Dear Rider,

The Annual Lake Simcoe Winter Sports Festival continues to be the largest gathering of wind sport enthusiasts in Ontario. We invite you to join us for the 8th year to be held Saturday February 13th, and Sunday February 14th 2008 in Keswick Ontario. (from 11:00-15:30hrs ET daily)

Bringing together wind powered enthusiasts using kites with skis, snowboards, snowfers, skimbats, monoskis, and more the weekend is aimed at educating, demonstrating, meeting new friends, connecting with familiar faces and having a great time doing what we love.

This year for the second time we are pleased to announce a fun race in partnership with the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario.

Feel free to forward this invitation to your friends and come out and see why we are having so much winter fun.

Details for this years festival can be found on-line at http://www.lsws.info

It's been a real mixed bag this winter, everything froze up nicely but no wind, then some snow but the wind came and blew it off the ice, then a melt then not much snow in some areas. The forecast this week is for snow starting in this area tuesday and and some good accumulation throughout the week so we should have a nice base by saturday and so far some wind in the forecast.
If the weekend has prime conditions I've counted at least 60-80 kites in the air and lot's scattered about the launch areas.
There'll be quite a few brands represented there and I'll have a good variety of Peter Lynn Chargers to demo if anyone wants to go go for a ride and Jim should be there with the custom kite snowboards he's been making.
I'll update conditions later in the week,
Mark

Well saturday turned out to a fairly decent wind after the morning was dead calm. Great to see the snowspider turn up and gave a handfull of the buggy guys something to look at and discuss. I'm sorry that once the wind came up I didn't really stop until the end of the day and wish I had taken the spider for a run to see how it handled.
There was a race held late afternoon and I managed a 2nd place overall but 1st with a kite. The winner was using a custom snowfer style rig (with windsurfing sail) and had a few degrees higher upwind performance but the rest of the course I had smoking speed on a 15 Peter Lynn Charger. The biggest difference was the understanding of the course layout - we were to round outside all of the various banners and ice huts as markers. Igor was coming inside on the one marker cutting quite a bit off and I thought he was going around the wrong hut as I rounded a further "red" hut. As it turned out I was doing at least a 20% larger course but it was still fairly close and I think Igor probably still would have won with his upwind advantage even if we were following the same line. But from the kite standpoint I came very close to lapping a few competitors when I ran an extra lap at the end of the race just to see if I could catch them. It was a good day with close to 40 kites out and I put Chargers in the hands of a few first time arc flyers and it was a perfect day to have the kites auto zenith nice and stable so good feedback and happy kiters.
light freezing rain most of the day sunday so unfortunately I didn't do the drive back for the second day.
Mark

Sunday winds and conditions were even better , got up to 30.5mph in 3in of fresh snow,fast, smooth, and quiet, very cool. Im more used to a little faster with violent shaking and deafening rumble. Towards the north past the marina, the winds were consistantly higher,I was surprized more guys did'nt get down there and find that.
Simcoe area is great , we found Wimpys and words cant describe the monster burger they put together.Spent the night at the Briar got the last room, very nice , breakfast was like being on a cruise ship. While I was flying, the boys took the van for a spin and got it stuck, a life time memory for a 10 and 12 year old. I think Ill keep the keys with me the next time! Great fun great event thanks