Escaping the Rain

Vancouver weather has SUCKED lately. Actually, it seems that most of Western Canada’s weather has been pretty lousy for the last few weeks. Rain and wind in Vancouver, snow in places like Calgary and unseasonably cool in both.

When I don’t see the sun for a few days, I get the urge to run away and seek bluer skies, so somewhat last minute I convinced my boyfriend to go on a short trip to the States to get away from the bad weather and hopefully do some flying.

While driving south we encountered plenty of rain and essentially the same weather I was trying to run away from. We took our time driving, checking out things along the way, and eventually ended up at Oceanside, Oregon.

Last year after the Rat Race, we checked out Oceanside, but only my boyfriend flew, as it was blowing slightly down and I simply can’t run that fast! Yesterday our luck was better and we encountered a bit of sun and a healthy number of paraglider pilots at launch.

The local pilots were pretty friendly, and although the conditions weren’t ideal for soaring (the winds were too light), we both had a little 5 minute flight, which I quite enjoyed. I’m not typically a fan of sled rides, but when I’m flying a new site, I think they’re alright. Of course, it would have been awesome to have been able to stay up for a while, but I think you have to learn to take what you can when it comes to weather and paragliding.

Oceanside is beautiful, as is the Oregon coastline. Hopefully someday I’ll have the privilege of flying along the Oregon coast again. It’s unlikely that I’ll be doing any more flying for the next two weeks, but mid-June I will be attending a fun paragliding meet in the BC interior – my fingers are crossed the weather cooperates.

Skydiving and Paragliding

After checking my blog today and realizing that I haven’t posted anything in over a month, I figured an update was in order.

I’ve only flown once in the last month, and I missed some pretty epic Spring flying too. The flight I had was on a windy day and seeing how my practice flying in those types of conditions isn’t exactly up to speed these days, I decided that I didn’t want to go XC, and just bobbed around launch, around the clouds, and then came into land. It was a good flight, but nothing really to write home about.

A couple of weeks ago I went tandem skydiving, which was really fun. I went solo a few years ago and blacked out when I let go of the strut on the plane - I came to when my chute opened, so I don’t have any recollection of my couple seconds of freefall. The tandem I went on, thankfully, went infinitely better. I was definitely anxious, but I felt as calm as I think I possibly could have. I quite enjoyed the jump actually and I think I can thank paragliding for being OK with being high and not freaking out, as opposed to a few years ago with my first jump, when I was still a newcomer to paragliding.

In fact, I think skydiving is something that I would like to pursue. I think it’d be fun to do a course and do the freefall stuff. I would love to do some somersaults and try positioning my body differently and noting the effects. The only thing stopping me is my ears. Unfortunately I have a lot of scar tissue in one ear, and during my tandem, I felt like my head would explode. The pain was pretty bad, so I am seeing a specialist to see if there’s anything I can do about equalizing my ears better when there are big pressure changes. I’ve tried yawning, chewing gum, etc. on planes in the past, and it only seems to help to a point. Maybe some special ear plugs would help? In any case, hopefully the doc can give me some suggestions.

I’m going to a small fun meet for paragliding in about 3 weeks which should be good. I should really get out flying at least a couple times between now and then, but I’ve been quite busy with other things lately, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m starting to feel happier about my decision to sell my tandem gear, because already, paragliding has taken a back seat to other things this year. I still have some flying goals I’d like to achieve this season, including doing a vol bivouac, so hopefully things will work out. My last XC flight was back in Nepal a few months ago – my goal is to hopefully do another one (even if it’s short) between now and the end of May.