South Padre Island Kites

South Padre Island hosts a Kite Festival every year on the first weekend of February. Since the wind always blows here, it's a fine place to have such a gathering. The event is held on a large tidal flats area on the north end of town. There have been a great variety of kites each year, and this year was no exception. The crowd this year was much larger than we have seen in the past – perhaps the marketing was better.

I have attached a few photos. Since the kites are spread over a couple hundred acres, it's hard to do the event justice in photographs. There are often at least a hundred kites in the air at any one time.

You can see from the photo of a group launching a big kite, what the scale is for some of the kites. I'd say there were perhaps twenty kites that were at least 100 feet long. The wind is pretty constant throughout the middle of the day, so once they get the big kites up they anchor them securely and just let them fly all day. Often they tie them to a vehicle, or anchor them to big sand bags. The kites start to go up about 9 AM, and start to come own around 3 PM.

The two black spiny–looking globes never actually left the ground, they just rolled around with their "mouths" facing the wind. We overheard the folks who owned the rainbow colored octopus say they were from Portland, Oregon and they loved being here every year. The other large rainbow tube has a big swivel mount in it's line, so it spins on it's own axis as it flies. It's probably sixty feet long, so it's pretty dramatic.

There are acrobatic kite contests, both for individuals and team events, complete with judges and awards. They perform in time to music from a public address system. The contests go on for a couple of hours, so many of the local retirees bring their chairs and food baskets and make a day of it. All-in-all, it makes for a very interesting and colorful two day event.