Very early tomorrow, I fly out to New York and the Metro Balloon, Music, and Kites festival. Should be good fun. A hundred thousand people come out to watch the balloons lift off in the morning. That leaves us with a captive audience to showcase kites to.

We’ll be flying the Mega Flag as well as a series of largish kites twice each day. The show starts with an early media call on Friday. Balloons in the morning – kites all day – music at night. I keep looking for “sleep” in the program but it isn’t there….

Meanwhile, I just got a note from Carlos Simoes in Toronto:

We were in Port Colborne, Ontario for the Canal Days festival on Sunday Aug 3, 2008.

Over the last year in Ontario we have started doing an "Aquarium in the Sky" theme demonstration at festivals. Anybody with sea life related kites gets involved in this. It's all announced on the P.A. system just like any other kite demonstration would be.

We ran out of lifter lines to tie my second Peter Lynn fish to. Not enough time to anchor and put up another lifter kite so I decided to walk around with him in hand held fashion. There were hundreds of people behind a tag tape barrier. I simply held the fish bridle in my hand and walked the 30 foot fish over to the barrier. I dragged him over the crowd and they loved it!

I just wandered left and right for about 20 minutes. Yes, without a lifter the fish sometimes turns upside down. But he never deflates and it just takes a little patience to get him upright again.

Nobody pulled out any of the long flowing tails.

All the other inflatables were several hundred feet away so people really got a chance to see one of them up close! I found the 30 foot fish very easy to handle in the 10-15mph winds. Heck, it even won me an award at the dinner that followed. "Biggest Crowd Pleaser" or some made up title like that… Just sharing a trick I am sure I will use again in the future.

So well done, Carlos. Maybe we can try this one in New York over the weekend. We’ll see if folks South of the Border (and their lawyers) are as polite about not grabbing kites. Thanks for sharing!