Paragliding in BC

Paragliding in BC

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Ozone Chabre Open - Day Five (no task)

Another day of excessive wind! So far on this trip we experienced the "boora" wind in Croatia, the "foehn" in Germany and now the "mistral' in France. They're calling it a petite Mistral because it's only blowing 40 km/hr instead of 100 so I guess we're lucky. We sat on launch until about 4pm today until they gave us the option of going back to HQ or hiking to a nearby ridge. Chrissi & I decided to go down (the ones who went to the other site didn't end up flying either), but we made our descent a great adventure.

A handful of us were going to have to wait for the next round of shuttle buses, so Chrissi & I decided to hike down with our gliders to the main road. We saw 2 guys heading down ahead of us, and since we'd have to wait an hour anyway it made sense to meet the bus at the bottom. It ended up being an hour and a half hike down! The 2 guys in front met us about half way down and gallantly offered to take our wings since they'd sent theirs down in a van. Turns out they were in the Navy & hiking around with heavy packs is nothing for them so we quickly handed over our gear and made some new friends.

We've made the most of our no fly days - yesterday I got to sit in a new pod harness that hasn't hit the market yet (a prototype Advance Impress 3) and tonight we got 2 other sneak peaks. First, Russ Ogden from Ozone did an awesome slide show/Q&A on the process of designing gliders, and then Jockey Sanderson gave us a look at the trailer for his Security in Flight 2 video. Very cool stuff in the paragliding world!

No comments: