Own That Thermal, Bitch!

One thing I really need to stop doing is being a thermal’s bitch. You ever feel like that? Where a thermal has control of you and almost a personality of its own and says “ha ha, you’re mine!” One second it treats you to smooth 5m/s lift, the next second it spits you out and makes you suffer as you fly through its rough edge, and then as you reinflate the one half of your glider that went missing in the process and fly upwind to fly through it again, it’s gone.

It’s definitely very stupid, but maybe a new reaction to this sort of thing could be a sort of american ghetto-attitude where as you do your 360’s perfectly climbing in a thermal, you can think to yourself “you’re mine, beotch”, and then if you find yourself in shitty scrappy lift and it gets a bit rough, combined with one of those fancy sideways snaps and head movements (brakes in one hand of course), you let out a defiant “oh no you din’t!!!!!!”. That could always ease a bit of nervousness and could be really funny if your radio were locked on.

OK, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about again – must be the fucking heat out here. Moving along…

I had a really nice time flying for almost 2.5 hours today reaching and surpassing the 100 hour mark (finally!!!) and as I did, I realized how important it is to use the pitch and dive energy of your glider to turn it on its yaw axis. Cores were fairly strong today and there were plenty of times where you’d be pitched back rocketing up and then you’d catch the dive as your glider accelerated forward. I know this isn’t anything new, but I guess what I experimented with was turning the glider with total weightshift as it would dive forward and I found that although instinctively it made me a bit nervous, doing it made me stay in lift much more efficiently.

Maybe it’s that see-saw sort of feeling that makes me want to shit my pants sometimes when paragliding. That rush of wind you feel when rocketing up sometimes, and then hoping that next second you won’t see the trailing edge of your wing… Or like today, I suddenly hit 4.5m/s sink, then watched as the reading on my vario went from -4.5 to -3.5 to -2.5 to -1.5, well you get the picture, until I was rocketing up at 5 m/s. As the readings changed so quickly, I was sitting there anticipating a juicy thermal, but a bit anxious because I had no idea what the climb would be like – smooth, choppy, how much, etc. But that’s half the fun of paragliding – there are always so many unknowns.

It’s all about feeling comfortable in the air though, that’s for sure. Your comfort zone expands each time you have a noteworthy flight, be it a conscious thing or not. With that your goals become more ambitious, just like mine: set a new personal best, fly over Mt.Buffalo, fly over Feathertop, do a proper SAT, and have 150 hours airtime, all before I leave OZ. Ha ha! What I want might be just a TAD unreasonable, but…yeah, so it might be totally unreasonable, but it’s fun to dream.

Smiley flights!