Dozens gaze upward at kites decorated for Marco Island event

Corwin Sampson tugged on a kite string.

“Come on, wind!” he called out to a plastic kite with red and pink streamers.

The kite soared up and he handed the string to his 4-year-old daughter to fly.

Corwin was multitasking at Mackle Park’s inaugural kite festival Saturday on Marco Island. After sending up one kite, he proceeded to detangle another one of his children’s kite strings or tape a plastic kite back onto its wooden dowels.

The festival, which attracted about 100 people, was organized because “we want to get the community more involved,” said Kay Sager, park program director.

Children and adults decorated kites on plastic sheets with crayons and finished them off with crepe-paper tails.

“They’ve never flown kites,” said Larissa Gurgenidze, who brought her 2¤½-year-old twin boys to the festival. “So it’s a first-time experience for them.”

Her sons were most excited about decorating their kites; plans for their kite designs were made final at the breakfast table, she said. The twins soon left the coloring table for the playground after they finished coloring their kites.

Luca is learning the alphabet, so he decorated his kite with his letter-writing skills, while his brother, Rocky, was more abstract by scribbling his kite with his favorite colors — yellow and orange — and attaching teal streamers.

The wind came in puffs most of the morning, but many of the kite fliers were able to keep their kites afloat by running across the field.

“Mommy, I can make it go higher,” Brandon Cardin called out. The 6-year-old and his mother relayed the kite strings to each other throughout the festival.

For some of the festival attendees, kite flying is not new.

“We’ve always lived on the beach and kite flying seems to always be part of it along with sand castle building,” said Tiffany King, who was at the festival with her daughter.

King’s kite was decorated with bright butterflies and finished with a flourish with the longest kite tail of any of the kite fliers on the field.

Jamie Thibodeaux said she flies kites “whenever there’s a windy day and there’s nothing to do.” She decorated her kite with the University of Florida’s Gator logo.

“It’ll help them win, I guess,” said the 15-year-old, who was wearing Gator flip-flops.

Kite flying is a unique activity that gets the family together, said Jamie Blodgett, a park attendant who helped at the festival.

“It’s more than going to the beach. It’s not your typical Marco Island thing,” she said.

The park community center hopes to have more community events in the future. Several programs are in the works, including a potential world record-setting event in November. The staff has not decided what it wants to do yet, but is leaning toward “something with key lime,” said Sager, who became park director about two months ago.