I said who am I to blow against the wind (Paul Simon)

Below, in between Calvin and the Baseball guy, you can find a picture of Paul Lamaster's better side. I spared you a pic of the bright yellow rev he was flying however,but, given the kind of weather we had today, thats about as much as I wanted to take my camera outside for! But, I make it sound like it was a monsoon out there when it really didn't end up being too bad, given the dire predictions of the weather gods. The forecast suggested 100% rain for the entire day, all day, when the reality was we only had some rain in the am before comps started, and just as the last few events were wrapping up. In other words, it could have been much worse.

The biggest suffering was single line kite displays out on the fields during the afternoon, but, I can certainly understand wanting to avoid getting some of he beauties that are around the convention all soaking wet, a day before the People's Choice voting! This takes place tomorrow evening as part of the final auction and I'll make a special trip around the entire room tomorrow night to show off some of what's being shown. But for today, the vast amount of pictures came from the Auction items that were being displayed, and then sold. More on that later...

But, despite the potential for a downpour kept the single line flyers mostly inside, the sport kiters had very little choice, the plan was to try and get as many of the scheduled events over with as possible, and thankfully, every last event was run. Sometimes collecting judges together was a bit of a delaying issue but, through perseveranceand somearm twisting, all panels were filled and all events went off without issues. The wind was much the same as it's been all week lone, light and low and variable, but, flyable nonetheless. I've had worse days out on beaches on either coast, so no complaints from me! Below you can find the results for the day's events and as part of tomorrow's update, we can reveal all the top 3 winners in each category, directly after the final awards dinner. Also included are wednesday's results from the NIB refly which i neglected to include yesterday.

After a quick pop back to the rooms to dry off a little bit and settle in, it's off to the The Great Kite Auction! Given that we had finally chased away the dog convention, we were now in the bog room and as you can see from the pictures, it was pretty well packed with kites and kite related stuff, from the silent auction (where I scored a cool Chicago Fire wooden yo-yo!) to the loud" auction.

I'll get a final number tomorrow, because not one single person in the bar could remember what the actual final tally for auction proceeds was, but, most guesses put it between 20-30k (thats a wide range!) to about roughy 25,000 which is a little off what they had budgeted for, however, given how the economy has kind of swirled around this summer, perhaps it's to be expected that'd it'd come in a little lower than anticipated. I'll update tomorrow's report with the actual number. Two "high ticket" items that went included #1 of Rev's 20th Anniversary series that had been signed by nearly every major quad team on the world, which went for $800 and an stunning kite called the Enigma that went for $1100.

And tomorrow brings us to the last day of the 2008 Convention and Grand Nationals. On the slate for tomorrow, a day of demos and flying down in the main fields, provided the current rain thats coming down decides to ease off. But, you never know, we could end up with another day like today and very little rain. Cross your fingers for us, and I'll be back with the last update sometime after the Awards banquet tomorrow evening.

    One last day left...

      David Hathaway