32km from Rybury

Kirsty Cameron at base high over the Wiltshire countryside.

There was a sudden break in the atrocious weather today so I went to Rybury for a fly. It was quite busy with people skimming this tiny hill but I managed to climb out with Kirsty Cameron and avoid the chaos. Briefly at the roughly 5000ft cloudbase there were three of us circling; there was Kirsty on her Skywalk Poison-2 and Chris Jones (I think) on an old Nova Mamboo. We all went on glide in different directions no doubt each with their own tactics in mind. Mine was to fly to a nice looking cloud that I thought was building but was rewarded with nothing much. So I continued on a glide towards Hungerford hoping for some lift from the town but got a lazy climb before I got there. Whilst climbing in weak but usable lift I noticed Kirsty circling high in the distance and Chris and another glider climbing well underneath her. I thought they were reachable on glide from my position so I broke the cardinal rule of never leaving lift and went on what turned out to be a death glide towards them. I hit major sink along the way and that left me with very little height to work with when I did hit the bottom of their climb. I ended up landing and watching them glide in to the distance. It was a bad decision and I should have stuck with my climb and got on with my own flight instead of trying to join the others. Kirsty ended up flying to Reading for 65km or so, nice. Still my little 32km was a nice flight with some great views over the Wiltshire countryside.
As usual I landed at a nice pub! I watched paragliders fly overhead whilst having a pint in the sunshine, not so bad I guess.


The pub with paragliders overflying me!

Curse the British Weather

I am writing this watching and listening to the rain and wind hammer against my living room window and I'm cursing the British weather again. Why is it that the UK seems to be a magnet for low pressure weather systems lately? They bring the strong wind and often the rain so it's not been very conducive for paragliding for the last couple of weeks. And it's past midsummer already! I expected to be flying a lot more and as I've turned in to a bit of a cross country snob it's been even more frustrating. But there have been some small windows that have just about been flyable and some people have managed to put some flights on the league, but nothing epic. I've managed to get some very windy flights in at Bunster Hill in Deryshire, the Long Mynd in Shropshire as well as locally around here at Chinnor Hill. But I've not managed or been particularly inspired to go cross country so I still have only one flight in our UK league. I'm waiting patiently for the 'Big Day' but Murphy's law dictates that I will be doing something else when it comes along and so will miss it ... I do have a couple of pictures from the last two weeks below. I wonder why England looks so green?

Looking down at Long Mynd on a windy & cloudy day.


Cherry picking a flyable window at Chinnor before it became too windy.

SIV above Lake Annecy with Jocky

photo: John Porter approaching our caravan park.

I just returned from a very enjoyable SIV course in Annecy in the Northern French Alps. SIV is a French acronym for Simulation d'Incident en Vol or in English Simulated Incidence in Flight. Basically you get to put your glider though all sorts of configurations that you'd usually prefer not to see it in and then learn how to deal with it. So you learn things like recovery from max amplitude spins, flat spins, canopy collapses, stalls etc. All this is done above a lake with a safety boat and comforting radio guidance. We stayed in a nice caravan park at the South end of the lake right next to the SIV landing field. The course was organised by Jocky and his team at Escape and was flawless. We also managed to do a bit of free flying each side of the course with a few flights from Marlens, L'Anglettaz and Semnoz as well as the popular Forclaz and Plan Fait launches.

I met a great bunch of pilots who were on the course with me. Paraglider pilots seem to come from all walks of life; we had oil workers, kitchen worktop specialists, graphic designers, nurses, trainee fast jet pilots and even a professional cage fighter!

An SIV course is thoroughly recommended ! ...

80km in Greifenburg Austria

The weather has been pretty awful in the UK with a constant low pressure system hanging around giving high winds. So after looking at the forecast for Austria I decided to pop over to try and do some big triangle flights in Greifenburg with Trias a Scottish pilot. I had my mind set on a classic 115km triangle and so went to the take off in Embergeralm to have a go at it. This is the first time I'd been here and was pleasantly suprised with the setup; a nice take off area and next to it a place to have coffee and cake. You have to pay a small fee for this convenience but it was money well spent I felt. The main landing area in the valley is similarly setup and although there is no cable car there is a regular navette or minibus service that takes you to launch for 5 Euros. So I managed to fly two sides of my triangle for a total distance of 80km but the last leg was difficult and so I landed near a train station to make an easy retrieve back to the hotel. The cloud base was quite low at about 3200m as we had more humid southwest meteo winds, but with drier easterlies the base can get much higher apparently. It was challenging flying but fun so lets see what the rest of the week has in store. My flight can be seen here

62km from Nant y Moel in SE Wales

I did a great little 62km flight yesterday from Nant y Moel in SE Wales on one of the rounds of the British Club Challenge. I'd never flown in SE Wales before and was looking forward to flying from a new site, but as soon as I turned up I was doubtful that any decent cross country flights could be made as the sky was grey with a low cloud base. But as I was there for the Dunstable club I persevered and although hard work I managed to pull off a reasonable flight; perhaps even one of the best of the day. My strategy was to stay over the higher ground and away from any sky that looked grey and overcast. This meant I had to glide cross wind in a more northerly direction between climbs, I think most other pilots went further to the south in a more downwind direction. I passed over Merthyr where the British Open hang gliding competition was starting and joined a gaggle of hangies in a climb, probably much to their annoyance. Once high enough I carried on my merry way to get a more peaceful climb a few kilometers downwind only to find several of the hang glider pilots zooming over to join my climb, nice to reciprocate the favour! The rest of the flight was the usual mix of glides, getting low and climbing out. But when past Abergavenny I was faced with the choice of which way to fly to get past an airspace restriction, the D-147 danger area which is the Madley Satellite Earth Station I could clearly see from the air. I chose to fly north of it as the sky looked better, but it was the wrong decision and the one that put me on the ground. I landed in a sheep filled field and a nice lady drove me to the nearest village where I waited in the pub for my retrieve (Thanks Steve and Tanya).

Tracklog can be seen here or here.

A Great Time in the French Alps

Yours truly in restitution with Mont Blanc behind. Photos by Tom Payne

So after Austria we drove to France and met up with James and Joe who that night persuaded us to 'Ninja camp' in Annecy which involved my drinking a load of wine and sleeping on the ground, not so great for a 40 year old with a recovering back injury. Again Adam and I were a couple of days early for the course so we did a couple of flights one at Planfait in Annecy and another from St Hilare du Touvet.

Tom Payne (2009 X-Alps competitor!) was the organiser of this weeks mountain masterclass and as soon as I met him I realised that he had put a lot of effort in and that I was going to learn a lot from him. He brought along two helpers Toby Colombe (a very experienced local paragliding guide and XC pilot) and Quentin King another XC hound local to the area. We spent considerable time going over maps of the Northern French Alps learning about valley winds and convergence areas and generally getting a good understanding of the aerology of the entire area. The meteo winds were not ideal but they managed to select some great sites to fly from. We did a great little 40km XC from Montlambert which was hard won and very rewarding as well as visiting new sites to me such as Chamoux and Verel. We also flew from Planfait and St Hilare again.

Quite a wierd experience for me was an evening flight from Chamoux where I took off at 7PM and landed at 8:30PM struggling to get down! It was of course restitution or magic lift but I've never had it so strong and smooth; climbing to over 2000m in 2-4 m/s lift without really having to turn was a quite strange experience for me, especially as it was so smooth you could feel the wake turbulence from other gliders.

A fantastic weeks flying and more importantly it has given me the knowledge and confidence to plan some big XC's in the mountains. Thanks to Nicky Moss of Axis Paragliding UK for organising the trip!


Posing again for a Tom Payne photo ...

Zillertal Open 2009

My first paragliding competition! A bit nervous obviously, mainly because of the start gaggles; the thought of 100+ pilots flying aggressively close together did give me some concern ... Wagga and Nicky both very successful comp pilots (British team) gave me lots of tips and dispelled a few of the nerves I had. Although it was just a local Austrian League comp it was attended by most of the Austrian Team and had a few of the big names there. It was a two task race-to-goal comp on two successive days.

Interestingly I found the race starts not too stressful. Obviously we were all competent pilots and although the flying was close and aggressive everybody was observant and predictable.

The first task was extremely frustating for me as my new Flytec 6030 all singing and dancing comp vario died on me and I was forced to use my backup GPS which I've never bothered to learn to navigate with (duh). So I attempted to learn how to use it mid flight with lots of traffic around me wearing thick gloves, not ideal! It wasn't very successful and I ended up following other pilots around the sky most of the time. This strategy worked some of the time until I flew a few kilometers too far past a turn point to a free flying pilot that wasn't in the comp! The acronym RTFM comes to mind 'Read The Fxxxxxg Manual'. The good news is I did the task and got in to goal, the not so good news is that I went over the goal line in orbit 2000m above the valley floor over an hour after the winner got in! I sheepishly handed in my instrument in the download area and sneaked out before the laughing started. You live an learn.

The second task was much harder and a lot fewer pilots got in to goal, so the fact I only got half way around didn't bother me too much and I got a reasonable amount of distance points. I did however stay up in to the night learning how to use my GPS. I also was keen to fly faster and so pushed on low not taking climbs to their maximum and using a lot of speed bar. Not really the best strategy for the day. Again you live and learn.

Anyway although I only came 37th I did learn heaps about comp flying and am really keen to do more.

Zillertal Open 2009 Results.