Today's Almost Towing Experience

Yesterday I got a phone call from a pilot who said he was interested in towing today. It's kinda funny because we ended up playing a short game of telephone tag, which included me waking up the household he's staying at at 2:00 am - whoops!

Today we headed out to a place kinda in the middle of nowhere, about 20 minutes east of Strathmore. Some hang glider students were being towed behind ATV's, and then we found the group of pilots who were using tow rigs on trucks. The winds were fairly strong for newbie towers such as myself, at about 15 - 20 k's from the south.

Jens, a PG pilot out from Germany, ended up having 3 tows today, 2 being especially successful. With one he went up 4000 feet! It was really cool to watch, even if I was on the ground.

I sat in the truck a couple times too to look at the winch, pressure controls, guages, etc. Man, I never knew towing was so sophisticated! Even little things like the weak links and drogue chute - how cool are those?!

The hangies had 2 of their own trucks, and got lots of towing in. Very very cool to see a hang glider be towed...it's like one second they're on the back of a truck which seems to be in full accelaration, the next second they're 100 feet up - those guys can climb fast! Going tandem hang gliding on a tow rig looks like a rush - I gotta bug one of the pilots to take me one of these days.

One hang glider pilot did some wingovers, and another screamed into his landing - awesome. There's a small part of me that wants to try hang gliding simply because of the speed involved, but then I look at their expensive, bulky, heavy, gliders which take forever to learn to fly, and I'm happy being a paragliding pilot.

So, despite the fact that I didn't get to fly today, I had a nice day...I learned a heck of a lot, and am looking forward to my first real tow. And hey, only 31 days until my flying trip - yyyyyaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy!