Friday 27 May 2011
- British Paragliding Champion Craig Morgan training hard
It’s raining and, with six Brits holed up in a small house in Slovenia, this can only mean one thing – banter and piss-taking.
Currently the boys are in the kitchen comparing farts, sexual inadequacies and generally running each other down. Breakfast has been prepared by Craig and then derided and critiscised by the rest of us for not being any good. Somebody’s tried to make tea which has tasted like ‘dishwater’, ‘muck’ or ‘worse than piss’ according to who has drunk it and I can currently hear the pack laying into Neil Roberts because he’s bald, has a Birmingham accent and is probably trying to fiddle the kitty to his advantage. To be fair, they’re correct on at least two of these points…
Neil and Mark Watts have lost their gliders somewhere on the plane between the UK and Slovenia and much amusement has been had at their expense as they’ve tried to deal with various Germans on the other end of the phone at Lufthansa who struggle to understand an angry Brummie yelling at them when they keep telling him that they ‘haf no record of ze bag on ze computer…’ If they don’t get their gliders today I suspect they’ll be doing a rain dance for tomorrow.
Flying training yesterday consisted of driving halfway round the Tolmin valley looking for the take-off and then, when we finally found it, getting mugged for 8 euros ‘flying tax’ by some surly looking cop who was waiting there. ‘If you buy it at the bottom it is only 4 euros’ he said, cheerily trousering our 24 euros for the right to run off their crappy little hill into a grey and thermal-less flight. Just as we landed, and true to form, the sun came out and it all got quite nice. I actually did want to fly a bit as I’ve not been in the air for months so it was probably worth doing. However a two hour drive and a wallet 8 euros lighter for a 5 minute top to bottom doesn’t strike me as great value…
This is the first flight I’ve done on a ‘conventional’ glider in quite some time. I’ve ditched the two-liners, at least for this year, as I don’t like the way they react after big collapses and falling into one or cutting a part of your body off on the lines whilst falling through them probably wouldn’t be a lot of fun. Nor would blowing one up and parting company with it which you think about quite a lot when you fly at 140kg. Last year my glider had a good go at trying to cut my head off when the micro-lines ended up round my neck and it wound into a spiral and this has focused my attention somewhat on the risk/reward equation that we all play when we go flying. Let’s hope the ever-resourceful designers can deal with this problem and that it’s not inherent to the two-line design as in every other way (apart from take-off behaviour) they are lovely to fly. The trouble, under the current system, is that all the designers’ energy and inventiveness is focused on performance and there’s no real benefit of focussing any of that genius and brainpower into making the two-liners any safer but that, as they say, is another debate.
Anyway I’m sitting it out for a year and have an Aircross Evo U-Sport to fly which seemed nice and ordinary in my very limited flight. It certainly turned a lot better than my two-liner did which, as it has a much lower aspect ratio, is to be expected and it certainly doesn’t glide as well nor carve through the air as well which is also to be expected as it has a lot more line attached to it. Whether it feels any better or more reassuring in the air remains to be seen but, either way, it will be an interesting experiment to conduct. At least it won’t do its best to try to fly underneath me if it takes a big whack and having experienced what this feels like I’m quite happy about that. It’s not a serial wing so I’m going to have to compete with Boom 8’s and R11’s whilst giving away a pretty sizeable chunk of performance to them so I shall get my excuses out of the way now and predict that I will be coming last in the Open Class!
I can hear the baying pack laying into their next victim as the boredom threshold sinks ever lower so let’s hope the predicted weather improvement comes along tomorrow before the banter starts to get really vicious and we all fall out with each other…
Follow the action from the 2011 British Paragliding Open in Slovenia
Mark Hayman and Craig Morgan
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Slovenian Paragliding Open
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