Newcastle Hang Gliding Club

On Saturday morning, after our weekend visitors had had to pull the pin at the last minute on Friday evening, Flo & I were wondering what we'd do this weekend, our calendar suddenly cleared. To my surprise, she suggested that I take Saturday afternoon off, and she takes Sunday afternoon off ( i.e., she takes care of the kids on Saturday, and it's my turn on Sunday ) I'd already seen Seabreeze.com.au and picked Saturday as the pick of days for the weekend, so quickly accepted her offer.

As soon as lunch was over, I kissed the three of them goodbye and headed off for Merewether. It's ages since I've launched Merewether, and I've been wanting to practice doing landings and re-launches from half way down for a long time. There are so few sites (that I know of) where you can do this, so I've been looking for a southerly day that ties in with me having a leave pass for a while. Lately, most of my coastal flying has been after work, so what might have been a great southerly day has swung around to the south east or east by the time I manage to get there.

When I got there on Saturday, it was west-south-west, and Donny had been up for ages. Being the inaugural Cliff Couture festival, Donny had duly come dressed for the occasion, well more accurately, he hadn't bothered to get dressed when he got out of bed, other than to throw his dressing gown over his pj's. Nice one Donny!

I slapped my new camera mount and camera on Donnys glider whilst I set up, and he did a bunch of top and bottom landings and launches. 238 photos later, I took the camera off him and put it on my cross bar. This is the first time I'd flown with it on my cross bar, and I managed to make a couple of minor errors. First, I had set the camera up somehow to take RAW images during Donny's flight, so each of the 238 photos saved as a 4MB jpg was also accompanied by a 10MB raw file, which meant that there was only room for about eight minutes of my flight before the 4GB card was full! Oh well, I'd mounted the camera at a funny angle and not noticed it until I was about to launch. I should have strapped it to the leading edge to get a better angle. That's what photo editing software is for.

Now, being the inaugural Cliff Couture festival, I didn't had to make some kind of effort, but as I had only been granted a surprise leave pass a couple of hours before I left, the best I could do was to tape some flags to my kingpost. An Aussie flag, a French one, and a Breton one. ( Flo is from Brittany ) The only problem is that I didn't consider right way up when I strung them together, so the there may be some breton nationalists out there looking for my blood as I got the Breton flag upside down ( sorry ! )

A few pilots had launched before me, but were not in the air when I went off. Some of them had landed half way down for a breather, others had top landed.

It was still WSW when I launched, and there were another ten or so gliders waiting on launch for the direction to improve. I had the air to myself for a little bit, so danced around in front of launch before heading across the bowl to give more room to the others as they came up to join me. In short order, the sky was full, the wind had swung around a little, but not enough to get the East face working. Alan was floating around over near the end of Hickson st, and there were more and more of us boating around between the bowl, and a little to the right of launch.

The lift band at this stage was not too wide, but plenty deep. JOD & Stuie had both made trips up to the Gun Club and back. As the wind had come around a bit more, and I'd seen a couple of guys land half way down the hill I thought I may as well give it a go, so I made a bunch of runs south along the beach to loose height, then turn tail-wind straight back at the hill, each time getting there lower and lower, and turning away from the hill and going out again. After about 5 laps like this, I came in low enough and extended past the landing area, turned 180 and was lower than I'd planned, so landed just a bit lower than where I was hoping, but otherwise a good landing. I carried up a little, then went up to see what Nicola was doing.

Nic had landed earlier and was working on her Cliff Couture costume, it was hindering her zipper a little, so she'd decided to land and sort it out then re-launch. Conrad flew down and swaped her Fun for his Malibu for the rest of the afternoon.

Nic's had obviously put a lot of effort into dressing her harness up as a Dragon, Conrad had a monster mask, but for my money, Stuie's Bumble Bee costume with legs hanging down from his red and yellow striped harness was the best. I was flying around singing "I'm squashing up a baby bumble bee...Won't my mummy be so pround of me" all afternoon.

I waited for Nic to re-launch, then carried further up, and re-launched myself. The wind had slackened off a fair bit by this time, so I went around the front low and worked the cliff below the end of Hickson street back up and above. The wind came further around to the South East, and I gained a bit of height, then went out to land at Dicko, but as I got to the park I was still quite high, and the flags on the beach were straight in, so I continued on to Scenic where I floated up high to watch the most beautiful red/orange sunset across the city. Damn, we're lucky to be able to do this stuff!

Then it was time to land and get back home to Flo & the kids, so back towards Dicko I went, but got there with about 400' so I couldn't help but continue on back to Merewether, waving at Stuie as he drove down the hill honking his horn at me, and making it back much higher than any time I'd previously made the crossing. Up again, then back to land and pack up.

Another fantastic day to validate my move to Newcastle.

As I had the kids on Sunday, there was no flying for me, but we came in to the coast to let them run around in a park, and I visited both Merewether and Strezi with them. Another dozen or so pilots got to enjoy the best of Newcastle in the light, bouyant air.