No Wind Up There

Sometimes we have nothing to report, no tale to tell.

It happens. When there is no wind, there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it.

Slovenia in general is … ehm, wind-challenged. And so are the best places here: for every great shot and for each successful kite aerial photography session there are tens of fruitless KAP expeditions: the kites lying impotent on the ground, us gloomily checking the wind apps, fooled yet again by lying meteorologists.

Sometimes the wind is making fools of us too, blowing just enough to entice us out, shaking the leaves on the highest trees, rushing the puffy clouds around to trick us into unfolding the kites and prepping everything for launch – and then laugh villainously when an embarrassed kiter running with hundred meters of line out fails to get the camera off the ground.

And sometimes the wind is really perfidious. Like that last weekend at Lake Cerknica: the forecast was great, a beautiful and windy day was on, so we joyously drove to one of the best KAP spots on the southeastern edge of the lake. The plan was to capture yet another snapshot of the never ending cycle of rising and receding waters of this wondrous lake.

There was wind! A lot of wind! So much wind Janez was sceptical about both his rokkaku and the giant white quasi-conyne delta – because the pull might be too much!

The other rokkaku was faster and went up and up and up …

… until it could not go up any more.

The wind, the river of air that spilled into the Cerknica polje over the low pass between Stražišče and Lačnik, was only some 50 meters deep.

Or high.

There was absolutely no wind higher up.

This wasn’t a roll, a typical layer of turbulence that forms in the wind shade of a hill … A well-flown kite usually can penetrate that by jumping through whirls and air pockets from one patch of reasonably steady airflow to another higher up, until it catches the real wind above all the mess (a rule of thumb says the turbulent layers reach three times the height of the obstacle that creates them – some 150-200 m in our case).

But not this time. At fifty meters the wind speed dropped, at seventy it was gone. No layers, no turbulence, no whirls or air pockets, no patches of steady wind. Nothing.

We pulled and cursed and cursed and pulled some more … until, faced with the utter pointlessness of this, had an idea: why don’t we try our luck catching the mythical wind up there by driving up there – to the Bloke plateau!

Nope. This was the highest the kite could manage. It wasn’t meant to be.

But it was a beautiful Autumn day on a beautiful and wild plateau – and a kiter is always happy to crack open a cold one.

Cheers!