It’s been a long time … the summer is never a good kite flying season, with the oppressive heat, with the air either standing still or whirling like a dervish, with storms springing up from nowhere in a matter of minutes.
So when a semi-acceptable opportunity presented itself, we ran to our usual place in the Ljubljana Marshes landscape park – and Janez (who is the by far the best rokkaku maker in Slovenia – and one of the best overall) had an idea to fly as many of his rokkakus as possible.
But we only had like four anchors, so we devised a cunning plan. We’d tie an old line to a tree, roll out some hundred meters of it, make loops in regular intervals, and tie the other end to a stake. And voilà! – we’d have as many anchors as we need!
Smart as hell, right?
Well … no. As we let those beautiful roks one by one into the sky and tied them to the loops on the line, we soon encountered the power of addition.
For a nice 2 by 1,6 m rokkaku pulls like hell in a strong and steady wind. In a strong and gusty wind it becomes a beast. And seven rokakkus on the same line soon wreaked total havoc on the Marshes.
It wasn’t just that the stake was being slowly pulled out of the ground, or that the old line started to make noises nobody wants to hear – it was the tree that was almost at its limits, the branches snapping, the bark giving way, the roots at their limits. Abort, abort!
After a hefty fight we managed to pull them down – and barely avoided a disaster.
Stick to kite aerial photography, we said.
Rokkakus can’t just fly idly in the sky. They are made to work, they want to work – and even though the light was dying and the clouds covered the big blue yonder, two picavet rigs were soon out, ready to carry the cameras up.
And despite there being seven roks already assembled and ready to go up, Janez chose his Cindy delta for this KAP session.
The Venerable Blue was the first to try finding something interesting in this part of Ljubljana Marshes landscape park we flew literally hundreds of times before.
Again, this place is never the same as it was any time before. It’s fractal, self-similar, but never the same. Even a kite can’t take a picture of it twice.
The river flows through it, softly- for Ižica is a Karst river, emerging full-bodied from under a rock like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. It doesn’t carry much abrasive sediment, it doesn’t come roaring down from the mountains, so she never carved a deep valley or made an alluvial fan.
Ižica is a gentle, pristine river; its meanders are dreamy, its waters clear as sky.
The Marshes are green, but there are different shades of green now. Those lush, moist, bursting greens of the spring are gone.
Summer greens, subdued, mature.
Summer melancholy; humid and heavy.
Nature saying, that’s me – that’s the true me. This is my peak performance.
All power of life focused into ripening … into splicing the line of past generations to the future, making sure they go on, again, forever.
Summer melancholy. Humid … and heavy.
Kite aerial photos shot with Insta360 on Cindy delta, and with Nikon P330 on The Original Blue rokkaku.
shot from delta 😉
Yes 🙂