Day 1 in Algodonales

Flyspain is a company that organises paragliding holidays around the world, I booked myself in for a weeks thermaling training in or around the town of Algodonales in Spain.

After the necessary faffing around with paperwork. We set out for an inspection of the huge south-east landing field just outside Algodonales, it was comfortingly massive and only had a clump of small trees and an old farm house as obstacles. We set out for the south-east ridge above Algo in the sunshine with a plan get a confidence building top to bottom flight under our belts. There was very little cloud cover and the temperature must have been around 25C and rising.

I didn't feel nervous at all until we parked the car and I saw the take off area full of people, hang gliders being rigged and paragliders being checked, very intimidating. After a while I managed to find myself a tiny spot just big enough to do my daily checks.

Checks done I clipped in and moved to the take off queue (if you can call it that). With helmet, gloves and harness helping to bake me in the sun I was soon sweating.

After much confusion about who was going next and where the queue was (there isn't a queue) I was up. Having watched a few others launched it is obvious that the idea when doing a reverse launch is to bring the wing up and while making sure that your lines are as they should be and then turn and run like stink. My launch was similar to this but probably not as elegant. Finding very little lift on the way down it took about 10 minutes before I was in the landing field. As I was coming in it seemed to take ages before I could see the wind streamer on top of the farm house so I could land into wind. This was probably because I was so high to start with. It turns out that it was about a 2200 feet top to bottom which beats anything I have previously done.

Picture of a paraglider over the South-East landing field.

We all packed up and sat in the shade waiting to be collected by the FlySpain bus. We then set off for the westerly take off and stopped along the way to look at the landing field. The field was big but had trees around it, a road and electricity line running along the side facing the mountain. We were talked though a suggested landing approach so that we had a tried and tested method for avoiding the power lines when landing.

At the take off it was the same story of people everywhere and very little places for setting gliders out. Rob walked us though the site and gave a talk on general thermalling techniques. I found a space but only after I had the wing fully out did I realise that it had thistles everywhere.  I eventually made my way to the front baked in my helmet. I fluffed a couple of launches, it seems I am not braking my wing enough when it comes overhead but on my third or forth attempt I got away.

Having never really thermalled before I thought I did quite well. I worked a few thermals and was able to stay underneath a couple of gaggles (a gaggle is the name for a group of gliders in a thermal). Another first was that I was close enough to a few vultures  as they were thermalling and was able to make use of them as markers. Unfortunately I didn't turn on my GPS and so failed to make any recording of the flight, still there is always tomorrow.