Fishing Kites for Charter guides who already use normal fishing kites
Presently, unless the captain and his crew are exceedingly proficient in carefully choosing, adjusting, launching and flying traditional fishing kites, they will need to tie and tape an extremely fragile rubber balloon to the back of the kite to ensure it flies in variable winds. This not only takes a lot of time, skill and fiddly hassle in the moving cockpit of a fishing boat at sea, but it also requires a large, heavy, steel helium cylinder to be kept on board in a very secure manner, plus regulator valve and long helium hoses. The cost of the helium plus a rubber balloon is around $80. Sadly, rubber balloons leak like sieves and so only last for one day, so the charter skipper needs to use up $80 per day per kite. Often two kites are used, so that is $160 per day in helium + balloons! A massive hit to profits, or a big extra cost charged to customers.
Charter skippers do not just have one traditional fishing kite. They have 4 - 8 kites for all the possible wind ranges likely to be incurred. Each traditional fishing kite costs about $150 – altogether not so cheap. Also, if a kite gets dunked in the sea, (which is quite common), then this kite will not fly again until it dries out, which can take hours. So multiple kites, balloons and spares are all stored in the boat, which needs to be a fairly big, expensive, fuel hungry cabin boat to cope. It is a significant commitment, which may explain why most charter captains do NOT offer kite fishing as an option to their customers - even though kite fishing is acknowledged as being one of the best ways to catch game fish.
How Could Professional Fishing Helikites Help?
1 . Save money to increase profits. As a Professional Fishing Helikite has a low-loss plastic balloon, it only loses under $1 per day of helium. It does not need a helium cylinder to be taken onboard as it will not need topping up more than once every week or so. Over a three-month kite fishing season, this can save $7,110 in helium and rubber balloons! The captain can take these reduced costs as instant extra profits.
2 . Increase turnover and gain customers. Due to the massively reduced daily running costs of the Professional Fishing Helikite compared to traditional kites and rubber balloons, charter captains could afford to reduce their prices without impacting their profit margins. This is likely to gain new customers, increase turnover and thus grow the business and increase profits.
3. Reduce crew. When flying multiple Helikites and fishing lines, good crew will always be needed.
However, when flying only one Helikite with one or two lines, then extra crew may not be needed. This reduces costs and increases timeliness if crew are hard to obtain.
4. Increase boat manoeuvrability. As lighter-than-air Helikites never fall out of the sky, whatever is happening to the wind, it is often possible to conduct boat manoeuvres going with the wind, that cannot be done with a traditional fishing kite which will fall out of the sky as soon as the ‘apparent wind’ is zero. This capability may be very useful in a crowded fishing area.