.