New PB

PB means personal best. It's one of the important drives in Paragliding --- do better than you have done before. The other option is to compete in competitions where you must fly better/farther/faster than other people.  Both are tremendous fun.

I achieved two personal bests yesterday in Manilla.  First, I flew 97km.  Second, I flew for 5 hours and 15 minutes, my longest flight so far!  Also, it was a bit of an adventure flight since I had not flown south-west in Manilla before, so the scenery was new and the flight planning was also more challenging. I had looked at a map before launching and had programmed in the airspace limitations into my GPS, but the details of some of the roads escaped me.

First challenge occurred when I had to decide which way to go from Lake Keepit while keeping my eyes open for sail planes and their tow planes launching from the Lake Keepit soaring club. There was a road toward a town called Gunnedah, and a road that I thought was a short-cut toward Breeza.  I wasn't sure how many cars would be on the short-cut road, so I counted toy cars (they look like that from high up) on the road while floating around. The reason I wanted to know is because the land the road heads through is dominated by mega-farms: huge tracts of land with no homesteads at all. Not a good place to stand by the side of the road. After seeing a handful of cars, I decided it was a good shortcut and followed it toward a town called Breeza.

My flight... best clicked.

My second challenge occurred at Breeza where I encountered a quite grumpy wedge tail eagle who insisted on repeatedly attacking me, then heading back to its home thermal, climbing up, and repeating the cycle.  Aside from my usual technique of pumping/almost stalling the wing as the wedgie is about to hit it (still works perfectly!), I also threw down some acro since I figured the wedge tail would not leave me alone until I got really low.  The problem with that choice was that I was dehydrated (despite flying with water, I hadn't drank any for the first few hours; I fixed that after escaping the wedgie), so after a few cycles of asymmetric spirals and a loop and then some wingovers I started to feel a bit ill.  I also made the mistake of trying to keep my eyes on the wedge tail while doing some of the acro.  This put my neck in a rather uncomfortable position once while I was pulling some significant g-forces. Bad idea. Oh well. I eventually got far enough away that the wedge tail left me alone and I boated along feeling a bit nauseous and beat up for awhile.  Luckily conditions were light and calm and after eating a fruit bar and drinking some water I felt much better. This same grumpy wedge-tail harassed another pilot that day too.

By the end of the flight it was getting late, the sky was completely covered in high cirrus clouds, the  convenient tail-wind had dropped off, and all that was left for lift were disorganized bubbles coming off brown dry fields.  I hopped slowly field to field at low altitude until I came across a crop-duster attending to a pair of fields.  Crop dusters fly super fast and low so despite being rather high, I was not willing to go on glide anywhere near the plane.  So, I waited awhile until the pilot moved onto a farther away field, but he was still close enough to block access to a brown and dusty field I was hoping to use to continue onwards.  I glided away from the crop-duster and ended up landing in a thistle filled field not too far from a town called Quirindi.

A sunset during a drive back to Manilla. Similar to, but not the one
I saw while hitchhiking back after this flight.  If you are hitchhiking while
watching the sunset you've already lost.

My last challenge was getting home. Near the end of the flight I was thinking that I should land early since the hitchhike back is quite extended and takes at least a couple steps (first you hitch to Gunnedah, then to Lake Keepit or Tamworth, and then finally to Manilla).  I decided against this (good) idea because I could see my distance from takeoff was close to my personal best.  In the end my open distance (that is straight line distance from takeoff) was 1.4 km longer than my previous best, while my total distance was an improvement of 8.9 km.  Well, this came back to bite me as I ended up getting dropped off at Lake Keepit just as it was getting dark.  My first hitchhiking failure.  I used my "call a friend" out and Mik picked me up and drove me back to the farm.  Phew.

I'm still aiming at 100km and the next couple days look perfect for it.