Two brits four wheels

Well Switzerland might be the land of fondue, clocks and international bankers but it also has a stack of really great mountains to fly. One of the most-known places being Interlaken.
One of my main reasons to visit Interlaken was not simply to fly but to try a new wing as a potential progression for my current wing.
I have met Martin Steuri of Advance Paragliders whilst at the Coupe Icare festival in St Hilaire. He offered the opportunity to trial one of their wings if I was going that way. Low and behold we did!
He also gave me the details of a retired British Concorde pilot who is normally out paragliding – which he was – so I went off to meet Mike (said retiree) near Stechelberg in a valley about 20 kms south of Interlaken town.

Click for a Google view of the landing zone

With the Advance Epsilon 6 demo wing on my back we set up the hill by cable car and a ten minute walk at the top. We had to wait some time for the clouds to break sufficiently to fly but otherwise it was good.

Mike is a local pilot and knows the flying conditions very well. Only a couple of minutes into the flight and I am in rain! Rain is not good for paragliding wings: it can weigh them down or ingress through the cell openings at the front. Enough rain dramatically reduces the wings performance and means it will not fly very well at all – to say the least! So my immediate action was to land and call it a day. On the ground at the landing zone, as it was on take-off there was no rain. Annoying and tricky.
Two days later after another rain belt had passed the area I went back for another day of flying. My first flight on the new wing was uneventful and I put it through some small tests such as pitch control and dynamic turns.

My next flight was not so good. Compares to my Sky Fides 2 Evo, the Advance Epsilon 6 has much thicker suspension lines and having seen them snag each other, my boots, the grass, the wing I noted that they posed a risk and carried on…The glider was laid out for a forward launch, lines OK and then the odd gust of wind plus a glider in front took-off and that ruffled my wing on the floor a little. But, still OK I thought.
I made my launch run, glanced up (for too short a time), thought I was good and took-off. I wondered why the other pilots were staring at me, then the wing started to turn. I had a fat cravat ball in the left side of the wing. With the ground dropping away and a cable car cable ahead of me and to my left, trees and properties to my right I could not contemplate landing but had to clear that cravat. I try a couple of pulls on the stabilo line but nothing happened. My first sensemaking of this was ‘I cannot negotiate these obstacles safely, my glide is much reduced, I am not going to make it; this is my last flight…’. However, with some ‘Get a grip’ commentary and using lots of weightshift an opposite break I steered a course through the obstacles in the belief that being well clear of the ground was my safest strategy and to clear the cravat whilst hundreds of metres over the valley. Steering such a course I pumped several times with my breaks and tried the stabilo line again and it eventually cleared. I continued the rest of my flight, naturally shaken up, for some soaring and a very relaxed landing, even though the landing is very technical with a cable car and its cables to avoid, a car park, fences, and a plethora of other obstacles to negotiate:

I had intended to fly my own wing back-to-back for comparison purposes and this incident certainly motivated me to get my own wing over my head again. However this next flight did not happen for another couple of hours: see next blog entry.