An Interesting week......

It's been an interesting week of discovery this week, I hadn't realised that there was quite so much going on in our community. The petition has grown to 408 signatures as of this morning, but more significantly has been the addition of kite establishment signatures. This is heartening for me to see if at least in principle there is agreement that this change is needed. We have been added to more forums, and these are listed on the right. I am surprised that we need 10 views of the discussion to get one signature, any advice as to how I can improve this ratio will be greatly appreciated.

Thank-you again to all of you that have sent in advice, opinion, messages of support and encouragement, to those that have forwarded the emails, posted banners on their site, as well as started and bumped threads to encourage conversation. We’ve got a long way to go and these spur me on.

On a downer though, there is rightly great concern out there about those among us whose irresponsible and ignorant actions cause angst and frustration amongst our fraternity let alone with the non-kite flying public. What will it take for them to realize they are only trashing their prospects as well as for everyone else? I wonder also how large the problem of uninsured power kiters there are out there? In the long run I would hope that the changes we are working towards will ease the congestion on the limited number of flying sites, making kiting groups smaller and help manage the situation through peer pressure.

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Hmmm ......soapbox moment......have just been checking the forum's for progress and commentary, and seen that Camber Sands may be coming under threat of further restrictions. For further info read the SEKA thread on the side of the page.

At some point we have stand up and say HELLO we're here too. There are precious few suitable spots around this small country that are free for us to use for onereason or another. We all grumble and mutter about over crowding, each other and the bans. Why can't we (kiter's of all denominations) all come together to represent ourselves. Surely we would all pay a slightly increased fee to our choice of associations to fund cross sport representative negotiating team to support those in need, rather than relying on passionate committed local volunteers who have to start from scratch??? Better get off before I slip off!!

The Signature rate has slowed on the petition. But we have reached 329 signatures so we're in the top 500 most signed petitions. Its great but not good enough so I think it's time to broaden the net. Contact with Defra will be being made soon. From my experience they have always been extremley helpful. There are somethings though that may be more difficult......we'll see.

So it begins...

Well that's it the ball has started rolling, a petition has been setup on No 10 downing street's website. It would be an awesome achievement if the community can come together and we can amass over 4000 signatures.

I was on a course recently and discovered that to be a recognised sport, entitled to funding etc we would need a governing body with over 4000 registered participants. This campaign will never be that and does not seek to represent the sport in that way, but as a number it is significant for the purposes of persuasion.

I posted the petition and its details on some Kiting forums and in the first week we have amassed over 280 signatures in one week. I have been really impressed by the support and lack of apathy in the community and can only thank those that have added links, sent the link on to their address books and most importantly signed the petition. As a new minority sport it is essential for us to stand and work together in however small a way to secure our continued enjoyment of our shared passion. THANKS TO ALL. :o)

I've set up this blogspot to save time as updating all the forums daily was taking a long time. On here I'll post the additional steps that have been taken to progress the campaign.

A bit of History

I first became aware of this problem, in 2005, when after months of driving past a field I found out which farmer the field belonged to and got in touch. I have to say all the farmers I spoke to in this was very helpful and friendly. As I told the farmer more about what we wanted to do he was very positive about working with us and then came the BUT.

The new subsidy regulations were coming into force and he didn't want to loose his subsidy. I have some experience with legaleese so set about reading up on the reg's and found that as a sport we fell through a gap in the guidelines. I wrote to the rural payments authority (RPA) with a description of the sport complete with pictures. As the changes were coming in the answer took several months of follow up but finaly got a response. The answer I got back was that we were classified as a "Motorsport". At that point I dropped it, and started looking for another suitable site.

For the last 18 months I have been working with a local aerodrome, who have been extraordinarilly open minded, to allow kites in a corner of their field and we are currently waiting for the right conditions for our first flight (Sywell Kite Club). The issue has been niggling at the back of my mind for almost 2 years and now I've decided to stop burbling into my beer and try to do something about it.........hence this campaign.

The First Week.

The campaign begun by putting it out there. A petition was set up on No10's website Kiters if they aren't doing it, they're talking about it so the issues was posted on some of the forums that are out there and we received and outstanding response. 280 votes in the first week, which was amazing but to us demonstrates the size of the issue that we are facing.