My Hang-gliding and Paragliding History
My flying history is quite long and wonderful but lacking in greatness !
I started by trying to learn to Hang-glide in about 1987 to 89 with Vince Hallam near Brighton, and obtained my P1 - I then had a long break as I couldn`t afford to continue till about 1993 when I resumed and eventually obtained my Club Pilot certification with Steve Hudson in about 1995 at the DSC. I purchased a hang-glider - a Vision 5 large from Steve and a lovely harness and ventured out to fly occassionally thereafter. I have some fantastic memories - more especially both my qualification flight off Mam Tor in Derbyshire on a lovely summers evening and soon after flying at St Hilaire le Touvet during the Coupe Icaire - and more specifically the ramp - which is definitely the scariest thing I have ever done.
In the end though I wasnt flying very much and had a bit of an incident and moved over to Paragliding.
Paragliding training started with Steve again - and he is great but my location and weather conspired against me so I went on a few foreign holidays to try and obtain my licence more quickly. I visited Lanzarote - with Flight Culture - excellent, Spain - with Howard Young ? where the weather cospired against us and finally Greece about which I shall say nothing more.
The real significant learning though was during about 3 months when I was traveling round the world and I was in New Zealand. Here I stayed in the backpackers hostel in Aukland and spent about 3 months during the NZ winter learning with Alan Hills of Skywings. This was excellent - I flew numerous sites throughout North Island and my qualification day was brilliant - loads of short flights at Kario followed by about a 6km flight up the coast. I purchased a new to me ! Mac Hawaii and Moovy harness from Alan plus all the lessons for a great price. Basically I cannot recommend him and his wife Belinda highly enough - very very good teacher.
Following on from New Zealand I then went to Australia and flew at Rainbow Beach - which is just stunning Jean Luc who teaches there is very lucky I think - wow, Manilla - Godfrey Wiennes`s hill - Mt Borah - where I met the then Australian Champion - Rhett Rockman? - out of season but still great fun, Rex Point up near Cairns and visited Mt Tamborine although it was too windy for flying there when I passed.
My world trip finished soon after this and I returned to the UK on Christmas Eve 2002.
Since returning to the UK I am still flying the Mac Eden I had previously bought from Steve and have recently changed from the Mac Utopia harness to a second hand Woody Valley peak harness. I have also been flying in France, Slovenia, Austria and hope to visit lots more places. A lot of the photos are available in the adjacent links.
I hope that you enjoy looking at the pictures and videos available here and all comments gratefully received. I can be contacted at bob@bobveitch.net or bobveitch@gmail.com
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