Crators

The Crators were fun.

I got to meet some good PG people and had the local guru (Tanner) bark at me for not being aware of dust devils. It was comical, the guy goes over to my wing and grabs the tip while giving it an academy award performance shaking it and waving his arms. I don't know how long he has been flying paragliders but I didn't see him at the Crators back in the mid-80's when I started flying there.

"What are you going to do if a dust devil comes?"

You see Tanner had a big booger sticking out of his nose and I got fixated on it. It's hard to take someone serious when they have snot hanging from a nostril.

"Gees Tanner, you have identified a problem, what should I do?"

And he goes on to tell me how to act like a paraglider pilot...

Personally, I think it was fully an ego trip.

It was about 10a and I didn't see one "quite el polvo a diablo" anwhere (Español for dust devil) till I got back to the valley at 1p. With the moisture in the air, didn't think it was that unstable to wait for at least a light cycle to come in to run. Hot, altitude, hadn't been flying in a while.

So I pull up a forward and start to run, cursory glance up, go and tried to jump into the air ended up skimming and balling up on the slope, fully wrapped up in my paraglider.


G~d it was funny.


A couple of the good guys started running towards me (Steve, thanks) but I gave him the thumbs up and made tidy and did the walk of shame back up the 50 yards to the top.

Steve asked me what happened, I told him I couldn't breathe (I'm fat and out of shape) to wait a minute. Graeme did a perfect launch and I told him that "I didn't do that" and we sort of laughed. I said it was Tanner's fault.

Anyway, after that, I was left alone at the top and did a reverse and loped off.

The air was lively and I did some turns in lift but it wasn't there for me, landed by the Scion at the bench and took some pictures of Graeme after folding it up.

I got two nice flights, er, two and a half. Pretty much a blast.