I first met Mickey Kinley in 1981 while living in West Palm Beach, Florida. I introduced my neighbor, Jim MacNeil, to the sport of boomeranging a few months before I met Mickey. Jim was taking Engineering classes in Boca Raton. Just after Jim and I had purchased several long distance hooks from Al Gerhards, Jim was throwing one of his Gerhards hooks in a big field adjacent to the Florida Atlantic campus. Suddenly, a man who had been playing golf in the distance started screaming and running towards Jim. Thinking that this person was a mad man, Jim starting running for his car. An excited Mickey Kinley caught up with Jim and introduced himself as a new boomerang thrower. Mickey was a woodworker by profession and had started making strip laminated traditional boomerangs. He had never seen anything like a Gerhards hook. Mickey begged Jim to loan him the Gerhards hook for 1 day so he could make a copy. Jim agreed and told me that afternoon when he got home that he would meet Mickey the following day in the same field in Boca Raton and that he wanted me to come along to meet Mickey. The next day was hot and calm. We arrived at the Boca Raton field. I remember that the ground was covered with burrowing owl holes, so you had to watch your feet when you were running. Mickey arrived with an arm load of his strip laminated traditionals and a single copy of the Gerhards hook. This was a PERFECT COPY, complete with weights! The only problem was that it didn't return. I was not yet an expert in tuning and Mickey decided to adjust the flight by filing down the airfoils on the field using instructions from the Lorin Hawes book. That poor hook was filed down until there was almost nothing left and then it was so thin that it broke on the final test flight. The next year, I moved from West Palm Beach to Ohio, but stayed in touch with Mickey. That year, Mickey sent me one of his strip laminated hooks and omegas. These were absolutely beautiful and were weighted. The flight range was 75 - 100 metres. They were good returners, but had a very slight tendency to spiral out of a stable hover at the end of the flight. This was easily corrected by adding some tape to add flaps and slow the rotation down a bit.

This strip laminated Kinley Omega is identical to the one that I have in my personal collection. I have not throw it, but I would expect it to fly similar to the one in my own collection which I have not thrown for almost 20 years now. These are very rare. The strips are made of Ebony, Mahogany, Ash and Oak. There is a lead weight embedded into each tip. Mickey made very few of these and they were expensive. Two years later, Mickey moved on to making Boomalums, the first long distance boomerangs made out of Aluminum that I had ever seen. Mickey is a famous and early pioneer in long distance. He doesn't show up in the record books because he rarely went to tournaments, but his boomalums were the booms of choice in the long distance event for several years in the early 1980s.

This boomerang is from the estate of Brother Brian Thomas. This is a boomerang that he would never let out of his collection before his death. The sales of this boomerang will benefit one or more charities that provide relief to the victims of the 2004 Tsunami Disaster in South-East Asia. The price will be slowly reduced every week until it is sold.