Over the water

I had a few towing flights on Lillooet Lake in Pemberton with Ted at zone paratowing.  I spent some time/height perfecting my fast full stall and recovery which I keep in my toolbox for cravats.  Of course, I fly right now a 1-2 glider which has only cravat'ed a couple times on me, all pilot induced (unloaded wingovers while I was learning).  As a reference point for people learning, I feel reasonably comfortable now that I have done about 40 full stalls.  Similarly, I've only spun my glider 20 times or so (most almost a year ago), so am not that comfortable with the spin behavior and am a bit spastic in the controls when trying to exit a spin or failing while trying to heli my glider, which usually makes the exit way worse than it needs to be... always practice acro with your chest strap fully open.

I also worked on asymmetric spiral to loop.  While I managed a couple good well loaded loops, my last flight I didn't have the rhythm right in the asymmetric spiral but I went to loop anyway since I was getting a bit tired and wanted one last try.  Tired and with a "just try it" attitude?  Of course I had too little energy and ended up with a slack-lined collapse moment.  The recovery was simple and the glider didn't cravat.  Similar to what happens at 40 seconds in this video (not me): failed paraglider loop.

So, I know what to work on over land now: burn all available height with asymmetric spirals until I've got them perfected.  A tip for safe loop practice from asymmetric spirals (this same tip holds for wingovers when they become inverted) is to pull the brake early, before or just as you reach the bottom of the pendulum, which keeps you safely in front of the glider.  Then as you really get the timing dialed in, slowly push the brake later and later until you achieve your desired vertical-ness factor (you'll notice in the video that the pilot pulls the brake way late after the bottom of the pendulum).

My glider is a U-Turn Obsession II (S) and I fly close to the top end of the weight range and it's very dynamic --- I can wingover into inversions, though I'll admit it took me a year of flying this glider to get to that point.