500hrs!

I've just been updating my flight logbook (it's an excel spreadsheet these days) and noticed that I have spent over 500 hours paragliding! Woohoo!!
I remember reading some articles about skill level and time spent doing an activity - a rule-of-thumb number I came across several times was that people approach 'master-craftsman' level sometime after 10,000 hrs... Which echo's my feeling of - there's still heaps and heaps to learn!

One advantage of the excel logbook is it can be stored online (google documents, hotmail skydrive, etc), another is that with a little organisation it's easy to pull various statistics out of it. A good winter time-waster....

Some of the numbers that I thought were interesting were:

30hrs of sleddies!
Less than 30hrs of coastal flying (novice!)
Very similar amount of time spent flying sport (free) tandems to instructional (paying) tandems.
While less than 20% of my flights have been xc flights, over 60% of my airtime has been flying xc - more than 3,200km of xc km's flown.

The photo was taken a few days ago at The Pines - a great ridge soaring site (especially in a SSE - which it was the other day!) & also a good thermic site (I flew my first 100km's from here in 2007). It's apparently the rim of an extinct volcano.