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1st Aspen XC!!!
It was a great Saturday - here the story....
I took off from Mystic for the 3rd time (1st flight was a sleddie, 2nd I latched onto a bubble and ecked 30min airtime out of it and others that I could see by the rising dust from the convoy of vehicles heading up to launch) and had to scratch around Marcus and the front of launch for a while before eventually hooking into a climb that I followed up through the gaggle around launch (8-14 pilots) and out over the back. By the time it ran out I was at 1500m half way to Goldmine.
Thats the Aspen2. It's taking a while to get used to it but the main things I notice are that it moves around way more than my last wing (it doesn't move as much as a single unit - the two sides are sometimes sorta doing slightly different things) and that the handling is much more direct - I can turn quicker, tighter, but it'll spin much easier and without much hesitation. Correct input is required.
Looking down the other side of the Goldmine ridge. I flew past the top of the ridgeline and was getting pretty low before I found a climb that took me up to 1700m. Colin Jeffreys (flying his Gradient Golden2) flew across and joined me in the thermal for a while before pushing off down the ridgeline. I hung in for as long as the lift lasted and took a couple of pics as I set off after him.
Looking back at Mt Buffalo. If you look closely (click on the pic to see a larger version) you can see some paragliders flying around launch on the far right of the pic, about half way up.
Here you can see Colin a bit further down the ridge, and might just be able to make out Basil further ahead (above and to the right of Mt Feathertop). When I got to the end of the ridgeline there was no good lift so I stuck around in the zeros for about 8min until a cycle came through. I tried pushing upwind back towards Bright for a while, but my forward speed was so low, occasional patches of 3m/s sink put me pretty close to the ridge soon, and it was getting rougher and rougher. In retrospect the roughness was probably from the heat of the middle of the day rather than the wind picking up as I feared and I should have persisted in my efforts to get back to Bright. It was probably possible (Greg made it back from the Big Shed - even though it took him 2hrs and I think he averaged 6kph) and would have been good endurance training for long flights. There was plenty of lift around and as soon as you turned downwind you had plenty of speed and distance to make it to landing options.
Anyway, I'd had enough of the roughness and after taking one final climb that was too good to pass up (+5m/s on the 20sec averager for a few turns) I topped out at 2010m, turned for Harrietville and arrived there with stacks of altitude and 74kph groundspeed!
I lost height pretty soon and landed in what I found later was a no-landing paddock. Packed up the wing and was just starting to look through pics on the side of the road when Basil showed up - he's driven back from Bright to pick me up when he saw that my car was still at the LP. I won't say that this is typical of the paragliding community, but this type of looking out for one another is far from uncommon and just one of the many things I love about being a paraglider.
I took off from Mystic for the 3rd time (1st flight was a sleddie, 2nd I latched onto a bubble and ecked 30min airtime out of it and others that I could see by the rising dust from the convoy of vehicles heading up to launch) and had to scratch around Marcus and the front of launch for a while before eventually hooking into a climb that I followed up through the gaggle around launch (8-14 pilots) and out over the back. By the time it ran out I was at 1500m half way to Goldmine.
Thats the Aspen2. It's taking a while to get used to it but the main things I notice are that it moves around way more than my last wing (it doesn't move as much as a single unit - the two sides are sometimes sorta doing slightly different things) and that the handling is much more direct - I can turn quicker, tighter, but it'll spin much easier and without much hesitation. Correct input is required.
Looking down the other side of the Goldmine ridge. I flew past the top of the ridgeline and was getting pretty low before I found a climb that took me up to 1700m. Colin Jeffreys (flying his Gradient Golden2) flew across and joined me in the thermal for a while before pushing off down the ridgeline. I hung in for as long as the lift lasted and took a couple of pics as I set off after him.
Looking back at Mt Buffalo. If you look closely (click on the pic to see a larger version) you can see some paragliders flying around launch on the far right of the pic, about half way up.
Here you can see Colin a bit further down the ridge, and might just be able to make out Basil further ahead (above and to the right of Mt Feathertop). When I got to the end of the ridgeline there was no good lift so I stuck around in the zeros for about 8min until a cycle came through. I tried pushing upwind back towards Bright for a while, but my forward speed was so low, occasional patches of 3m/s sink put me pretty close to the ridge soon, and it was getting rougher and rougher. In retrospect the roughness was probably from the heat of the middle of the day rather than the wind picking up as I feared and I should have persisted in my efforts to get back to Bright. It was probably possible (Greg made it back from the Big Shed - even though it took him 2hrs and I think he averaged 6kph) and would have been good endurance training for long flights. There was plenty of lift around and as soon as you turned downwind you had plenty of speed and distance to make it to landing options.
Anyway, I'd had enough of the roughness and after taking one final climb that was too good to pass up (+5m/s on the 20sec averager for a few turns) I topped out at 2010m, turned for Harrietville and arrived there with stacks of altitude and 74kph groundspeed!
I lost height pretty soon and landed in what I found later was a no-landing paddock. Packed up the wing and was just starting to look through pics on the side of the road when Basil showed up - he's driven back from Bright to pick me up when he saw that my car was still at the LP. I won't say that this is typical of the paragliding community, but this type of looking out for one another is far from uncommon and just one of the many things I love about being a paraglider.
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