Waiting for wind to fly a kite: the 2nd half

[flexagon]

Impressions from the second half of hang gliding camp:

• The shirt that I usually like the least, that I've almost gotten rid of recently, was best for the dunes, and I wore it 3 times in 5 days. Let that be a lesson to me.


• The roommate who took the longest to start engaging socially was probably the most interesting and coolest. British guy who did wing-walking on a small plane for fun (crazy dangerous), has a series of "hazardous materials" demonstrations on YouTube (controlled but dangerous), ex-zookeeper and tarantula owner (hmm), and now a firefighter (fairly dangerous). He might be a bit of an extreme-experiences junkie.


• The loud-mouthed business guy, who was generally the most annoying, turned out to be great at grilling. We had shrimp, white fish, and seared tuna steaks twice in a row while I cooked rice and vegetables to go with, and I was not complaining about that.


• After that first day or two, I started seriously getting my cardio. I carried the glider up the hill every time my turn was over, and I could feel my lungs going hard.


• I think I sunburned my lower lip? It hurt a little on Thursday, and I woke up with it all puffy on Friday... it had no wrinkles in it, and was looking kind of bee-stung. Apparently people pay for that effect, but I just found it stupid-looking and painful. As indeed it was.


• Beach hair also sucks. Yes, it does have volume and texture -- unfortunately, the texture is
  "sticky sandpaper". I'm going back toward "silky and hard to style" the moment I can get my hands on some deep conditioner.


• Winds continued to be quite variable, but blowing generally harder and harder, after Wednesday. That is not good. On top of the dunes they can shift around to find reasonable slopes when the wind blows in various directions, but there's not much to do when the wind is just too strong or too gusty to fly. What we can do is "ground handling" of various sorts. Learned a lot this way about proper harness fit. I felt proud one day when the glider wasn't reacting to someone's motion and I, not the instructor, noticed that his leg loops weren't tightening when the student moved their hips.


• The instructors, by the way, were basically surfer-dude types but in phenomenal shape. All that dune running. Everyone out there was indeed a dude (more on this later) and the sport selects for types who are patient, grounded and kind of in tune with nature. All hang glider pilots learn a lot about air and wind. One guy who was only with us for one day told us interesting things about sunglasses messing up the body's response to heat (which seems to have some truth to it, though the internet says he's also risking premature cataracts) and also was a master kite flyer. He got me pretty interested in sport kites, which are still weather-dependent but a lot easier to get in the air than a hang glider and might still offer some satisfying pull that feels like counterbalance.


• On Thursday we ground-handled all day and did some little ostrich-runs. On Friday we showed up an hour early in the morning, hoping for calmer winds, but were already "blown out" (too much wind) on arrival, so we did classroom-type stuff and went over the material on the official test for Hang 1 certification. We all passsed; I missed one question out of 43 due to confusing wording, which is very very normal -- the test is a little weird and none of the instructors like it very much. It felt just wild to reach lunchtime without being thirsty and soaked with sweat.


• All our flying and kiting and ground handling was done with "Eaglets", a special glider just for beginners that they only have at the North Carolina location. The glider is light and floppy and slow. Friday after lunch we set up a normal beginner glider, a Falcon, which is what I guess I used at Morningside eight years ago; it's much stiffer and with more intrinsic shape to the wings, with more metal structure (metal battens, not plastic ones) and some pieces that the eaglets didn't have. The control frame (that triangle underneath) is a lot bigger, too, which makes takeoff trickier. With better weather we would have gotten our required 4 or 5 straight Eaglet flights in and then tried flying a Falcon, but what we really did is learn to assemble it indoors and practice holding it.


• About that control frame -- yeah, it's a male dominated sport, and all gliders are sized for guys. I talked to Billy, who's the head mechanic and one of only a few Hang 5 pilots in the country, and he says there's a limit to how small the wing can be -- air molecules are always the same size, you can't just scale down for women or kids. Looking at that Falcon with my mechanical engineering hat on, I'm sure the control frame could have been narrowed even if not made shorter. I'm sure, in short, that it would be possible to do better for women. However, Billy also noted that the market for such things would be tiny. Sure it's tiny now but with a marketing push and just a couple of influencers? Come on Billy, business opportunity right there.


• That same morning, Friday, it was clear that we weren't going to get our Hang 1 certifications. The wind wasn't going to allow it. (Insert the "loudly crying" emoji here). So we started talking about leaving early, and I got on the phone with my airline and was able to move my flight from Sunday night to Friday night; at that moment I had just enough time to get back to our place, pack up, drive two hours to the airport and get some food as the airplane was boarding. All of which mercifully went smoothly.


• Amazingly, through all this I maintained my NYT crossword streak! At this point I am officially trying to hit six weeks.

It's great to be home for the weekend, but I'm definitely sad not to have gotten my Hang 1. They're going to try to work out a deal for us with their sister location up in NH, so that we can do our flights up there, which I don't love because it would be on a Falcon and on a different surface (grass and dirt), with different instructors and of course with less muscle memory. Still, the different surface and glider would be good training. Since that other park is where I went almost 8 years ago, and I know the date because it was right after my birthday, I found the post from that excursion. Dang, I only got a single downhill run!? Still, it's only about a 2.5 hour drive to get there, no plane ticket required. It wouldn't be crazy to go there for a couple of days, say if I got the trip planned as a hypothetical and then waited/watched for decent weather conditions up there.

So... this was clearly a failure in terms of scratching the hang-gliding itch for good, although it contained far more satisfying moments than the last attempt at same.

Comments

[justplainuniverse]

again, so cool! learning to feel, understand, and read WIND just sounds like a real magical power.

i had no idea this was such a male-dominated sport, although i guess all the adrenaline sports are. but annoying to here there's still a sexism that excuses having smaller-sized gliders as "impossible."

it feels like not being able to get a hang-gliding cert due to wind conditions should actually be a prereq to getting the cert. like if you don't understand that sometimes you can't do what you want because of weather, did you really learn about the sport?

[flexagon]

i had no idea this was such a male-dominated sport, although i guess all the adrenaline sports are. but annoying to here there's still a sexism that excuses having smaller-sized gliders as "impossible."

I'm with you!! Especially since gliders actually don't require (or reward) the use of a lot of force once you're in the air, and obviously lighter bodies can be picked up more easily -- both reasons why women might make wonderful glider pilots. I'm personally tall and strong enough that things sized for men are sometimes fine for me, but... that doesn't mitigate my annoyance very much.

It's funny, in context, to hear it called an "adrenaline sport". I know that it is, but what we did was really rather quiet and peaceful. Especially compared to driving north from the dunes to the airport, when big chunks of metal were hurtling around me at 70mph with a concerted growling of engines! Being lofted a few feet into the air over a soft surface doesn't put my system on edge nearly the same way as that.