A Few Options for Anchoring those fantastic Flying Kites
Lets start this article with an obvious statement of fact. Serious kite flyers tend to have many kites in the bag. Large, small and everything in between! We cannot resist the urge to launch many flying kites in the air in a typical flying session either, but we only have two hands! No worries, there are many solutions to anchoring a kite and below, we’ll share our personal favorites.
To keep it short and sweet, there will only be two categories. As we see it, you either fly at the beach, or somewhere-else! Obviously, you want to fly at the beach, but in between visits, you have to fly somewhere-else, so here are options for both.
Flying your favorites somewhere-else:
Park flying and field flying is very common and the need for anchoring a kite so you can fly multiple at once exists. For flying kites in this arena, we prefer a simple plastic tent spike with bungee chord. Two different spike sizes are used, depending on the load / pull of the kite. A note: carabiners are a kite flyers accessory of choice and are readily available in sporting goods stores, walmart, etc. You will see them in all these photos.
This image shows the larger spike with two bungee chord tie downs pulled through. It is used for larger kites that pull hard.
Bill of Materials for the Spike Based Kite Anchor
- 16″ Plastic Landscape Spike for Large Kite Pull: Lowes P/N 349250
- 11″ Plastic landscape Spike: Lowes P/N 329251
- 12″ Canopy Tarp Bungee (pack of 8) : Home Depot P/N 1001820863
A couple of comments:
- All of the above is typically available at the brick and mortar stores, you do not need to order them if you would prefer to drive down and grab them.
- As shown in the above picture, we use two bungee’s for the bigger spike.
- A soft mallet is used to pound them into the dirt.
- As for success, at the time of this writing, hundreds of flights have been on these anchors with various loads applied with no failures.
- We do inspect the bungee chord before we use them each time and have yet to replace any of them. Simple, effective and perfect for kite flying in the park!
Flying at the beach!
Here is the good news. Everything mentioned above, for anchoring those flying kites, works at the beach as well. The only word of advice is, for very dry sand, the spikes are iffy. They do not take a firm hold and can pull up.
So, if you want to anchor in dry sand, our personal favorite is the Sand Anchor. Other links on our website show it available from Amazon, but at times its is out of stock. Here is a link at KittyHawk kites as well. Below is a picture of one and if you want to see more in action, check out our South Padre Article!
Kites are one the flyers we tend to find a lot of good deals on. When we do, we offer then In Our Store Here!
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