A golf ball.

The story: last July, late afternoon, a few of us arrived on launch with a cloud layer moving over the back of the ridge from the south. The cycles died off and the typical cross launch wind disappeared, leaving dead calm. Figuring I had surrendered a twenty for the ride up and expecting nothing more than a 4 minute sled ride down, I kitted up and set up for the mad horde charge off the 'cliff'. Launch was as expected for the conditions and a quick turn west to go put a km in before turning east to set to land. 

Or so I thought. 

I start my short run west and the vario starts chirping, point two, point five, back and forth. Odd, the sun has been hidden for near half an hour, there is no dynamic lift, and cloud base is nearly 5000 feet above me, clearing the mountain peaks. I wander further west by a few hundred meters to 'tag' a ridge, thinking this is great. Then it hits me, a comment from Godfrey during the 2012 Australian Paragliding XC Open regarding it becoming lifty everywhere for no apparent reason. I beeline for the LZ (landing zone, situated next to a golf course) and snap off a succession of quick 360's.

One hundred meters off the deck and the lift is gone. I touch down to discover a golf ball sitting in the grass at my feet. Not five minutes after, the sky unleashed its wrath with one of the strongest storms of the season. 

Two weeks later. I am at the Canadian Paragliding Nationals, laid out on launch with the words from the task committee in my head - 'thunderstorms expected'. I think of the golf ball from that fateful day (that I had since put in my flight deck), decide I'd much rather have a beer than fly, and pack up. Half way down the hill some of nastiest clouds I had ever seen in this region cleared Mt. Currie and began to unload on Pemberton.

I like to think of skill being the result of trying something and getting it right, where as judgment is the result of trying something and getting it wrong. The golf ball is my reminder of those two days and the initial gain in judgment and subsequent gain in paragliding skill.

June/July - 'You're no longer a Novice, time to stop flying like one' -> coaching @ Mt.Woodside, Bridal Falls.

August - 'The key to XC is adaptability' -> Canadian Paragliding Nationals @ Mt.Mackenzie.

September -> 'Sometimes you have to just sit back and enjoy a paraglider pilot's view (but mind the glide ratio)' -> Heli-Para, Tantalus.

Hope everyone is out enjoying this beautiful Easter long weekend. 

With spring and the return to longer days and more high pressure systems, catabatic and outflow conditions subside.  Flying conditions return to inflow & anabatic flows, and Novice paragliding conditions emerge. 

We are inviting all new 2013 student pilots, grads and flight club regulars out for a social evening to celebrate the new paragliding season and make goals and plan exciting events. Of course, friends of pilots are also always welcome!

Relax knowing you can enjoy a few drinks and get home safely using skytrain, just stumbling distance away.

Great weekend coming up at the Outdoor Adventure Show at the Vancouver Convention Center, March 2-3.

An awesome day out to explore a wide variety of recreational pursuits: paddle sports, scuba diving, rock climbing, mountain biking, camping and much more. 

We'll be at booth #1035 taking visitors on a guided tour of the sport of paragliding.

iParaglide is pleased to provide this discount coupon.  Just print as many as you need and bring with you to the show.

Hope to see you there!  

Upon my arrival back in Squamish, BC, I started searching around for local paragliding instructors.  Some research, some phone calling and web site browsing brought me to Dion Vuk at www.iparaglide.com.  We had a phone conversation followed by a coffee outside his downtown Vancouver apartment. We discussed the sport, lessons, prices and equipment. He sorted me out and made me feel more than confident to begin that spring. 

It started at Vanier park ground handling the wing and learning the equipment. My kiteboarding experience certainly helped in understanding the paraglider and its behavior, especially as it pulls through the ‘power zone’! Then we moved to Diefenbaker park in Tsawwassen to do ‘slope soaring’ aka takeoff and landing practice. 

My first ‘flight’ and freedom from the earth’s confines was upon me. I was hooked, and pumped!  The following day with much ado about nothing we headed to Agassiz to do our first solo mountain flight. The group was excitedly nervous, as one should be when about to fly solo in a non-powered aircraft and head into the sky. My first solo paragliding flight was calm, free flowing and absolutely spectacular as the scenery of the site is breathtaking, never mind you’re flying with vultures, eagles and hawks. A safe landing and another quick shuttle up the mountain for a second and third flight, ecstasy is being in the air!

Weather and work scheduling over-riding my weekend training I did not manage to graduate my Novice P2 course that summer of 2011. I did however, get eleven solo mountain flights, slope soaring training, kiting training and a beautiful end of the year flight off the intimidating, yet totally mind blowing, famous Bridal falls.

Summer 2012 arrived and more adrenalized than ever I took back to the skies with Dion in the lower mainland. I was making all kinds of new friends and nothing was greater than sharing the stoke with fellow students as they came down from their 1^st, 3^rd or 20^th flight.  My flights climbed and the summer drew near an end. It was time to get serious. My last mountain flight of the year took place in Pemberton during the Canadian Paragliding National event, and it was an amazing experience to fly in a new setting amongst the best in the business in Canada.

After dialing in the whole flying, take off and landing thing, it was time to sort out the emergency training skills set, an SIV course delivered by Dion up in Lillooet Lake, north of Pemberton, BC.

It simply was the best and most exhilarating thing I have ever done, to destroy and rebuild my wing, spiral, spin and descend in the air in a controlled environment with an angel on my shoulder. Not only was the course amazing, but the tow launch from a jet boat indeed made it a world class exercise. No dusty, bumpy logging roads for this guy. Beach, sun, sand and acro training over the beautiful Lillooet Lake is certainly something I’ll be doing every year, and every new gear.

I’m so blessed to have chosen such a positive paragliding mentor, instructor, and fantastic person as Dion to take me to the air and set me free. Never once put me down, handed out high fives and stoke like candy, and let me gain confidence at an appropriate level.

After graduating my course, which involved a 6 minute kiting session, I had my first solo flights at Woodside and the then Blanchard in Bellingham.  As I write this I am sitting in south central Mexico in Valle de Bravo just having flown my first couple of paragliding flights in a truly international setting.

Paratour from Jeff Bertoia on Vimeo.

I guess I fulfilled my resolution; living a healthier life, flying the friendly skies and travelling with my wing to meet new friends, discover new places, and keep my adrenaline habitat satisfied. 

Blue skies amigos.

After months of rain, looks like a sunny long weekend coming up with a fantastic evening of paragliding films to keep your mind soaring while your feet may have been grounded for a while. 

Some great new film entries on paragliding at the upcoming VIMFF (Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival) this Saturday (Feb.9) afternoon Adventures in the Southern Hemisphere and Saturday night's Big Air Show. It's at the Rio theatre at Broadway and Commercial.

We will be MCing the event, and look forward to meeting new and familiar faces.

We will also be presenting our paragliding multimedia presentation:The Sky is Your Playground:

Join iParaglide as we take you on a guided tour of paragliding: from taking your first steps off the ground to flying ever greater adventures in the sky.  With dramatic images from around the world and breathtaking videos that are sure to inspire all that seek to soar with the hawks and eagles.   

The Show starts at 19:30 but doors open at 18:30 and early arrival is recommended as sometimes the show is sold out by 19:00.  VIMFF details are here. 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

This last summer, Craig, Melissa, and I went on a little paragliding trip to Nova Scotia (by way of Wisconsin, but that is a completely different story). For Melissa and I, this was our first time travelling with our wings and it ended up with me completely hooked on the idea of para-vacationing!

It is an odd experience trusting your paragliding gear to baggage handlers. I mean, you hear what they do to baggage in general, and then you are going to let them dropkick thousands of dollars worth of equipment from one end of the airport to the other and then trust your life to it? More than that, we thought for sure that the inspectors would be "curious" about the gear and that we would be handed our harnesses with a wad of paragliding reserve crammed into the reserve container by a (hopefully) guilty and apologetic-looking TSA inspector. Luckily, this never happened, and with the exception of money-grubbing airlines charging extra for checked luggage - all of them with the exception of West Jet - there were no issues at all. Needless to say, we did a thourough inspection of all the gear prior to flying just in case a TSA rep got creative trying to hide an error.

Ahh Nova Scotia! Not sure about the rest of the province, but where we were staying in Parrsboro, on the Bay of Fundy, was the perfect example of a maritime fishing village. It's quite a ways off the usual tourist haunts and about two hours north-west of Halifax. Small doesn't come close to describing it; I think it took about 5 minutes to drive the length of the town centre (all one road of it) and there was just one hotel and a handful of restaurants, all of which closed before 10 PM, except the Tim Horton's.

We had figured that seeing as how we are all relatively new paragliding pilots, we decided to find a local guide to show us around the local flying sites and give us an idea of the conditions and things to look out for prior to flinging ourselves out into the Bay of Fundy. We met up with Michael Fuller of Pegasus Paragliding the first day and hit it off right away! On that first day, the winds were gusting to over 40 km/hour, so we spent the entire day driving around to the various sites. At some point I mentioned that, seeing that we were in Nova Scotia, I was looking forward to feasting on some lobster. Michael nodded and suggested in a deadpan that it was quite likely that something could be worked out. Later on in the day, we stopped at the commercial dock where he suggested we wait for a moment or two so he could meet up with a friend of his. Turns out that friend is a commercial fisherman who was just coming in after bringing in his lobster pots. Michael introduced us as some paraglider pilots from the West Coast and soon there were four gigantic lobsters being passed up from the boat in an plastic shopping bag. I asked the two of them how much I owed and the fisherman just sort of shrugged and told Mike that it would be about $12 or so... but really, Michael had helped him out with the generator last month and... well, really, it's just not really a big deal. I looked at Michael a little confused, but he just smiled, shook the fisherman's hand and started back to his truck. While we walked he just matter-of-factly told the three of us that we were coming over to his place for a lobster boil that night. I was blown away! Here is this guy whom we've just met who has just invited us into his home for dinner! I love this place! Needless to say, all aspects of dinner was amazing: the food, the company, and the conversation.

But you folks aren't reading this for a point-by-point rehashing of my vacation; you probably want to hear about the flying!

Well, the weather was incredibly uncooperative and it turned out that we only had three real paragliding days. One day was spent just getting the idea of ridge soaring with some "amazing" 15 second flights. In our defence, the winds weren't great – a bit low for ridge soaring – but it is also true that we just had no concept of how fast the whole thing has to happen! When your launch is only 20 feet above the landing zone, there is no time to think about what's going on: you've either launched and turned into the wind immediately, or you are on the beach looking at a mad scramble back up the bank. It was a steep learning curve. Sadly, just as we were getting the idea, the wind started punching up to 40 km/hour again, and the rest of the day was a wash.

Fast-forward through two days of rain and then we are with Brian, also from Pegasus Paragliding, at the Fox River launch over the Bay of Fundy with sapphire skies and perfect 25 to 30 km/hour winds. It. Was. Amazing. Since coming back to the West Coast and mountain flying, I've referred to soaring the Bay as "cheater flying". As long as you stayed within the lift band, you couldn't help but get lift! There was no turbulence and there were no punchy thermals; it was nothing but clean, laminar wind holding you in the air. There were times when I would just lean back in the harness, put my hands behind my head and relax while remaining perfectly still within the sky. Getting used to the idea of not having a constant horizontal component to flying was really odd at first, but once it sinks in that you aren't just going to drop out of the sky, it was just so relaxing! After the first 40 minutes, the wind started picking up a little bit and we had to start playing a balancing act between brake positions and the use of the speedbar to maneuver where you wanted to. Until this point, I had always thought of the speed bar as an all-or-nothing "get the hell out of Dodge" device; here it was just another tool to use while soaring back and forth along the ridge. Once I noticed I was regularly having to use 40 to 50% bar, it was time to land after floating back and forth above the Bay of Fundy for a solid hour and 45 minutes.

The next day... more rain. Then thunder storms with rain followed by driving wind and rain. See the pattern? While there was nothing we could do, it was disappointing to only get the one real flight in!

On our last day before heading back to Halifax for our flight home, we got a call from Brian saying that while it looked like there might be rain later, the West Bay launch was golden and we had to get out there ASAP! And get out there we did. Paragliding in cloudy skies was a very odd experience and something that I would never have thought to do were it not for the experienced local assuring us that since the landing zone was always just below you, should the rain start, you just went and landed. Now, because of the possibility of rain, it was suggested that we don't stay too high, but we should get out there and get going! Again, it was amazing! Directly to the right of launch was a bowl that connected a point with the shore, and given that the winds were coming in directly from the bay, that bowl acted as a paragliding elevator: +1.6 metres/second and smooth as silk. You just had to find the point in your controls where you were stationary, then just enjoy the ride to the top of the ridge and above.

I've rambled on long enough; I'll let the video speak for itself:

To sum it up, we'll be going back to Nova Scotia again – as many times as I can – as we only just barely scratched the surface of the paragliding possibilities on the amazing Bay of Fundy.

It's time for our annual paragliding gala celebration for 2012.  Welcome to Flight Club.

We are inviting all pilots that came out for their first flights, Novice pilot graduates, and former grads out for our paragliding season finale.  Of course, friends of pilots are also always welcome.

Share a beer with flying friends and relive the most exciting flights of 2012,  exchange photos and other media, and plan upcoming adventures. 

We will be issuing some very special wings to our new paraglider pilot graduates during the winging ceremony.

Then we will celebrate our Best of Paragliding 2012 Awards, with the winners of Best Paragliding Video, Photo and Blog announced. 

Relax knowing you can enjoy a few drinks and get home safely using skytrain, just stumbling distance away. 

I've had a fantastic year of flying. From my first unsupervised launch and my first solo, local flying day, I've gone on to do my first paragliding trip (Russ, Craig, and I went to Nova Scotia, where I also had my first coastal ridge soaring flights), attended my first fly-in (the Can-Am at Black Mountain), and quadrupled the number of different of sites I've flown at. All steps towards becoming a better and more confident paraglider, but the most important step of all was one I took last weekend: my first SIV clinic.

SIV is a French abbreviation for "Simulation d'Incident en Vol", which translates to "simulation of incidents in flight". Over water, you do things to your wing to imitate bad things that can happen while flying and practice recovering. You learn how to recognize problems, learn what actions you should or should not take in various scenarios, get a feel for long it takes for normal flight to resume, and figure out about how much altitude you lose in the meantime.

For iParaglide's SIV, we go to a remote little beach on Lillooet Lake near Pemberton. We set up a simulator on the beach and take turns walking through the different maneuvers on it before taking our turn in the air. We use a boat, piloted by the wonderful Ted, with a special winch to tow each of us, one at a time, to about 3000 feet above the water. Getting towed up isn't a passive process, but one where you have to constantly monitor the boat and steer to follow it and constantly monitor your paraglider and brake to keep it steady and overhead. The boat gets you up, but you are also flying the whole time, which, as another participant put it, has some advantages over driving up a hot and dusty road to a mountain launch. Then there is also the great opportunity to learn from each participant's tow and SIV moves while watching a spectacular show from the comfort of a beach chair! Ted has the very best towing equipment, so launching was very safe with no risk of being dragged, and I found following the boat to be a fun challenge.

Once high over the water, our instructor, Dion, uses the radio to remind you about what you are going to do, then guides you through the process. For example, to do a frontal, he'll remind you that what you are going to do is pull down all the A-risers on both sides. He'll say: "So grab all the metal carabiners for both A-lines on both sides. On my command, you'll pull them both down hard and then release. Ready? Three, two, one: huy-yah!" And on the "huy-yah", you haul down on those lines and the entire front of your wing collapses and you release the lines and you fall a little until the wing opens again. And as it happens, Dion says: "OK, release. Great. The wing is open again. Good." And then he gets you ready for the next move. It is all progressive: you start with a move called big ears, which is easy and benign, and move up to slightly more exciting incidents that are likely to happen at some point in your time in the air, like frontals and asymmetrics (where some portion of your paraglider collapses, usually because of turbulent air, and you have to shift on to the good side of the wing and fly with that until the collapsed portion pops back out).

If you are responding well to commands on those first moves, on subsequent flights, you learn B-line stalls and spirals, both of which will help get you down should you encounter cloud suck or other undesirable weather conditions. Then you move to the "Big Scary Move" for most of us: the full stall. To stall of paraglider, you pull both brakes symmetrically all the way down and hold on to the bottom of your harness while your wing turns into a flapping mess above you and you rock back and forth and plummet downwards. The important part of the full stall is to release the stall only when your paraglider is in front of you; if you release while it is behind you, it will start a cascade, so you'll be swinging drastically forward and backwards in a fairly uncontrolled manner, still losing altitude. Dion gives clear instructions, saying "hold, hold, hold, and release", but if you don't respond quickly to the commands, it can still lead to some crazy stuff. Before going out for the clinic, I was worried about my physical ability to hold down the brakes during the stall and about my ability to do just the right thing at just the right time while my wing is flapping around above me, but I understood that this is an important move to learn: the full stall can be used as a re-set if other things are going awry.

It turns out, the full stall wasn't that hard for me. As long as I followed Dion's instructions as far as posture, I could hold the full stall quite well.

What I couldn't do was the B-line stall; no matter how hard I pulled, those lines would not move. This has to do with the Icaro Instinct's incredible stability in the A- and B-line portion of the glider's leading edge: it doesn't fold easily, and wants to stay solid and open. I was a bit discouraged about not being able to pull a B-stall at first, but after landing, Dion and I discussed the characteristics of my particular wing and my physical strength and decided to try a C-line stall on my next flight. C-line stall is not recommended on most paragliders, but it works really well with with an Icaro Instinct, and accomplishes the same thing as a B-line stall: increases your descent rate a lot while staying relatively stable. You drop quickly - it feels a bit like a descending elevator - and you only rock around for a couple of moments until it steadies. As long as you wait until everything is steady before releasing and release slightly more gradually than exiting a full stall, all is very safe and sane feeling. It's a really important tool to add to my paragliding toolbox, so the whole weekend was worth it for that discovery alone.

Many of us were quivering from adrenaline after at least some of the flights. Since I'm a "Sunday driver" type of flyer, rather than a "race car driver" type, that level of excitement made for an intense weekend for me. Still, I learned so much about flying, about my wing, and about myself, that I'm eager to do it all again next year. I'm taking another step towards feeling like a real paragliding pilot!