The only downside is my snack budget will go through the roof due to a certain paraglider pilot who will always top land to drive down as long as there are BBQ chips on board. No crumbs in my new truck Martin!
Paragliding:
a visual journey
Follow along with us as adventurers take to the skies for the first time on a tandem, learn valuable paragliding skills or even catch a glimpse of pilots just goofing around!
After months of research and watching ads on auto trader, I finally traded in my little Jeep Patriot and got a real 4x4…a Toyota FJ Cruiser! Off the top of my head (where the wind is blowing my hair all crazy) I can think of 7 other paraglider pilots who own one of these…and there's a good reason why. As someone who goes to the hill a whole bunch I get rides up in lots of different vehicles and do my share of driving down, so after a lot of unofficial test drives this was definitely the paraglidermobile I wanted.
The only downside is my snack budget will go through the roof due to a certain paraglider pilot who will always top land to drive down as long as there are BBQ chips on board. No crumbs in my new truck Martin!
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Getting my geek on this morning, watching Apple present the iPhone 6 and all the other new goodies. It seems the new watch can do anything…I wonder how flying Apps will work with it? I can't wait to find out! Another picture story - I was getting a kind of low yesterday when I saw a car driving up the road to launch. Paragliding textbooks say a car driving on a road can release a thermal, so I flew over top and was rewarded with a great save. The 4 other paragliders in the air soon joined in my thermal - everyone merged in smoothly and enjoyed the ride up together! You can click on the pictures to read the captions and get the whole story. Dave, a pilot from the UK, emailed me to do some site guiding while he was in town for a business trip. Even with the forecast winds blowing over the back, we still drove up "just in case". Martin managed a running reverse launch in the light winds, then used way more patience than I think I'll ever possess to (eventually) squeak out over 2 hours, spending the whole time only a few hundred meters over the ground! Dave and Mark ended up doing forward launches as the wind was almost non-existent at launch by now, and I caught Mark's fabulous take-off on my iPhone: Andrei sent out a message to fly Vedder yesterday afternoon, and by the time we all got to the landing zone there was a group of 8 excited to go up. It was a brand new site for most of us, although Martin had flown there years ago when he still flew hang gliders. The launch is flat with a steep cliff at the edge (pilots below are standing right at the take off spot) so a strong running reverse or forward launch is needed at the back of the flat area then a "leap of faith" off the edge! Everyone flew and enjoyed the change of scene from the usual sites. Yesterday I had one of my favourite solo flights of the year. It wasn't the furthest I went and it wasn't the longest I've stayed in the air. But after a summer of teaching and tandems and having set plans (must land in 20 minutes to meet next passenger…must drive chase vehicle for student learning XC instead of launching...) I threw all "musts" away and just…flew. I took chances of gliding on to areas that may not have lift, but that also forced me away from my usual landing spot. It was glorious and fun and just what I needed to remind me that my favourite thing to do when flying alone is to go explore. And that I did. p.s. Captions with each photo tell the story. Every year, Skywalk holds a video competition asking pilots to show what they love about their wings. I had started a video to answer the question "How did you get into this? How do people learn?" and decided to enter my movie into the competition. Here's the finished product…enjoy! As a pilot, it's your job to always be watching the sky. With views like this, it's hardly work at all! I probably spend more time than is practical for my business going through GoPro footage, but finding little gems like this make me smile. Catching Deb's expression of excitement as she bumped into a thermal while "driving" is priceless, and made it even more rewarding to have gone "jet setting" back to Keremeos for the day to bring the joy of flying to more new friends. |
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