OGUNQUIT – Larry Smith has been taking the expression “go fly a kite” quite literally for as long as he can remember, and he brought that message of joy and fun to Ogunquit Beach this weekend for the 25^th time.

“It’s all in good fun,” he said.

The Capriccio Festival of Kites delighted both children and adults on Saturday, with kite-flying enthusiasts taking to the beach – and the sky – throughout the morning.

Smith, 86, founded the festival back in 2000, and has brought it back just about every year since.

“One year, it rained,” he said.

It started when Smith, then a member of the town’s select board, grew weary of the political infighting that was happening at the time, so he decided to take the $1,000 stipend he received for the position and do something positive with it.

“I liked kites, and I was flying kites myself,” he said.

For Smith, channeling his need to do something positive into kite-flying was easy. He enjoyed the activity so much he once held the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive days of flying at 555 (“Some guy from Texas beat me,” he said).

That first year, in 2000, Smith gave away 300 free kites, and with the help of volunteers from the Ogunquit Rotary Club, the festival has come back year after year, giving away an estimated 6,000 free kites, he said.

The kites are made out of white, weatherproof polyethylene, the same material installed underneath siding on the outer walls of homes. Each year, the festival offers the kites to anyone who wants them, and also offers crayons and markers for parents and kids to decorate the kites.

Alana Marceta, 36, of Wells, said she has forgotten how many years in a row she and her kids, now ages 5 and 7, have been coming to the festival. She called her family “frequent flyers.”

“It’s lots of fun for the kids, get together, do something different besides just go to the beach,” she said.

The festival is also a draw for more dedicated kite-flying enthusiasts like Glenn Davison, 65, of Chelmsford, Mass. He rattled off a list of kite-flying associations he belongs to that were represented Saturday, including the American Kitefliers Association, the Nor’Easters Kite Club based in South Portland, and the Massachusetts Kite Flyers.

Davison has been flying kites for the past 25 years, and walked up and down the beach Saturday morning holding a string with six connected kites, all different colors, flying overhead. Other professional-grade kites splashed color all over the blue sky Saturday morning.

Davison said he loved letting other people hold the kite string, saying it always brings a smile to people’s faces.

“It’s such a relaxing thing. It’s like you’re bonding with nature by holding onto a kite string, and people are amazed because they’re actually feeling the wind,” he said. “You don’t get to feel nature. You get to look at it, but you don’t get to hold it in your hand and enjoy it.”