Hi Kiters,

Thought I would throw this post up quickly to let you know we have had a spate this season of tiny punctures creating slow leaks in leading edges of many kites. Our guess is that there are more Doublegee's in the grass this year. When you rig up on the grass, or deflate on the grass, you expose the kite (and yourself) to the perils of puncture from these rascally bastard doublegee's.

Sometimes it is better to roll up the kite with a bit of sand on it rather than a puncture from those devils spawn.

For a repair, these punctures are often very difficult to find, simple to fix, but often we need to take the kite home, inflate it and dunk it in the pool to find the bubbles because they only leak under full inflated pressure.

They produce a very small hole which creates a very slow leak. Not fast enough to be a major problem to prevent you from kiting, but slow enough to be a problem after an hour.

Avoid the grass!

DM and the ASWA team.

Are pole dancers behind this epidemic

Adam'KiteRepair said..
Arhhhh!

Oh poor Adam. Scary ain't it? ;)

You can download Department of Agriculture App called MyWeedWatcher and report it when you see it. Once you register you can do it online with photos and gps coordinates - in theory they will come and spray to eradicate it (this plant is declared as pest in Western Australia).

ActionSportsWA said..
We think its been especially bad because we had a really early start to winter last year, and then a super wet and long winter.
Ideal for the old double gees. We have noticed in our grassed area outside the shop that the grass provides a smooth minimal layer of coverage over the double gee breeding fields, to the extent that we wont even pump up kites outside anymore

We call them cat's eyes or F#@$%$ HELL over here, sure enough after reading this thread, just pulled an LE out of a kite and it had three little pinholes next to each other on one end...

A few weeks back, we destroyed three mountain bike tyres in one run around the Chapman River (Geraldton) with about a million of these bastards managing to pierce through the armoured tyres and tubes. There were so many holes in the tube (Only a few weeks old) they weren't even worth trying to repair. These things are diabolically evil.