The Straddle Mount, A Technological Masterwork

After my dangling kite line camera mount fiasco last week I decided to scrap that idea and work on a more stable kite line mount. I was sort-of stealing the idea from this mount I saw advertised on the internet, which straddles the two center lines of the kite. The difference is that my mount was designed to straddle wider, and be positioned higher up the center lines. I used the same padded stick that I had for the dangle mount, but I replaced the hanging grommets on the end of the stick with double-ended coat-hanger-based line grabbers.



It stuck on the lines pretty well, with just a bit of rattle when I went over chop that I can probably fix by tightening up the spiral line grabber loops in the ends of the coat hangers. Unfortunately the wind was very light when I tried this last night, so I struggled to plane and couldn't stay upwind. I think the mount tightened the front lines a bit, too, making the kite a bit depowered. Nevertheless, I was fairly pleased with how it worked, and some video was salvageable. After I stopped filming and took the camera off, the wind came up enough to have a short but fun little session. Stoke!

Straddle Mount Experiment from James Douglass on Vimeo.

(Notice all the crud on the beach in the video. This is the time of year that a lot of seaweed and seagrass washes up and collects in a stinky mass at the Fort Pierce South Jetty.)