Newcastle Hang Gliding Club

As I wrote elsewhere, Denman went off this weekend.

My flight on saturday was epic by my standards, screw everyone elses standards. I got high, stayed high, crossed over the hills to the next valley, which from my high horse up by the clouds suited my conservative flying style perfectly. The google maps file below kind of shows this, but only just, if you open the Google Earth .kmz file, then you've probably got nothing better to do than read my ramblings, and you'll be able to rotate around and see that it took me quite a while flying head wind in the Sting, drifting downwind with each thermal I found back up to cloud base, until I was on the other side.

I was considering going around the hills to go back, making for a kind of triangle, but I was frozen solid. I was wearing a t-shirt and rashie, no balaclava, and just a pair of jeans to keep my pegs warm. The lip balm I'd put on before launch was freezing off in lumps, I could hardly feel my fingers any more, my legs were shuddering and my face was frozen to the point I could only speak in a drunken slur. Damn it was fun. I chose to turn tail wind an tuck my tail between my legs and raced back with the bar stuffed pretty much the whole way. I stopped to top up once just as I got back over the high ground, and then flat lined it to the strip, but spent much of the time going up in a straight line.

Back at the strip, most everyone was singing the same song.

JOD declared it the "Coldest cloud base EVER!"
Once his core temperature had returned to normality, ebbs was basking in a warm glow of self satisfaction for having completed the assigned task of the day to Merriwa and back.
Scott had photos he'd just taken of Rylstone to show us all, having flown there and back.
Adam, flying a Rev made it to Merriwa and back in about as much time as it took Ebbs just to get back.
Alby came down volunarily from his first flight to get some warmer gloves, and had another. I'm not sure where he landed.
Donny won the award for dragging Mon out furtherst for a retrieve somwhere over the hills.
Rob had a couple of flights,
Alan a couple more
Dustan and Kieran were both seen to be gloating the gloat of the glutinous, and we all danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.

Ultimately, the day was such that if you were able to work the weaker lift down low to get up high, coming down became a deliberate choice, and one that you had to work bloody hard at to achieve. I got to just under 8 grand a bunch of times, took just over fifteen minutes to get to 5 grand, another fifteen minutes to get back up to five grand, eight minutes to get back down to just over 300', then another fifteen minutes to get back to five grand and didn't get below that height again until I came down to land.

I'd love to share the scenes with you all. I did set up my camera running my script which was supposed to have seen it taking five minute long videos with a 3 secod gap between each of them, but when I downloaded the files, I found thatI had thirdy three videos of 3 second duration each. Something went wrong somewhere, but here's a couple of samples of what I to to experience. You'll have to get out and do it for yourself to get the whole picture.

Watch this video on Youtube

Watch this video on Youtube

I had an enjoyable short flight on Sunday, the got a lift home from the ever generous Jeff, Flo choosing to take the kids home earlier in the day. Rumour is that Scott, Adam and Alby had big flights with scott making Merriwa, Adam crossing over the Liverpool Range and Alby making it to Dunedoo. I'm looking forward to reading about it.

See you all up there.

Dawson