First flight

I went paragliding again last week, to finish my Elementary Pilot course. I had my first solo flight from a height of 45m on 24th Dec 2008. It was an exhilarating feeling, although short. After 3 days of solo top to bottoms, I now have 15 min of total air time. I'll put up the pictures soon. The sight is Shinde Wadi, around 125km from Mumbai.






I also had great fun at the Native Place, home to Nirvana Adventures. Hoping to go back in May and make progress towards Club Pilot.

@ the Native Place: Paragliding

The actual paragliding while pretty less in the amount of time was a lot of fun. It was hard work too.

Day 1 involved learning the parts of the glider and wearing the harness, opening the wing and setting it up. This was followed by about 15 runs from forward launch trying to hold the glider dead centre. Then we moved to a downward slope. By the end of the day, after carrying quite a few kgs for a few kilometres I was totally exhausted. Not to mention all the friction burns on the arms. So it was good that a hot cup of soup awaited us at home.

Day 2 was an early morning rise. Fortunately we went to a landing site instead of takeoff site at Shelar and practised a few runs. This was my first lift ( ~ 3 feet ) and also the first fall. At these moments when you first learn something there are so many things going on in the mind. Like riding a bicycle you keep doing a hundred things wrong or in excess or just not enough. Yogi kept telling everyone to FEEL the glider. And everyone was 'feel what? Is this some Jedi thing?'. But just like riding a bicycle some things slowly start to seep into the unconscious and muscles start thinking. By day 2 this was beginning to happen to some extent.

Day 2 in the evening was another set of runs finally followed by some bunny hops. By the end of that day I probably sustained permanent wrist damage due to lifting badly formed mushrooms and heavy paragliders.

Day 3 had the morning for theory. This involved watching a video about all the crap rules and conventions, stages and system of teaching/learning paragliding.


Day 4 had nothing important to say except that I flew pretty much perfect


Day 5 was a big day. First the written test for the P1 stage in which I managed to scrape a pass mark ( 16/20 ). The evening had pathetic winds which means we had about 3 bunny hops before we packed up and went up the hill to the 70m top to bottom launchpad. But the strong winds meant that we only got a tandem. Ofcourse I was allowed to use the brakes and bring in the glider for landing. But the view from the top was amazing, and the rush of air when skirting a ridge is worth its weight in gold. I'm going back ASAP!


Ofcourse since we didn't complete the required solo flights, I'm not a Elementary Pilot. All of us had a paltry 7 minutes of total airtime over 5 days... :(

@ the Native Place: Getting started with Paragliding

I took a 5 day break from my monotonous boredom to go Paragliding. First time pilot, no experience. The location was Native Place, the base for Fly Nirvana, at Kamshet.

First it was absolutely worth the money and the remote location and the bad roads. We had a hell of a great time. We ( me and cousin ) were lucky to meet two other people of a similar age - Rishabh and Apoorva.

For the first three days, I jotted down small notes on my cellphone, so here they are paraphrased. I'll recount the trip in detail in more posts. There will be quite a few of them.

24th May

• 1:30pm - finished lunch. sitting in a hammock. leave for practice at 3.
• 8:45pm - drinking soup. shoulders hurt, arms burned by friction, crap it was fun. ( This was first practice, ground handling and forward launch @ Shelar )

Shelar hill - our paragliding site

25th May

• 6:23am - awake for 20min now. last night's bath will suffice. not much pain, shoulders tender though, will risk short sleeves ( For all 5 days we established a convention to only have a bath at night, although we could have used 2 a day, we were just too lazy )
• 11:42am - more ground handling, got a few pushes to go about 3 ft in the air. fell once. rishabh had an encounter with a bush. Also practised Parachute Landing Falls - hopefully I'll never need them. I wore a long sleeved t-shirt after all.
  
• 8:37pm - back to base from Shelar. Began bunny hops and short flights. upper body is crap ( it hurt so much! ) . chest jarred ( did a bad landing, the harness locked the jerk in ) . old injury haunts. ( this is something stupid that has been bothering me for 4 years now, some internal muscle out of place )

26th May

• 8:54pm - another day of bunny hops. good success rate this time. stupid radio fails... sorry ravi :( ( The radio got switched off and I couldn't hear instructions when everyone else could here them. Ravi [ instructor ] was helping another student, and I bumped into him before killing the glider )

Other

A Jenga structure just before it fell. We built lots of these, one went 13 storeys. ( Yes, those are fresh gooseberries at the back! )