Kite Flyers From Coast To Coast Arrive In Iowa Great Lakes
Kite Flyers From Coast To Coast Arrive In Iowa Great Lakes
January 28, 2022Steve Schwaller
(Arnolds Park)– There will be a lot of eyes to the sky again this Winter Games Weekend as the Kite Festival returns to the ice off the Arnolds Park water front. Organizer Steve Boote of Sioux Falls says the event only continues to grow…
“I think a good goal would be 100 kites in the air if everything works, but that’s a goal. We hope to get close to that. We’ve got kite flyers from all over, I’ll let Blake touch on that. Everybody rolled in yesterday, the kite field’s set up. We’re just really excited to get going.”
Blake Pelton, who’s from Utah, is also a kite enthusiast who helps organize the festival. He says flyers are here from coast to coast…
“We have people from Oregon that brought a big pile of kites and then all the way down to New Jersey and Florida, St. Petersburg, Florida. I myself live in Utah and we’ve got a couple of others from Utah but all over the country, and then several others from Minnesota and this sort of state area here, too, so.”
Pelton adds they couldn’t ask for a better venue to fly kites…
“Frozen lakes are really just the perfect venue for kite flying because we can make the field as big as we want and it reduces mechanical turbulence as the wind comes across the lake, it’s not coming across buildings and hills and stuff. So frozen lakes are just ideal and it’s easy to put in anchors, too, because these kites do pull hard so we anchor to the ice.”
Pelton says a kite flying event in the summer here in the Iowa Great Lakes is also gaining in popularity, but it’s done a bit differently…
“In the summertime on the 4th of July we’re also here and Steve has really pushed developing, or helping us to develop pulling kites behind boats. So there really isn’t a great field here to fly kites like we have in the winter when the lake’s frozen, so Steve said a few years ago let’s pull them behind boats and I said well we’ll figure it out so we brought the best in the world out and every fourth of July you can see the big kites behind boats and it’s really cool to see.”
You can look for the giant kites to be flying today (Thurs.) through Sunday.
