Fun flying at the farm

The wind on the hill was S-WSW today, so just before lunch we headed up from some tandem flights. Phil was first...

...and after launching we hung around a bit in the patchy lift before the wind swung slightly more to the west and mostly just blew along the ridge.

We landed, did the vehicle shuffle, and Heather was ready for the next flight.

The wind had picked up a little, and she was lighter than Phil, so pretty much as soon as I pulled the wing up she was lifted off the ground.

I tried to run forwards but was lifted into the air after a few paces as the wing started flying slowly forwards.

The slope at the top of the hill is a very gentle one, and although we touched down briefly once we were soon in the air flying out from the launch.

There was more lift during this flight and we climbed above launch height as we (slowly) headed out from the hill before landing in the valley.

Next a short flight with Phil from the top (wind had picked up slightly more, had difficulty controlling the wing while checking lines before we were attached) but once in the air it was all good. We got above launch and flew along the ridgeline some before landing on the top of the ridge further down (near the farm truck for an easy retrieve).

The wind had slowly increased still more and I decided to leave it for a while.

As the sun started to get low I headed back up with Dad for a final check and we arrived on launch to find the wind strength perfect but the direction slighty cross. Fine for launching, but the direction was the similiar to earlier in the day and just 10-15degrees more to the south would have caused a mega lift band out the front of the hillface, rather than small, ever changing patches of lift swinging around the peak of the hill and windy sink to fly through in front of the hill to get over the flats to the house.

The view on launch was amazing - the sun was about 15min from setting, the massive clouds deeper in the mountains were golden pink hues - half of the horizon looked like a movie set backdrop or a photoshopped postcard!

We launched into the smooth evening air and found the lift better than we expected - by soaring the crown of the hill we got up to 650m as the sun dipped down to touch the horizon and slip slowly over the edge.

The lift eased off and we slowly flew out from the hill, over the flats and down to land in front of the house. It wasn't a long flight, we didn't go very far, or high, or achieve any of the other big numbers that often make up a great flight - but it was great nonetheless.
The smoothness of the air, the sound of the wind in the lines, the unfamiliar viewpoint of familiar places in the last light of evening- combine that with the thrill of flying with my Dad (we've flown together before, but never as good a flight as this from the hill) and it all added up to pure magic. All the difficulties of paragliding become insignificant and forgotten when days and flights like this are possible!

Soaring at Mt Oates

I rushed up the hill when I noticed that the wind was blowing pretty much right on the face at a soaring strength (very rare except just before a thunderstorm hits). Didn't get much height as I flew away from launch until I got out over the main face, then the lift was good with a nice wide lift band.
Some pics...

Take-off is the bare patch on top of the hill (plenty of room hey?) in the center of the pic.

Looking down the valley...

Recently repaired dam (wall damaged by flooding, we cleaned years of accumulated silt out of the bottom as well).

Making the most of the day!!

What a great spot to be at lunch time!! Brett (the far pilot) and I talked about making a run over to the Kiewa Valley if the day looked good enough (xc skies was predicting a light SE and good climbs) and we took off just before 1pm to check it out.
I didn't find anything over Marcus until I got over the second 'bump' where I took a tight little climb up to 1,000m, then searched around for the core - the air was going up everywhere as I flew back towards launch and I knew the core would be worth finding. I found it just over launch and it was good, peaking at 5.5m/s and taking me up over 2,100m. "Woohoo! The day's goanna be epic" I thought, and headed across to Goldmine. Brett was already over there and had gone down the ridge a ways - see him?... ... I didn't find anything as I approached or flew over the ridge but I'd gotten a 13:1 glide over so I kept going towards Pyramid. I arrived over the lower point with plenty of height, but there was no lift there so I turned right and headed in towards the second point, pretty happy to have bypassed two climbs that I usually need to take. I arrived there and still no lift! Weird, I'd thought I'd be getting sucked into screamers over Pyramid if Mystic was giving off 5.5m/s climbs - maybe the climb is further along... Nope! Only more sink...
Now I was low, just over the trees, and in desperate scratching mode - following the ridgeline down and circling in anything that would even keep me up. Lower and lower with nothing to indicate any nearby lift.... I stopped to circle in zero's at the lowest point of the spur (bottom left of the pic above), wondering what had gone wrong with the day and my thermal spotting. There was plenty of sun around, light wind on the hill... so where were the thermals???
Well, one of them was underneath me, it turned out. The zeros slowly became ones, and then the climb steadily improved until I was happily climbing at 2-2.5m/s back up to 2,000m.
I headed in towards the top of Pyramid for a top-off before crossing the Tawonga Gap and straight away was flying in sink. I had a 2:1 glide in to the top of the hill and didn't have much time to play around there as I was still going down. No thermal off the top, sink down to the second point, still no lift... it was all feeling horribly familiar as I got lower and lower. Half way down the ridgeline I finally flew into a light, drifty thermal which averaged 0.9m/s for the next 20min. It was drifting quite a lot too, but that was good because by the time I left it I was already a third of the way over the gap and back around 2,000m. Interestingly, each climb had topped out 100m lower than the one before... I was very keen to avoid any more 2:1 glides... ... Landing on the road below HAS been done before, but it's not the sort of thing you'd wish on anybody - I flew very slow and made the most of the light lift downwind of the thermal until I was safe within an easy glide of the Kiewa Valley landing options.
The glide was good and I arrived over the ridge-line with over 1,700m asl, which steadily reduced no matter what I did. I sank as I flew on the right side of the ridge (the SE wind should be carrying the thermals over to somewhere around here...), I sank as I flew on the left side of the ridge (Huh! Maybe it's triggering earlier, or maybe there's a valley wind that's carrying the lift the other direction?), I sank when I flew over points (why weren't they triggering??), I sank when I flew over saddles. There wasn't even the hint of lift around, and by this time I'd discarded so many theories about what was happening and was totally confused. I arrived at a bowl and was low enough that I had to stay and either climb out or bomb out. My average sink rate slowed and finally there were clues of lift around - short scraps of lift that would lift half the wing and allow me to do half a turn or so before they were gone - but at least I wasn't sinking out any more. I bobbed up and down, exploring the lift and trying to find out where it was coming from (or going to), gaining a couple of hundred metres, before it all disappeared. Bugger.
I didn't have enough height to cross the valley (at least there were some clouds over there), or even make it to the next bowl up the ridge, had no idea what was going on with the air, and needed to go somewhere fast because the sink was increasing again. Just before my radio had gone flat (AAA Alkalines just don't handle the cold as well as Lithium-Ion packs) I'd heard from Brett (ahead of me) that he couldn't figure out what was happening on the hills and was heading into the valley. Oh well, if what you're doing isn't working - do something else!
I flew out over a spur (maybe... maybe...no.), had a bit of a wander up over the tree-line (nope, that's not working either...) and flopped into the valley.
Now a while back I flew from The Pines on a fairly stable day - I just couldn't seem to get over 1,400m for ages and in a burst of unquestioned insanity I bashed upwind for most of the afternoon (away from much higher looking clouds 30km downwind...) but I did learn one very useful thing - when you're low vineyards can be very reliable triggers.
And there were a succession of vineyards sprinkled up the Kiewa valley. Yay! I headed for the nearest one and it worked again! I climbed from 700m back up to 1,500m, then at the next vineyard from 850m to 1,500m, then again from 1,000m to 1,300m - where I headed for the top end of the little side valley on in the right center of the pic below.
You'd think I would have learned by now...I found sink where my paragliding knowledge said there should be lift.... sigh, heading along the ridgline, getting lower and lower, being tempted to head towards the road to save some walking when I landed (which usually results in less walking, but always results in less flying), but there was a gap ahead - if there was no lift here (a good trigger point if the valley wind was all back-to-front) I'd head for the road. But... there was lift!! A tight but welcome climb that lifted me from 700m back to 1,450m!
Here I used my experience to do a smart thing by flying crosswind to a nice point (baking in the sun with the wind presumably blowing up it's face) of the N side of the valley where I could catch a thermal up through the 1,500m valley inversion and finally get some good height and fly along the peaks of the ridgeline.
Except... there was no lift there! And lots of sink! I couldn't believe it! The wind was doing very different things at different levels and I'd thought I'd nearly be able to ridge soar that face until I did get a thermal. Ahh well, back down the same sinky ridge line I'd followed before, back to the same point I'd climbed out of 20min before, hmm, no climb... keep heading down the ridge I guess.... What is with today? Maybe I should just do the opposite of everything that I think of...
A bit further down I found a climb that was so light and delicate that it took every gram of concentration that I had to stay in it meandered slowly along at the mercy of the wind. I was staying with, flying it like a flatlands thermal, and it drifted me back onto the ridgeline I'd attempted to get up on before. It disappeared, re-appeared, disappeared again, and I left, then there it was again for a few turns, then gone again, then gone for good but by then I was at 1,300m (funny, since 1pm every thermal seemed to top out lower than the one before...) and in a really light convergence zone from the wind blowing out of Happy Valley opposite me. And, I was over the northern ridgeline.
Dramatic burntout patches from the Feb '09 fires were sprinkled along the hills and ridge around me, but these were the later, slower burning part of the fire and hadn't caused much damage (burning small trees, bushes, and dead branches on the ground, browning the established trees but not killing them).
From this point (above right of my shoes in the pic below) I got another slow, drifty, sortof climb that got me most of the way across the the bowl behind it -and fed into a genuine thermal - 2.8m/s back up to the spectacular heights of 1,850m!! Woohoo!! A good climb after ages spent grubbing around low always feels fantastic! Being able to finally relax, after the intense concentration required to beat whatever obstacles you have been fighting, is such a release! And the view is much better by then too!! And if it's late in the day and you have been nurturing the suspicion that the day has died for a while, it's just great!!
It was late in the day, but I was over the hills on the right side of the valley finally, with a tailwind behind me and smooth late-afternoon conditions ahead. Yeehar!!!
Lookit the view! Lookit how far I've come!

I cut the corner of the next bowl and gliding along the ridge in smooth air, weightshifting to work every bit if lifty air I could find, and slid over Savhill about 300m over the takeoff. I was hoping for a late climb from here but didn't find one. There was a cloud of dust heading down the new track though, which looked like Michael's truck (Dozer driver who's been making the track for Bob). I gave him a ring on the mobile and, sure enough, it was him! He had just knocking off for the day and soon spotted me as I flew over - we had a quick chat and he told me what the wind was doing at ground level. I didn't find any lift to speak of over the next few bowls but the air was warm and smooth and the late shadows and sunlight made the view spectacular.
All too soon I was doing a final circle to check the wind strength and direction, making sure the camera was secured in it's bag and the flight-deck all zipped up, looking hard to make sure I hadn't missed any powerlines, final approach, crabbing along downwind of a road and powerline, kicking the legs to make sure there's plenty of blood flow and they'll work ok, standing up in the harness, a bit of brakes, watching the ground, brakes up.... flare... and down.
The steady wind in my face is gone, the ground is firm and steady beneath my feet, my wing - which has been moving above my head and telling me what the air is doing for the last four hours - is suddenly still and quite - just a pile of material and string now. Just material and string.
I slowly pack up, savoring the afterglow of the flight, remembering the beauty of the late shadows, feeling the muscle aches from hours in contact with the harness that I never feel while flying, wondering how I'll get back to my car....

I hadn't organised a retrieve and decided to hitch hike until I ran out of daylight and then think about ringing a friend. Hitching back to Bright from here doesn't work very well, I've found, because you either have to take three (or four) lifts if you go via Happy Valley and Ovens, or at least two lifts if you go via Tawonga. The problem is as you run out of daylight less and less cars come past and nobody wan't to pick you up after dark. So I decided to make for Wodonga instead. It was much closer, I could stay the night there and retrieve the car (and maybe fly again) in the morning. Even though I was on a back road I'd only walked a few km's before a nice old guy in a semi stopped for me. Once we had the wing up in the cab (looong way up) we headed off. Tom was on his way back to the farm north of Holbrook after delivering a load of hay to the fire affected farms down in Gippsland. He insisted on dropping me off at the doorstep of where I headed for - no mean feat maneuvering a rig that size through the streets of Wodonga. Thanks Tom, it's people like you that make the world a better place.

Bright Open - Day 5

We flew today - task 2 - and it all went pretty well. No one hurt, 4 in goal (that I've heard of). I didn't make it to goal, I couldn't punch through the wind from Mystic towards the second last turnpoint.
The course was: Start - Goldmine, TP1 - Smoko Ridge, TP2 - Blackfellas Peak, TP3 - Little Mystic, TP4 - Porpunkuh Bridge, TP4 - Little Mystic, Goal - Mystic LP. Total distance - 51.7km.

Things I think I did right:
- Didn't launch straight away. It was a good thing to put off the stress of the gaggle for an extra 30min.
- Was near the down-task edge of the start cylinder at the start time.
- Took a pretty direct route to Little Mystic - that saved heaps of time.

Things I didn't do so well:
- Thermal with the gaggles - especially when the air's a bit rough I'm just not used to having lots of glider around me. I like to move around in the thermal and look for stronger cores and it frustrates me to try and circle at diameter of the least efficient climber....
- I should have pushed harder earlier on stay with a faster gaggle instead of circling in a weak climb and getting stuck with a slow gaggle for ages.
- I should have headed direct towards the Porepunkah bridge intead of flying through Mystic - I'd heard that people were getting stuck there and could see them there so I should have avoided it and tried for Apex or at least a glide up the center of the valley.
- Stayed in the strong lift over Mystic when the gaggle joined it instead of leaving (? assuming it would have been safe....)
- Used my height from Mystic to get as far along the course as possible, rather than flying back to land at the Mystic LP.

But all in all it was a good day of flying!

Here's a pic of the field shortly after the start.

Bright Open - Day 5

We flew today - task 2 - and it all went pretty well. No one hurt, 4 in goal (that I've heard of). I didn't make it to goal, I couldn't punch through the wind from Mystic towards the second last turnpoint.
The course was: Start - Goldmine, TP1 - Smoko Ridge, TP2 - Blackfellas Peak, TP3 - Little Mystic, TP4 - Porpunkuh Bridge, TP4 - Little Mystic, Goal - Mystic LP. Total distance - 51.7km.

Things I think I did right:
- Didn't launch straight away. It was a good thing to put off the stress of the gaggle for an extra 30min.
- Was near the down-task edge of the start cylinder at the start time.
- Took a pretty direct route to Little Mystic - that saved heaps of time.

Things I didn't do so well:
- Thermal with the gaggles - especially when the air's a bit rough I'm just not used to having lots of glider around me. I like to move around in the thermal and look for stronger cores and it frustrates me to try and circle at diameter of the least efficient climber....
- I should have pushed harder earlier on stay with a faster gaggle instead of circling in a weak climb and getting stuck with a slow gaggle for ages.
- I should have headed direct towards the Porepunkah bridge intead of flying through Mystic - I'd heard that people were getting stuck there and could see them there so I should have avoided it and tried for Apex or at least a glide up the center of the valley.
- Stayed in the strong lift over Mystic when the gaggle joined it instead of leaving (? assuming it would have been safe....)
- Used my height from Mystic to get as far along the course as possible, rather than flying back to land at the Mystic LP.

But all in all it was a good day of flying!

Here's a pic of the field shortly after the start.

Bright Open - Day 4

Today was the first flyable day of the Bright Open. It's been really well organised by Benn and Hamish but, until today, the weather hasn't co-operated.
But today we got to fly - and although the day didn't look very good initially (windy, with a really low cloud base and a short thermic period) it turned out much better than expected.
The task committee decided we start at Goldmine before flying to Smoko Ridge, Blackfella's, Freeburg Ridge, and landing at the Porepunkah Airfield.
Launch went well... ...with all the field off pretty soon - and everyone was going up nicely.
I timed my run over to the Goldmine badly and got there late, low, and behind most of the field. After a lot of looking around I eventually started getting high (around 1,600m was high today!) but heard on the radio that the task had been canceled. This was puzzling for me, as the weather seemed fine and I couldn't think why else the task would be canceled - but I could see from the way the other pilots were flying that they were heading down to landing spots so I spiraled down and landed at the Mystic LP. There I heard that one of the pilots had smacked in pretty hard near the Mystic launch while thermalling low and badly broken his wrist and possible hurt his back. An air ambulance had been called, and the organisers wanted paraglider pilots on the ground before the helicopter arrived.

After packing up and trying to find out some of the who, where, how, how bad questions (along with everyone else) we headed back to the Outdoor Inn for some food and to await developments.
Turns out we hadn't been flying for long enough for the task to score any points so as of the fourth day of the comp we are all still equal first....

Once the injured pilot had been flown out a number of us went back up the hill and had a very nice fly in the later afternoon conditions.

I had a really fun glide over to Clearspot with Paul and another pilot on an Aspen2
- formation flying by the end and although we were flying into a headwind it was a pretty boyant glide. After that I hunted around clearspot for a good climb but it wasn't working that well and the highest I got was 1,560m so I headed down towards Blackfellas, then along the ridge towards the airfield. There were little bubbles around, but nothing really worth turning in so I ended up landing at the airfield after Paul. A fun fly!

Extreme weather

The weather forecast for the weekend was very hot with winds of around 50km/hr in the mountains. But, further west and north there were areas of lighter wind forecasts.... After a lot of last minute phone calls and emails I headed to Deni on Friday night - arriving around midnight. Garry rolled in from Melbourne 1.5hrs later, with a driver, and Benn was driving west from Sydney. By 6am we were on the road driving north of Deniliquin, aiming to get to the lighter winds, tow up, and fly a long, long ways....
While I was listening to the weather warnings on the radio the night before the thought had crossed my mind that maybe I should stick around home just in case of fires - with them in mind the day looked like one of the really bad ones. But the house has been built with fires in mind, is very defendible, and I knew that there'd be people around to defend it if need be so I kept going. Flying wise it looked a bit iffy - like maybe it'd be fine to launch in but maybe it'd be crazy to. One thing was for sure, if we did get up early the potential of the day was huge. Cloudbase was supposed to be above 4,000m and the winds increasing to over 80km/hr up higher.
We knew there would be plenty of lift around - after a mild night the temperature passed 40degC around 10am - and just kept getting hotter. 10:30 and someone in the car said, "Hey does that look like dust ahead to you?" and it was. Pretty soon we were driving through a full-on dust storm, forcing us to slow down as the visibility worsened.
At this point, with more heat and wind yet to come, even thinking of flying seemed insane.
Eventually we arrived in Ivanhoe (the dust storm had mostly lessened by now) where we eventually met up with Benn. He'd driven for a good bit of the night to meet up with us and, several km's behind us on the Cobb Hwy, was forced to stop completely several times as the visibility reduced to several metres.
After discussing options over ice-creams in the Ivanhoe cafe (air conditioned - lovely) we headed north again.
Ivanhoe is supposedly on the border between 'red country' and 'black country' and we soon noticed the difference. Instead of a red dust deserty landscape with occational small stunted trees and lots of roly-poly bushes we were now driving through medium sized scrub sprinkled with taller trees - but not many landing options. In the early part of the flight, when you're scratching in light lift as you drift low over the ground, you really want to have plenty of landing options availeble. Launching in strong winds makes that even more important - the rotor from up-wind obstacles extends further and if you have to land running backwards you may cover some distance between touch-down and when you get the wing under control on the ground - an inconveniently placed tree or fence may ruin your whole day.
After inspecting a potential tow strip about 30km north of the town we returned and waited to see what the day would bring.
About 3pm the wind started backing off so after some chasing around we recieved permission to use the local airstrip to tow from. We set up in the heat (mid forties by now) and Garry launched first, getting away in a light cimb towards the clouds far above us. Ron launced nex, and myself after that. It took me three tows to get away - my first tow I landed about 4km down the road, on the second a radio malfunction occured, but on the third tow I connected with some light lift and drifted off downwind.
By now it was 6:30pm and Ron and Garry had been in the air of over an hour and were way ahead of me - but I was just happy to be flying. Once over 800m the worst of the heat was below me and by 2,500m I was deliciously cool as I circled in the light lift. I knew there wasn't any big distance left in the day but since I was drifting roughly with the Cobb Hwy south the goal was to just stay in the air for as long as possible (hopefully untill it cooled down on the ground).
The flying was really enjoyable and super smooth - so smooth that I took my helmet off and hung it on one foot for a while to enjoy the air a bit more! Visually it was stunning - the red dust, the outlines of old floods and dry creeks making it look like something on Mars, huge areas of dry desert sprinkled with island like clumps of trees, a wall of dust near the horizon to the west (not coming closer - I was watching!), dust devils ripping across the ground below, carrying the red dust right up to the clouds so that their bases had a reddish tinge, the single road visible streatching off into the distance, everything turning to gold and red as the sun slowly sank into the haze of the horizon....
My final glide was a good one, taking me km's down the road to land just after 8pm! After a quick 180 to land into the light wind I was just packed up by the time Benn arrived and we started the long drive back.
We met up with the others at the servo in Hay before grabbing fish and chips and going for a swim in the river - heavenly!
Back in Deni by midnight....
The next day Benn and I towed, but neither of us was able to fly for long. I landed about 7km downwind but the retrieve took over 3hrs - locked gates, roads not going where the map indicated, it was a good reminder that flying in this type of country carries it's own hazards. Phone coverage is limited to near the towns so keeping your driver updated with your position is very important. Devices like the sPOT tracker make flying here much safer - you know that even if you have to spend a night out in the bush you'll be found sooner rather than later.

Once we got back to Ron's place we started to hear the news of the devastation being caused by the fires back in Victoria. There was a fire burning within 50km of my house, with a wind change forecast to push it closer later that night so I rushed off. The change did come, but it was much colder and lighter than forecast, and by then 2 people had died in it. Further south over 200 people were killed by fire and more than 2,000 home burnt.