Go Places – My Paragliding Adventures So Far

Over the long long winter I have set myself a challenge of going through all my old Gopro footage and making a compilation video showing all the amazing places that paragliding has taken me.

Spurred on by last years Wessex Club video competition, I have discovered that shorter videos are far more entertaining. No one wants to watch 30 minutes of someone ridge soaring the local ridge! I have decided to limit myself to 3 minutes unless I have a good reason to go longer (a story to tell or an instructional video).

To make it extra hard for myself I had chosen Isla de Encanta by the Pixies as the music for the video, a fast paced number that only lasts 1:41! Squeezing nearly five years of paragliding experiences into that time has been very tough and time consuming but I’m proud of the result…

Mere Bash 2012

Whoever ordered the flyable weather over the Mere Bash, bravo! The forecast was for very light winds and not very thermic either. I would never have bother driving all this way on that forecast but Alasdair convinced me to turn up to the bash a bit early on the off chance of a bit of flying. Coming off of the A303 I could already see gliders in the air, funny how you suddenly start driving much faster once you see gliders up! Turns out it was actually quite thermic but with a low inversion. For about an hour or so the thermals were kicking off of the field out front nicely and it was easy to get 1000ft above take off. Mostly nice and smooth too and with no chance of going xc you could just waft around enjoying the view. After a while the clouds came over and everyone floated back down to earth. It remained flyable but scratchy, a bit busy for my liking so I landed for a chinwag. It remained flyable until sun down, with everyone getting their fill of airtime.

With that, everyone set up tents in the landing field and gravitated towards the BBQ’s. After that we moved on the marquee for some excellent music from Leatherat and Also Eden. Combined with cheap local Ale and Cider and a jolly good night was had.

It was even flyable on Sunday morning… if you didn’t have a hang over.

The rest of the photos can be found here.