Alex Casey spends the afternoon on New Brighton beach with kite-flying YouTuber Jim Nicholls.
Head to Christchurch’s New Brighton on any summer’s day and you are likely to check a few things off your beachside bingo card. There’ll be a couple of fishermen casting off the pier, kids splashing around in the fountain-filled playground, and diners clinging to their fish and chip wrappers in the wind. What you might not expect to see is an 84-year-old man confidently conducting a cavalcade of critters including a 40-foot long centipede, a 33-foot giant squid and a 60-square-foot Spongebob Squarepants.
The day I head out to meet local kite enthusiast Jim Nicholls, there’s no shortage of spectacle on display. Winds are gusting over 50km/h and sand is whipping his face as he sends up his “well-mannered” UltraFoil 30 high into the air, using its long line to attach a gigantic penguin and a spiky rainbow spinning tube. “In this wind, anything can happen,” he grins, before scuttling over the dunes to fetch another clutch of kites, including a happy-faced triangular ‘Pink Smiley’ which he bequeaths to me to take home.
It’s an honour to receive such a taonga from Aotearoa’s leading kite content creator, who has amassed thousands of fans on his YouTube channel. And while you might imagine that an English-born man in his 80s probably stumbled across kites somewhere in the Hundred Acre Wood, Nicholls didn’t discover his obsession until he was in his 70s. It was at New Brighton Kite Day, 2010, that he spontaneously bought a kite at a nearby stall, from a woman who likely thought he was just “a grumpy old man,” he tells me.
“I don’t know why I did it. It was just on an impulse,” he laughs. “Everybody else had their kites in the air, why shouldn’t I?”
He headed back down to the beach, launched the small parafoil on the quiet side of the pier, and a new passion soared. “The whole idea of having something of yours up there in the sky immediately attracted me,” he says. “I watched it flying and I thought, ‘yeah, this is fun. I need another one’. That other one turned into a cascade of kites.” His collection now takes up much of his small Parklands home and includes everything from Superman, to a giant Orca, to a disembodied set of legs kicking a football.
“Quite frankly, I don’t have the faintest idea how many kites I have,” he says. “It numbers in the hundreds. But how many hundreds? I’ve never had the courage to find out.” He also refrains from picking out a favourite. “They’re all favourites, because I enjoy flying them all. I can enjoy flying a $10 kite from China just as much as I can enjoy flying a $1,000 kite from Germany.”
Early on in Nicholls’ kite collecting journey, he identified a problem – you could never know how a kite would actually fly from a plain product photograph on a website. “I thought that maybe I could start making some videos, give people a better idea of what they’re actually like,” he says. He set up a YouTube channel and uploaded his first video – ‘19ft Delta mesh kite’ – on January 14, 2012. “It flies beautifully, but pulls very hard in higher winds. It’s great for lifting big tails,” the caption reads.
Since then, he has been consistently uploading multiple times a week to his channel Jim’s Kites (tagline: “How to fly kites! How to have fun with kites! Where to buy kites! What kites are best!”) and has amassed over seven million views and nearly 12,000 dedicated followers. The most popular uploads are instructive, with ‘How To Launch and Fly a Kite’ at nearly 500,000 views and ‘The 10 Big Rules of Kite Flying’ not far behind. “I suppose people go on YouTube needing help and they come across it,” he says. “I must do more of those.”
Beyond his helpful advice videos, Jim’s Kites is packed with plenty of memorable mid-air moments captured from New Brighton beach over the last 13 years. There’s a Hula Girl kite swaying to soothing ukulele, frog siblings having their first outing together, and even a thrilling multi-part series involving a parachute rescue. “I do really enjoy it, but I suppose now it’s almost become a compulsion,” he laughs. “I try to put up a couple of videos every week at least. If I don’t go and fly, I’ve got nothing to video, so I always make a point of going to fly.”
Given that he heads out year-round to fly his kites, Nicholls’ video uploads also show the shape of the year, the seasons, and the special occasions within. For Chinese New Year, he celebrated this week with slithering snake kites. The shortest day called for a series of “spinny things”. He’s flown Mario for Mario Day, a giant bunny for Easter, and even donned a Santa costume for his special Christmas video ‘Santa Flies a Kite and Has Fun’. His kite-flying encompasses world events too – at last year’s Kite Day he flew dove kites for Gaza.
I suggest to Nicholls that his YouTube channel might be one of the only good places left on the internet. “Well, there’s nothing bad about kites,” he chuckles. “There are a lot of people who view my videos regularly, and we keep up a correspondence through the comments, or people email me and we chat about kites. There are some people that I email with quite regularly that I’ve never met, and never will meet in most cases.” And what characteristics does he think unites kite-flyers around the world? “Craziness, probably.”
While Nicholls has a legion of fans online, he finds there’s slightly less real-life interest in his kite-flying. “I think the phones have killed kite flying, because when people go to the beach now, they sit down and they look at their phone. They don’t even look at the sky or the waves anymore.” One Kite Day, he bought a bulk lot of cheap small kites, and gave them away to any kids who showed interest in his display. “I gave away about 50 or 60 kites that day, but I never saw anybody flying them ever again, so I gave up doing that.”
But ultimately, Nicholls isn’t interested in what anyone else thinks of his kite-flying. “If other people enjoy it, that’s great, but I do it because I enjoy it. I have my audience around the world, and they enjoy it too.” And, as he sails through his 85th year, he’s also not setting sky high expectations for himself. “Without a doubt, once you get past 80 years, you do slow down. I used to spend six or seven hours flying on the beach, but these days, two or three hours go by and I’ve had enough,” he says. “At my age, my goal is just to keep going a bit longer.”
A few days after our afternoon talking and flying kites together, Nicholls emails me a link with the subject line: “You are a YouTube star!” His latest video has gone up already – ‘A new kiteflier and an interview, on a VERY windy day!’ – and the wholesome comments are already flooding in. “Thank you, Jim for making my day better,” wrote one. “Smiles all round,” said another. What the video also revealed was that, just after I left, a dramatic gust of wind deflated Nicholls’ entire display, sending the penguin, the spinner and the spiky tube tail plummeting to the ground.
As ever, he kept looking up: “It had been fun while it lasted,” he wrote.