Learning to Fly

Face Down

Jussara and I got up the hill around 1pm. We hadn’t seen anybody flying all morning, and they were just starting to take off as we were driving up. I prepped and took off from the northern ramp.

The breeze wasn’t very strong but I found a thermal quickly and soon had some height. I got up to a little over 2000m but couldn’t seem to get any higher. I remembered some of the guys yesterday talking about the inversion layer they had encountered and that they hadn’t been able to get much more than 500m above the ramp (2100m).

I looked around and I was the highest of all the guys that had taken off recently and there were only 2 guys higher that had managed to pass the inversion layer. I knew if I passed it I would be able to fly long distance, but my head was a bit slow from the tequila last night, and I was expecting Daniel to show up soon, so I decided to not go far from the ramp.

I headed a little north of the ramp and started trying a few wingovers. A few doubts had come up in my mind since the last time I did them and I had watched the instructional videos on YouTube again to see if I could work things out in my head. I had also asked Gilmar but what he had said was a little different to how I had started so I ended up more confused and figured there must be several different ways to do them and decided to stick to the method Japa had told me.

I tried a few times but my coordination just wasn’t working the way my head was, so I gave up and decided to do a hard spiral instead. I went into it and remembered Alex saying how Kurt had pushed him into one with the wing face down. I was spiralling faster than ever before and noticed the wing was still a long way off face down. I edged it further as far as I dared, but then started to come out as I had already dropped over 300m and didn’t want to end my flight.

I was surprised by how much my wing pendulated on exit even with me controlling the exit, as I must have been going much faster than I had thought. I will have to make sure I come out even slower next time. It was good though and I got some more height and then did it again.

Total flight time: 1h25m