Newcastle Hang Gliding Club

Special thanks to the friends (Gary and Wendy Herman, Steve Crosby, Stuie Coad & Adrian Muller) for a putting on an event that allows me and Karen the chance to get away for a great time and holiday.

I had a great time at Corryong (as always). I had a couple of really memorable flights. One day I flew the best I have ever done, I did the floater task in about 12 minutes using just one thermal at Elliott then a small top up at Towong then bar in for a fast glide to the Corry airport. Only problem was my GPS battery failed and I had a broken track log and had to fly around above goal for more than half an hour while the batteries got enough charge back to record my location. So seeing I was still in the air I decided to stay up and went for flight around the clouds for about another 3 hours - it was great. I find it difficult to get the words together to describe the experience and the beauty of what it is like when you get up through the haze at the cloud base inversion and fly around inside the dome above the mountain peaks and look out over the top of the inversion layer and see the crystal clear blue sky with perfect white cu clouds bubbling away around me.

On the day that I managed to get through the cloud base inversion I could not get my camera out of my new harness pocket to take some photos, so the next day I put my camera in an easier to get to pocket.

The next day the task for the day had been stoped due to a storm on the course, I waited till after the storms had cleared and went up with Robert Larkin, Julian Lee (Sydney) and Brad Elliott (Melbourne) for a free fly. After a couple of low saves from very low in front of launch Julian and I made it to cloud base and I had a similar flight to the day before.

I made the following short video up form some of the clips – rather than music I put on a voice commentary mainly for the benefit of my non flying friends but feel free to watch if you want to get a sample of what it was like at Corryong in January 2010.

Link