January 23rd, 2012
Terribly sorry...one of the longest breaks between
posts...but here’s why...
The tandem flying was progressing along smoothly with me
having flown about 100 tandem flights. I
had hoped to have more passengers on a daily basis but once the season reached
its peak there were 13-14 other pilots with not enough paying customers to keep
everyone busy all the time. At the start
of the season I was receiving some flights from the waiters of the restaurants
who tended to the sun beds that line the beach.
It’s a good gig for them. They
simply ask all of their customers whether they want to paraglide and cash in on
a 200 rupee commission which is a larger source of income than their actual
job. Why we pay them 200 out of 1500
rupees I don’t know. I tried to explain
to pilots that we’re flying for peanuts and we can dictate the prices but like
a little capitalistic market, there were some Indian pilots who were happy to
fly cheaply and they drove the profits down for everyone. During the peak part of the season however,
it was obvious that the Indian waiters were feeding flights almost exclusively
to Indian pilots. Fair enough. It just meant I needed to do some more
marketing so I put up posters around Arambol and on some other beaches.
Another factor that was hindering the amount of money I was
earning with the flying was this seemingly inherent yet intangible tandem
flying law: whenever there were many
people wanting to fly, the conditions were bad, and when the conditions were
perfect, there were no customers to be found.
Uncanny.
On this day, it was the former. Quite a few tourists desired to fly but the
wind was just a bit too light for tandems yet it was enough for solo
pilots. So for a change, I grabbed my
solo wing and hiked up the hill with a couple of French pilots, Jacques and
Manu. There were 3-4 tandem pilots with
3-4 passengers each hanging out at the west launch hoping for conditions to
improve. A few tandems attempted
take-offs but then soon sank down to the beach after only a couple of minutes.
I took off and enjoyed the sensation of being back in my
solo wing. It’s kinda like being a bus
driver during the week and hopping in your sports car on the weekend. The flight was decent although I couldn’t
climb too much higher than the ridge.
Most times when I passed by the takeoff I would be questioned by the
crowd below as to my latest evaluation of the wind conditions. Suffice it to say, it never improved so it
looked like I had made the right decision in grabbing my solo wing. I was the “sky pig” of the day with an hour
and a half flight.
Near the end of the flight, I crossed Sweet Lake Beach to
the small ridge on the south end. I
played around there for a bit but wasn’t climbing much as the wind was
diminishing. With each pass I lost a
meter or two of height but that was okay, I was ready to land and have a nice
late afternoon, post flight beer. I
decided not to land on the large strip of sand behind the sun beds as I always
do with my tandem, but instead opted for the patch of sand in front of the
three restaurants. Why? I don’t know exactly. Feeling a bit cocky, not wanting to walk an
extra 50 meters, or just trying something different... Well, that was a mistake. I was cruising just in front of the top of
some coconut trees that were near the base of the hill and I turned back
towards the restaurants for my last downwind leg before turning into the wind
and landing.
Everything seemed normal yet suddenly I felt a loss in
pressure from the wing as it fell back and I immediately began to fall
backwards towards the ground when I was about 5 to 6 meters above the beach. My paraglider had entered a parachutal stall
meaning it was still open but it was no longer acting like a wing providing me
lift. It all happened in a blink of an
eye. I had no time to react. I felt the sickening thud as I slammed into
the sand with my butt leading the charge.
“Damn! Not again!” I thought as
my mind recoiled from the idea of yet another back injury from
paragliding. Wait, I’ve got other things
to think about first, like breathing.
The impact had knocked the wind out of me.
I was immediately surrounded by tourists, other pilots and
locals. Thankfully there were some
foreigners who knew how to control the situation, first checking on me, keeping
people back, not moving me, getting water and talking reassuringly to me. I knew I’d done some damage but I could also
surmise that it was not as severe as the disk compression I sustained in
Panchgani back in March of 2011.
I gingerly removed my helmet while still lying on my side in
the sand. I was staring at some rocks at
the base of the hill just three meters away.
“Wow that could have been a lot worse.”
Some pilots packed up my gear as I eventually sat up and then into a
chair someone brought out from one of the restaurants. Eventually most of the onlookers dissipated
but one Austrian woman named Sonja stuck around and mentioned that she was
studying kinesiology and if I liked she could perform some simple tests on me
to assess my condition. Sure, why
not. I had just met Sonja and her German
boyfriend Francesco, both solo pilots, on the launch before taking off. I recognized them as they were staying in a guesthouse
near mine. Sonja had me hold my right
arm up as she asked me a question in German (which I could hardly understand)
like “Do you want to be healed?” and then she’d push down on my arm. If my arm resisted it was a positive
answer. Then she would pinch my shoulder
to “turn off the muscle” and test again and my arm would always drop after the
pinch...interesting. At one point she
had me stare at a guy’s black t-shirt (oh, the guy happened to be Bagtoo from
Himachal Pradesh from whom I bought my tandem wing) and do the same test. I was still in the post traumatic stress
adrenaline fuelled stage so I wasn’t really following but it kept my mind a bit
busy.
Sonja and Francesco offered to escort me home. In retrospect, I know I should have gone to
the hospital immediately to get checked out but I was quite sure the doctor
would just tell me to lie prone for the next few weeks and it seemed like a
long distance to get to medical help, at least an eight hundred meter walk and
then a taxi or ambulance to a hospital half an hour away. I made it home and into bed and thanked Sonja
and Francesco for their help.
My next door neighbour and good friend Martin came home a
few hours later and I told him of my accident.
Martin or Nurse Martin as I called him was fantastic. Over the next few weeks he brought me many
meals and helped me in whatever manner he could. Sonja visited regularly and did some
“balancing” of my muscles and energy lines with similar techniques as on the
beach. I have to admit that I didn’t
follow or necessarily believe in the treatment but I happily went along with it
as it kept me distracted and hey, there are only so many movies to watch and
books to read before cabin fever sets in.
By the fourth day after the crash, I realized I needed to
get my back checked out to see what I had done.
It was a Saturday and the hospital would be open but I tried to sit up
and the pain was overwhelming and I quickly lied down again. Okay, let’s go Monday morning. Sonja, with the help of a fellow Austrian
Andy, organized an ambulance, borrowed a stretcher from the life guards and
gathered some friends to haul me down from my guesthouse. Did I mention that my guesthouse is 120 stairs
up from a path that links Sweet Lake Beach to Arambol Beach? And after the descent, they still had to
carry me about 600 meters to the nearest road!
Amazing.
The ambulance was very posh, a new vehicle with a super
comfortable stretcher and air conditioning.
Sonja escorted me and we joked at the fact that they blared the siren
the entire way to the hospital. “C’mon
guys, the accident happened 5 days ago, I don’t think it’s a real emergency.”
We spent only an hour at a fancy new hospital near the city
of Mapsa. Unlike western hospitals, I
hardly had to wait for the doctor to perform a cursory diagnosis and send me
off for X-rays. I was immediately
wheeled into the X-ray room and discovered an annoying and painful kink in the
Indian medical system. The X-ray table
was about 8 inches lower than the gurney I was on and neither could be
adjusted. Getting to and fro proved to
be quite excruciating.
On examining the X-rays, the doctor told me that I had
sustained compression fractures on my T9 and T11 vertebrae. Damn, I’m really screwing up my back. Those are the third and fourth vertebrae I’ve
damaged along with a compressed disk in between. He prescribed some calcium pills, vitamins
and this expensive nasal spray to promote bone healing and told me to rest in
bed for the next few weeks at least, let my body dictate that. I also purchased a back brace. The whole medical visit only cost about
$100. Twenty five dollars each for the
ambulance, X-rays and diagnosis, medicine and the back brace. Pretty good deal I thought, especially since
the ambulance even took Sonja and me back to Arambol!
Then came the tricky part, how to get me back up to my
guesthouse. We eventually located enough
people we knew to help carry me back up the 8 storeys or so to my room, right
in the heat of the day. Thanks
everyone! My hat is off to you.
I spent the next three weeks confined to the Magic Villa
(Martin’s name for our guesthouse). I
received many visitors and I have to say that it was wonderful to feel the love
in this country, half way around the world from my home. By the time Martin left back to Sweden in mid
February I thankfully could at least fend for myself with the nearby restaurant
delivering me food.
I spoke with a few pilots just after the accident and in the
ensuing weeks. No one seemed to think I
did anything wrong. I had my hands up
with next to no brake applied. So what
caused the parachutal stall? Well my
wing is old, in paragliding standards. I
purchased it in 2005 and have about 350 hours on it. By this time a combination of the lines
stretching or shrinking coupled with the sun causing the material of the wing
to become more porous makes the wing to be more susceptible to stalling at low
speeds. So unlike my first two
paragliding crashes where pilot error was the main factor, perhaps this time it
was an equipment failure. Well, actually
I can chalk this one up to pilot error as well.
Why was I flying such an old and potentially dangerous wing? Ironically I was planning to buy a new solo
wing before leaving India so this Synergy 2 was not leaving the country with
me. But it had just taken me on an epic
84 kilometre cross country flight last year in Himachal Pradesh so I naively thought
it was still flyable.
Some lessons in life are painful to learn...
