September 2001

The last straw!? 

IT has just happened to me again!.  And NO, I don't mean that there's no wind AGAIN, nor even that the wine cupboard is empty again for no reason that I can think of. It's not even that the Morris Marina has rolled off down the hill by itself and crashed into the wood shed.- Actually I wish it would but this only happens to vehicles with some intrinsic value,

Maybe it's that I've been booked on a flight with a departure time earlier than 10am?  No, and it's not that I had to sit around at Milan airport for 32 hours because some #*@+~ Airline wouldn't let me transfer to an earlier half full (and more direct) flight.

And, it's not another 5 page vexatious E mail from a "favourite" customer that's been "democratically" assigned to me for answering.  Oh, and my dear old mum hasn't just woken me up at the totally unreasonable time of 9.00am to tell me that the cat's just thrown up on the bedroom floor- not for a few days anyway.

What happened is that there is this (very) young local lad who loves kites, he's always dragging his Nana up to the park when he espies something new in the sky.

Well, last month I developed a new single line kite- a penguin. At that time I didn't know how well it would fly by itself (there was NO WIND here AGAIN) but it sure looked great hanging under a lifting kite, the very essence of a penguin. 

Grandson comes rushing in from outside and tugs on grandma's sleeve saying; come on NANA I wanna go to the park, there's a DUCK UP. 

Yes I think, with a capital D!

New things-

That ducking Penguin of course, 2 sizes so far maxi (9m head to feet) and smallish (1.5m).

Also the cat has been developed further now. It's cute- I think as realistic in form and movement as any kite we have ever made- and the people at last week's Washington State International Kite Festival at Longbeach thought so also, voting it number one.

On the traction kiting/kitesurfing side, our R and D is running at record level.  Ouch it's costing- but there is an aura of excitement around here which bodes well for the future.

There are a number of new things on the way, some of them (mountain boards) new product areas for us. I'll go into specifics as soon as we know when they will become available.  There is a bit of a queue of new products waiting for production space just now, unavoidably so given the growth spurt we are experiencing.

Lachlan has been working on Arc leashes- successfully.  Leashes have been one of those details that we rather neglected in the headlong rush to get on top of the big things- but they are a very necessary detail. 

Maybe correcting and updating the Peter Lynn Ltd web site will float to the top of the list this year also- but I'm not holding my breath!

Our H-Arc, Artur Bosche and Michelle Dekker's astonishing Arc variant design has undergone a minor name change to Hi-Arc on account of HArc having a some unfortunate connotation in Holland- whoops, sorry. .  Since minor changes, it can now be launched without pre-inflation and has more low end grunt.  Although I don't yet have formal test results to support this claim, to my impression it is the highest performance (by lift to drag ratio), kite there is of any type, bar none. Currently we only have 6sq.m (projected) versions available, and only ex NZ in small quantities. The next 2 sizes we develop will probably be a 4.5m and an 8m.  This is a kite that is suitable only for top end users

Peter Lynn, Ashburton, 1 Sept '01.

PS.  Well, nearly the last straw:   The penguin is already proving to be a reliable, albeit not high angle, flier, - and on mature reflection I've decided the young lad has a point- with minor cosmetic changes it can very easily become a duck.