Great name if you ask me!
Friday, October 05, 2007
Sunset
After spending weeks driving around with the glider in the car and thinking every day was going to be the day I found that perfect place to fly I finally admited defeat. I only flew 3 times in Tenerife, twice at Taucho and once in a fit of desperation I tried to dune goon a small hill on the NW coast. Both the flights from Taucho were bombouts, the second flight was a brown trouser flight where I was seriously considering landing on the flat roof of a building before I got some unexpected lift and made a small carpark. The wind changed in the last 10 days and meant that some of the unflyable sites I had surveyed might have been flyable then, but when you are one man alone with a hang glider some times it is wise not to push your luck too far.
Snorkel
I got into the habit of climbing down the steps in front of the apartment every morning to go snorkelling after 'breakfast'. It is amazing how many schools of fish there are and looking down you can really see how the lava flowed out to sea creating the shoreline.
Gomera
I visited the island of La Gomera where you get the classic view of Tiede.
Its about 30km West of Tenerife so would be a good cross country flight if you were feeling lucky ;-)
Fun in the pool
Jason and Karl were only here for a week and it blew past. We explored most of the island, savoured the windy roads and got to cloudbase more times that I can remember. Unfortunately cloudbase was always at road level not hang glider level. I flew once whilst the guys were here, after you have flown a hang glider in Tenerife or even seriously thought about doing it you find that it hurts to walk. This is because your balls need to be very large indeed. Its not the taking off or the flying, thats similar everywhere, its landing in small sloping building sites amongst powerlines and large volcanic rocks.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Tiede
We drove up the volcano but missed the last cable car to the top. Had a nice pizza in the north of the island....Drove through cloudbase twice...
Short Flight
I was too late taking off and found no thermals, I was more concerned with landing safely in the small downhill sloping crosswind area that I had to land safely in. I pulled it off and I am a bit less worried about it now... The local tandem operator said I was the second Delta to fly here in 10 years, i can understand why!
Cool
There was a Paraglider soaring the apartment block and he landed only 500m away in a small patch of scrub.... I went to chat with him and arranged to fly Taucho with him the next day....
Fun
I was just starting to realise I could have some fun with the whole under water photography thing when I looked up!
Friday, September 07, 2007
Sunday, September 02, 2007
Carnivale
After a week of non flying and grey skies karl decided to head south and get away from the miserable weather. The last day he was here we went to the notting hill carnival and it was excellent. Lots of happy poeple, huge rivers of people where you just got pushed along. Wicked sound systems with bass that make your vision blur. Even the sun made an appearance and it was a great day. Karl is in Spain with Jason at the moment, We are hoping to head to Tenerife soon.
Tourists
In the end we did allot of touristy things like taking panoramic shots.
It has been the most non happening summer I can remember. I miss the sun.
Karl
After missing out in Switzerland I convinced Karl to jump on the train over from Paris to see a bit of the UK. I was hoping we could go and fly somewhere. As the English paraglider pilot so aptly put it "Go back to Australia, England is Pants for flying" We did some getting blown out and some sitting on the hill waiting for the wind to pick up and alot of marveling at the incredibly optimistic and cheerful forecasts that the BBC
provides.
Back to UK
After a wet week in Aarau with family it was back to the UK. One straight drive leaving basel around 6.30pm after saying a quick bye to by cousin. I just made the 1AM ferry in Dunkirk and was home in bed by around 5.30am . An easy drive the whole way at 130kph
Furkapass
After the forecast deteriorated I decided to take a short cut back to Aargau over the furkapass. In the dark motorbikes passed me fast enough to shake the suzuki and coaches executed 30 point turns to get around the narrow hairpins. Every kilometre is another sign advising the motorcyclists of their impending death.
T/O
Today we were on the opposite side of the valley. There was another inversion and even the eagles were flapping. The debate was when to fly, in theory max heating is going to be around 2pm, but it still looked dead out there. In the end we all flew and found a few bubbles but no thermals and landed in the same bombout field in the valley.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Back in the air
After a phone call from Jas to say that it was looking on for tomorrow we headed up yet another mountain, this time using little cable cars to get to the top....
Bern
Then it was off to Bern for me for the evening of Aug 1 and some impressive fireworks, the next day I caught up with my cousin in Basle and spent a couple of days there as the weather was no good for flying.
Back again
The next day there were no clouds in the usual places and perhaps because there were more pilots and more pressure we made the mistake of lobbing off to early. Jas and I both found ourselves in the bombout down below. Its a tight little field with every imaginable hazard on all sides, roads, buildings, a railway, high tension power lines, paraglider pilots.... With the Perfex its easy, pull the bar in to waste energy so I had no trouble. Jas had to flare hard to stop his glider in the limited space. The whole time Jas flew his huge topless aeros like a champ and made every one of his basebar landings look easy. Go Jas!
Allrichtung
or Allrecht or something like that anyway. It was down the end of the valley and where we landed. An idilic green meadow to pack up in and it was 25'C in the sun and warm. It is hard on the perfex rigging it on concrete as at this T/O you can already see marks on the undersurface...
Otherwise I am getting along just fine with it, its great to fly..
That shot!
Yes, its the obligatory head shot with the show covered mountains in the background. It was cold, really really cold. I am still suffering from freezing myself solid during this flight...
I got up!
On a day when there were hundreds of paragliders and perhaps 15 Hang Gliders and around 20 sailplanes all sharing the same sky. The guy in the sailplane with the red wingtips was just having fun....
The view the other way
When it works, photostich really can make some nice panorama images. If you have a big monitor and a fast internet connection check out the originals on my Flikr site, some are 20,000 by 2000 pixels!
Eggishorn
After getting up way to early for me and then catching the cable car to the top of the Eggishorn together with all the extra work required to get the gliders brought up too... We made it. Jason admires the view!
Fiesche
The next day we drove to Fiesche, we spent the night with a cool local pilot called Stefan and the next day we went mountain flying...
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