Everything is in "vibration" mode. The floor, the ceiling, the windows and seats of the bus almost shake themselves loose of their nuts and bolts as the driver hurtles at high speed along the rutted dirt road to take off. Perhaps he is timing himself, trying to knock off an extra few seconds every day to beat his personal best. Oh, and I forgot to mention, that he has a trailer on the back with the gliders!
It is incredible that when the bus actually stops, you can't feel the souls of your feet, they are completely numb from the vibration and your face feels as if is had been duct-taped to one of those industrial conveyor-belt sorting machines. Good for the circulation.
The briefing took second place to the local school children from Porterville giving us a beautiful send off this morning with songs and much cheering as we lobbed ourself off the mountain for another day of adventure in the sky.
Today was my Joker Card day. For 2 reasons:
The first, and for the first time, my glider went AWOL. Flying along the top of the ridge, I hit turbulence, the glider frontalled, tips collapsed, started flying backwards, I hit the speed bar, caught it on the rebound as it dived, didn't panic and prevented it from entering a spin. A brief hands up to see whether it was going to reproduce anymore surprises, then swung it out the turn as I got a brief second glimpse of the ground, and thought "We are too low for the reserve parachute, but we seem to be going slow enough that the damage won't be too bad". I shimmied over the rocks with about 5m's to spare, and had just had my first true recoverable incident of my paragliding career. And I was happy, I had done a good job.
The second, was that regardless of the event taken place prior to the race start, I could not thermal to save my life today. Could not manage to core or centre anything half decent, either left or right, to get me round the course. Abismal!
It was windy, inverted, with a southerly reinforcing as the afternoon went on. Sea breeze coming in to join in the party, and we had a stopped comp. Flying a meagre 16km, I was saved by the MD (Meet Director) canning the task due to high winds and dangerous conditions along the course line.
Although no one called a Level 2, it was evident that from "Windy Hill", where the majority of the field landed, it was indeed Level 2 on the ground. Blowing over 30km/hr and turbulent.
As I had not had the best day in my flying career, I was sad for the others that they had fought as hard as they had for the task winner only to be awarded a tame 91points for his efforts.
It was a lot of effort, for not a lot of gain apart from I am here to write this Blog.
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