Wayne Carkeek
For a long time I have been without a ground stake at the beach, not that I didn’t own any I just found them difficult and hardly worthwhile to use. I would unwind my lines by wrapping them around a buggy or land board to hold them and use the buggy to hold the kite while it was parked on brake lines so not exactly an ideal situation. I found the ground stakes were often hard to press in by hand with the varying conditions I kite on, I won’t even mention grass as I couldn’t even stomp my ground stake in there during some months of summer if I wanted to.
I was asked what the ideal ground stake would be to suit the needs of a power kiter, quite a question as it turns out. I made a surprisingly long list of things I would like it to do, to solve all the issues I had, problem was I had just come up with two distinctly different ideal kite stakes for the wildly different conditions we are using power kites in. I needed a sharper stake to penetrate earth but also a wide stake to not pull through softer sand, I wanted an easy way to hook and unhook lines to the stake to hold tension on them to wind and unwind, I needed something that I could easily stake one handed that would hold my kites and was equally easy to remove. The design quickly worked out as a hybrid with the best features of both stakes combined to complement each other with an extra feature I had never seen on a stake before and a very professional looking design from Hugh at Ozone.
When I was sent the first moulded prototype by Ozone it quickly went into the testing phase, but not with a kite. I dusted off my load cell and began to measure the total force required to pull out the new stake, what I found was very consistent holding power on earth and sand of a reasonable quality, obviously if you put any kite stake into a very loose material it is only as good as the materials holding power but having said that we had seven Method 5m kites holding off one Ozone kite stake in very dry sand dunes at one point in light airs. NB: I have had the best holding results from the stake being pushed in to the earth at about a 30 degree angle from vertical leaning up wind with it pushed in until the line tabs are just accessible if possible. Overall I am very pleased with the new stake and it goes where I go now, it has not let go so far in any condition I have used it in and it is the best addition to my kiting setup for quite a while, the less fuss, the more fun I say.
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