This town is coming like a ghost town

It’s the end; all things come to an end. It’s the last week of the season. One by one the paraglider operators cease plying their trade and the tandem pilots prepare to return to their homes for the winter. Shops are closing by the day and as the thunder rolls overhead, lightning flashing across the horizon, the plaintive strains of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez add a melancholy counterpoint to a quiet evening’s solitary beer and herald the sudden demise of what was once bright, shining and new.

As each day dawns the sight of beachside emporia that no longer open the shutters becomes more familiar and each closure causes less distress than the last; there is only so much you can mourn something you had for so short a time. The tour operators pack away their boards and the lights go out, one by one as the thriving resort of Oludeniz prepares to hibernate. The place you once tentatively thought you could live in forever loses its lustre and now you've seen beneath the surface it can never be the same again.

 There can be no greater symbol that this land of eternal sunshine is shutting up shop than the fact that we all bought umbrellas two nights ago, to get us home under black, pelting skies. Swapping paragliders for parapluies, how poetic. And talking of symbols, nestled on a pile of tee-shirts a lonely glass eye charm, a gift for a loved one, struggles under the brooding skies to do its work and ward off evil.

Ennui... enervation... it's still only Wednesday. The ticking clock tediously ticks off the seconds to Friday when we make our weary way slowly back home. What to do... what to do?

Little rays of hope

But, what’s that? A chink of blue light; the eye winks hope and all may not be lost. We heft our gliders onto our backs and head out for the transport, squinting into the light, fingers tightly crossed all the way.

Whether to fly?

He was only a humble meteorologist, but one look at a girl and he could tell whether...

Some days it’s good, some days it ain’t. Working out which is which is part and parcel of being a daring, free-flying aviator. Settle down now and Uncle Batsby will give you a little lesson in flying and the weather... if only to bestow on you the knowledge to be suitably impressed by my tales of derring-do.

A paraglider might look like a parachute to you, but to us it is a wing, an aerofoil, a means to commit aviation. The world paragliding distance record is over 500km, set by one Neville Hulett of South Africa. For us it’s all about keeping it up, but eventually gravity always wins the unequal contest. It’s a bit like the European form of democracy; however hard you struggle, Europe ignores you and carries on regardless.

Actually, the main reason for landing is usually to regale your audience – any audience – with exaggerated tales of heights climbed, distance won and competitors vanquished. (Imagine then, how pissed off Neville must have been when he landed in the boonies without a soul in sight!)

Falling or flying? Just like those nutters who go in for freefall parachutery, we are always descending through the air, typically at around 1 metre every second, so we need to find air that is going up faster than we are going down. Although you can’t see it, the air is in perpetual turmoil – some going up and some going down. We need to find the uppy bits. And then stay in them.

You can’t fly without knowing whether. But wither the weather? (When we’re together?) Little fluffy clouds – that’s the ticket. When you see little fluffy clouds you can be sure they are sitting atop their very own little column of rising air. Like a lava lamp, bubbles of warm, light air pop up from all sorts of origins then rise and expand as they float on the colder, denser air around. As some air goes up, some must come down and eventually what was uppy air starts to sink again and so it goes... When you hear a glider pilot talking about thermalling he means he’s managed to spend a little time in his own personal bubble. Easier said than done; the bloody stuff is invisible.

A typical flight from Mount Babadag in Turkey starts at a mile high – a little over 5500 feet and lasts 20-30 minutes on a straight glide to the bottom. On a good day, you’ll find thermals and get up to around 8000 ft, prolonging your flight and increasing the fun factor. The other day I topped out at 12,200 feet and lest you think, “Pffft, easy!” civil aircraft regulations require the use of supplemental oxygen above 12,500 ft. 

That pimple below is a proper mountain!

Yes, yes, yes Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24miles high, but he had a balloon and a special suit. Pffft, easy! I had to do it all by myself, in shorts and tee shirt and I have to tell you, it was bloody freezing up there! Nice view though.

Poetry in Motion

Sometimes words just won't do it.

So today, I'm going all zippy-gobbed and just uploading a very short clip of exactly how one goes about tossing oneself off.

This is the westerly launch on Babadag mountain, at 1700m above sea level - I joined the 'nearly-a-mile high club'!

Life's a Drag

Life has a habit of getting in the way of whatever it is you feel you're supposed to be doing. Don't you just hate that? Lately, for me, life has been full of work; not the kind of work that fills your days and makes you content, but the kind of uphill trudge that makes you long for retirement. Or death. Whichever comes first (and at times either option seemed equally attractive).

I have a ‘friend’ who’s been having trouble getting it up lately, so I said I’d give him a hand. Well, as with so many things it was simple, really. We worked up a bit of a sweat with the preliminaries as I checked out his package. It was quite small at first, but once he got it out I could see what a handful it was going to be. Anyway, I watched while he had a go and I could see the problem straight away. Mindful of how huge and unwieldy it was, he’d been yanking away far too vigorously and that’s never going to get you anywhere. So, with my help and a couple of gentle tugs we had it all the way up and he went off like a good ‘un with a big smile on his face.

To relieve the stress and soothe the fevered brow, I like to toss myself off as often as I can. If the weather is nice I will go to a local beauty spot, whip it out, get it up, turn into the wind and gently toss myself off in full view of the gathered crowd. Oh yes, sometimes there’s an audience. Just as with dogging, there are only certain places you can do it without being chased off by angry landowners or gawped at by roving bands of rowdy ramblers.

But once you’re up it’s fine and on a good day you can stay up for hours. Sometimes you’ll be up until the setting sun brings you back to terra firma, where you’ll often get a full video debrief of your activities. You do have to be careful you don’t get sunburn though – it’s not normal to be exposed for such long periods.

So, yesterday I got it out at the Long Mynd in Shropshire. It was pretty stiff, but I managed to handle it and tossed myself off for over an hour. It was pretty intense – slowly pushing forward then slipping back, occasionally trying a new position or a different grip (your arms do get tired after a long one) all the way up to the climax, when I embarrassed myself and made a horrible mess. 

It’s a shame when you get dragged like a rag doll after a perfectly good landing. Still, you can’t win ‘em all. So I picked myself up, dusted myself down, packed up my paraglider and went home for a well-earned wank.