Manilla Day 9 - Always flying somewhere

I hear they've been flying in the rain in Queensland, and it's been pretty windy down in Bright with a few good days squeezed in, Brett had a good flight on Thursday and Heike was attacked (repeatedly and for several minutes) by an Eagle. Not a fun encounter at all but it reminded me, on Tuesday's flight, I thought I was going to get rolled by an Eagle for the very first time. James and I were thermalling over the NE launch on Borah with two wedgies, I was watching one above and to my left and at one point he tucked in his wings and dove towards me but he pulled away at the last moment without contact. I actually felt pretty excited about the idea, though I'm sure my sentiment would have changed the first time he hit me. If not definitely by the tenth time he hit me I'd be getting mildly agitated.

This morning James and I were standing outside (it stopped raining for a few minutes) an there was a steady north-easter and we remarked how nice it would be to just go up for a bit of ridge-soaring. Then it started raining again.

Headed home tomorrow.

Manilla Day 7

Today I went into Tamworth and got into a whip fight. These things happen in the bush and I guess you just do what you can at the time. What’s a whip fight? Well, a fist fight is a fight using fists and a knife fight is a fight using knives and a whip fight is…well you do the math. Imagine it like ye olde English duelling days, but without the 10 paces, pistols at dawn, “By jove I say” and poncy cravats. Whip fighting is a down the line no messing around argument settler if ever there was one. You put on a drizabone, pick up your stock whip, put your useless non-whipping hand in the pocket of your drizabone, tell your blue heeler called Bluey to ‘get in behind’ (if you have one and that’s what he’s called, and ideally you do and he is) and then you proceed to lash the guy standing in front of you about the head. It’s a fair and decisive way to solve those pesky disagreements in the pub such as deciding once and for all if Ford really is better than Holden but I think it has potential to go much further. In fact, I’m sure John Howard had something in the back of his mind when he made all the delegates of the APEC summit pose with Drizabone’s on – namely winning another term, setting up a whip fighting arena in parliament house, handing over the leadership and then enjoying retirement watching PM “Lightning wrist” Costello and Kevin “Super Crack” Rudd settle their disputes like real Aussie blokes.

Manilla Day 6 - You are what you eat

I just ate a muesli bar. Really this is a noteworthy event as I have some very nice museli bars. Some time ago my friend Dom recommended them to me as an alternative to just about everything else on the market, so I keep buying them. They're called AO bars which the packaging tells me stands for 'Adults Only' and all my social conditioning tells me that means they must be good. The problem is, I never seem to eat them. There is 6 bars in a box and and if I've bought 10 boxes in the last 2 years flying then I'm sure I've eaten no more than 1 box worth. They do get used for various purposes, some are thrown in cockpit for that ‘one day’ when I might actually eat something in flight, a few go in with my lunch, these tend to get cycled out of the lunch bag at the end of one day and back in the next meaning one or two muesli bars are clocking up some airtime, a few get left behind in whatever car took me to launch and I’m sure a possum once took one away from me in Bright, they just don’t get eaten, at least not by me. On the box there is a cashew and almond model (for the bars made of cashews and almonds, of course…) striking a salacious pose and the assurance that the bar contains ‘100% unadulterated taste’. So imagine how much I was looking forward to finally savouring one of these pre-packed delights. Unfortunately what this all seems to mean – the sexy fruit figurine, the AO label, the price tag – is that you end up with a muesli bar, minus all the fun. The French have the philosophy worked out perfectly with snails - simply a vehicle to deliver an artery clogging amount of garlic and butter to your body as quickly as possible, likewise a muesli bar is not about eating muesli and nuts but getting sugar and low quality chocolate straight to your stomach in the guise of a healthy snack. I think I’ll go buy some jelly snakes to fly with.

If you couldn’t tell, it’s still raining.

Manilla Day 5

Today the rain came. Bob and James (in picture) both flew around for a bit before squeezing around the mountain back to the farm and landing a few minutes before the rain started. I pranced around on the west launch for a while, kiting the glider and messing around, but with rain approaching from every visible direction, I thought of Ewa and put it back in the bag.

Manilla Day 4

The wind was forecast to be lighter today so James and I were leaning towards doing a triangle. While my main goal is to fly a big open distance flight, triangles do have some very positive aspects. For example, if you attempt an open distance flight and you are even remotely successful, you will be landing a very long retrieve away from home. You fly a 100km triangle, you've had a great flight and you get to land in a nice grassy paddock with cold beer a few steps away...most would say the decision is easy.

However, as soon as we arrived on the NE launch we knew it wasn't to be a triangle day. A solid ENE wind was blowing and we went up and down on the NE side of the mountain for about an hour. There were clouds to the south of us and a line running out to The Gap so James suggested we fly south to Baldwin and try to connect with them. It was the best idea all day, James led, Oli Blonske and I followed and promptly got flushed. James got low near Baldwin but scraped enough height to get back to Borah. The sky blew up in the afternoon making for an amazing sunset.

Manilla Day 3

Had a wicked storm last night which blew my towel away, probably into the paddock where it has been thoroughly devoured by Godfrey's 8 goats. It seems the amazing lightning show off in the distance late in the evening moved a lot closer by about 1am. My radio and battery charger were out on the blacony and were sitting in a puddle when I found them in the morning. The battery charger exploded but the radio was fine, I fared better than James who after the excitement of the Weekend Warrior Weekend left his GPS and 5020 out in the storm...we are yet to find out if they lived.

Today shaped up as a classic Manilla XC day, some instability, some clouds and moderate SE winds had me imagining landing at sunset somewhere far away. It was windy on the hill and difficult to drift with some of the lighter climbs, but after half an hour of yo-yoing above launch, I hit 22oom and and headed towards Narrabri with Andrew Polidano flying his tandem a short distance behind. The drift away from launch was SE and ground speed was up to 60Km/h hand up so all was looking good for a long one. Clouds were forming around Mt Kaputar and further north but not accessible to us until we got much closer to Narrabri. It was relatively easy to stay high but it would have been much nicer to have a few clouds in our area. Andrew landed after about 20Km and I continued on flying north of the Boggabri gap and into the flat lands where I hoped I could speed up a bit. I left the last of the hills at 200om and lined up a row of nice brown paddocks about 10km long. I flew the entire length and only heard my sink alarm turn off once. I landed in a stubble field with zero groundspeed into wind as I descended, 50km from Borah. The wind was much further south after I hit the flats and I later heard that the Japanese all ended up flying north to the Horton valley after the wind becames southerly on launch, a much better direction. I ended up with the easiest retrieve imaginable from probably one of the most remote places I've ever landed around here, the farmer whose property I landed on drove me half way back to Manilla and then just as he was stopping to let me out, a ute came past and took me the rest of the way. Love the locals out here!

Manilla Day 2 - Weekend Warrior Weekend Task 2

The second task for the Weekend Warrior Weekend was a 45Km round the valley run, up to Tarpoly, down to Manilla then back to the farm. It was a similar day to yesterday with few clouds to help out and mercifully, a 3Km radius was set around Tarpoly so as not to put the entire field on the ground. The pilots who paid attention to that survived (mostly), yours truly flew half a km into the cylinder before working it out, got low battling a headwind coming back to the ridge and bombed out on the wrong side of the ridge (that is, the hot, long walk out on a very quiet road side of the ridge...)
Godfrey, Patrick, James, Che and Crannie on the tandem all got to goal.

The weather is looking good for some distance the next couple of days, James is hanging around and a group of pilots from Japan have just arrived so I have a few bodies to fly with. Hoping to go big...

Manilla Day 1 - Weekend Warrior Weekend Task 1

I'm in Manilla for the next week, hoping to do some good cross country flying. Today was the very first 'Weekend Warrior Weekend' - an informal competition organised by Che and James. Competitors fly in one of four clases - Xena (the fairer pilots), Wookie (just wanna go up), Warrior (still driving to Manilla every weekend) and Jedi (mmm, fly twitchy glider, you will). Pilots came from Sydney and and the North Coast folks managed to swim out and escape the deluge up there so we had 30 pilots competing - not bad for an event that was only announced 3 weeks ago and great work by James and Che to get a weekend series started in NSW which has been a long time coming.

We had a 50Km task to the north with goal at Cobbadah. It was a day that needed an enormous amount of patience, lots of circling and drifting. Many went down just around Barraba and Tarpoly claimed the usual haul. Wes Manzke, Tim Smith and myself all got to goal then Wes and I continued on another 15Km after getting the best climb of the day right over goal, always the way :-)

Get him out

Back in Australia, have been hugely busy with work since I returned including several trips up to Brisbane and a couple to Melbourne. Just a quick one to ask people to support the GetUp campaign running a cross-party advertisment to get Howard and his band of bloodless freaks out of the senate. The ad they intend to run in marginal electorates that need the swing is shown here:



You can donate to the GetUp campaign here:

https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/campaign.php?alias=ThreePartyAd&id=183

Thanks for supporting this. While it is incomprehensible that Howard could possibly win this election, it was something approaching highly unlikely 3 years ago and the coalition actually gained power, rendering the senate a political joke that has been abused quite enough. Please, I'm begging now, Labour will preference the Greens so if you can't bring yourself to vote for Rudd at least give it to Bob Brown, just don't throw your vote away. If you abstain you are for all intents voting for Howard, please don't.

I promise this will be the only election related blog, other than a little celebratory one when Howard's political career is finally over :-)

Alaska

I'm in Denali National Park - W0w, wow, wow, wow and wow. My time up here is much too short and rushed and internet is sparse and expensive so I'll blog about it when I'm done. So much to see here, need a year not a week...

Catch up soon.

Portland...again.

I've ended up in and out of this town much more than I expected and here I am again. The flights out of Seattle to Alaska were much cheaper so I'm headed back up there. Found myself back in Portland to do a two day options trading seminar, something I've been dabbling with on and off (mostly off) for the last 5 years. Not exactly a holiday activity but the timing was perfect and it was a good kick in the pants to get some focus on my financial health (damn I must be getting old... ;-).

I stayed with Brett and Heike who very kindly shared their cosy little basement apartment with me Portland has it's attractions, not least is Mt Hood which can be seen from points all around the city. I took this shot on the way back tonight. Not a tough place to live with this view showing up all the time...


Brett took the ultimate revenge on his reserve parachute after the hard landing at the Rat Race by cutting all the lines off and using it as a picnic blanket! (It was due for retirement) Sitting down to dinner with Heike, Katje and Brett:

Northern Exposure

Getting to Vancouver I felt like I'd run out of momentum and while I had initially planned on hanging around BC and exploring some of the places I'd visited before, that just wasn't grabbing me. I needed to do something, I needed a little a motivator. So I decided I'd go to Alaska, as you do. I've always wanted to see the midnight sun and although it wont exactly be overhead, there is still twilight all night at this time of year. It's uncommon but still possible to see the Northern Lights at this time of year, anything even hinting at this would be a gift:


The bottom line is I'm much more likely to be coming back through Vancouver than I am to be any closer to Alaska than this so I'm happy to just poke around, see some mountains and glaciers and try not to get mauled by a polar bear. I'm heading back to Portland for a couple days then fly out of Seattle to Anchorage on the 14th.

Vancouver

Gavin and I drove back to Vancouver the day after the comp. I spent the next 2 days wandering around in some kind of daze, trying to recover from the week of sensory overload in Golden. I really did do about 5 days of completely spacing out which was just fine. Also caught up with Andy who some Oz and Kiwi readers will remember from many moons ago. It was fantastic to catch up, and we did the Grouse Grind - not some weird kinky dance, but a very popular hiking trail in North Vancouver. We hiked with John who I met earlier this year when he was traveling downunder. Grouse mountain has all sorts of tourist catches including a couple of re-homed grizzly bears called Coola and Grinder and some timber wolves at the base of the mountain. It's a relatively steep, short hike under a thick green canopy, beautiful but very busy.



I have to give you the quote of the month which comes from Andy. If you walk up Grouse Mountain you can take the gondola back down for $5, we did, and we were about half way down when Andy, standing in the middle of perhaps 80 people squashed into the gondola, says, in a very honest tone and to nobody in particular but loud enough for all to hear "So, I never thought about the cable breaking..."

Classic :-)

Goodbye to Golden

The week in Golden had some more meaning to it for me personally than just coming here to compete. In 1999 i was here in Canada and learnt to fly just outside of Calgary on a hill that was about 30m high. Then I had my first flight from a 'proper' hill which was the launch we used all week on Mt Seven. Those first flights were just glides off the hill at 7am but they were the ones that had me hooked. On the last morning, a group of us went up the hill early and I repeated my first flight.

Looking north. Launch is the bare patch on the ridge just right of centre

The morning also gave Gavin and Karl the chance to fly the speed wings. Some video footage is here. Those crazy kids...

Canadian Nationals Day 7

The Nationals ended with 1 final task, a 55Km race to the south. The sky was completely overcast in the morning and again the forecast was for afternoon thunderstorms but again they didn't arrive. Conditions were really light at the start (but apparently ballistic later on) and many people scratched around trying to survive after the start gate. Heike and Nicole were both low heading south from Mt Seven, Heike fought hard but wasn't able to get high, Nicole flew low all the way to goal and took out the womens class. One of Craig Collings comp flying tips is to get ahead early in the comp, then you only need to fly as well as but not better than your nearest competitors - Nicole employed this tactic with Heike from before the start gate and it was fun to watch! I saw her launch and fly into the thermal I was in, it was quite useable but she made only 2 turns and then flew straight for Heike who was further away from launch and proceeded to lock on. Gavin had the opposite situation and needed to go all out to beat Keith and pick up an extra 30 points. After getting low around launch, Gav climbed in his own thermal near launch and tracked the lead gaggle down just after the start. He ended up beating Keith into goal by 30 seconds, but it wasn't enough and he finished just 21 points behind Keith who became the new Canadian National Champion. The End results were:

Open Class:

1 - Jamie Messenger, UK 5215
2 - Matt Beechinor, USA 5014
3 - Keith Macullough, CAN 4725
4 - Gavin Zahner, AUS 4704
12 - James Thompson, AUS 3912
18 - Heike Hamann, AUS 3133

Womens:

1 - Nicole McLearn, CAN 3865
2 - Heike Hamann, AUS 3133
3 - Michelle Macullough, USA 2207

The winners with trophies, some of them animated...

It was great to do so much flying in such huge, inspiring terrain, but everyone was mentally broken by the end of it. I didn't meet anyone who had flown the nationals and was planning to hang around for the Willi Mueller XC comp - sleep was the only wish. In the end we had 6 tasks out of 7 days, average task distance was 66Km for a total of just under 400Km of task distance flown with some very good racing by the fast guys.

We were told by all the locals that the conditions here during the comp period were 'not the best Golden has' and if that is halfway true, I can't reccomend coming here for comp or free flying highly enough.