November 6th-7th
I contacted Eduardo, the contact that I got from Jose Rosas
on my first day in Paracas. We met at
9:30 am and drove about 8 kilometres into the National Reserve, pretty close to
La Cattedrale that I visited when I first arrived. The beach was called Playa Supay. The wind was coming in, but not quite enough
to fly yet, however within 20 minutes, it was on.
Another pilot from France, Christophe, showed up with his
wife and later a “student” of Eduardo named Christian. I put student in quotes as he hardly seemed
like a student…the next day he did a tandem with his girlfriend… Eduardo gave me a site briefing. It is a ridge right by the ocean with a
pretty big beach to land on should you sink out. My guess is that it the ridge was about 200’
high and extended about 2-3 kilometres to the south. Eduardo suggested gaining some height right
by the launch before attempting to cruise down the ridge.
I was the first to launch and I was pleased not to get
dragged back as there were a lot of hard, crusty rocks on the plateau and if
you lost your footing, it could hurt. As
expected, the sea breeze was strong but relatively laminar. I watched below as poor Christophe had a few
botched launches and got dragged a bit. I
followed Eduardo’s instructions and gained some height by this rocky promontory
before eventually heading down the ridge.
All went well for the first kilometre but then I began to lose height as
the wind wasn’t hitting the ridge straight on.
I turned tail to run back but continued to sink and I was flying along
quite fast. I made sure to have enough
height to turn back around into the wind to land on the beach. Damn.
Oh well, I continued to kite the wing and used it to help
pull me down the beach back towards the launch as well as moving slowly up the
slope. I was able to make a small flight
for a few hundred meters before landing again but then promptly took off again,
climbed up and was back in the game.
Christian was in the air too but later I saw that he had top
landed and Christophe had landed below.
There seemed to be more whitecaps on the water, and I’d flown for over
an hour so it had to be approaching 11:30.
I decided to go for a top landing.
As I touched down, Christian came running up and grabbed my brakes and
ran backwards away from me to kill my glider, a technique we used to employ
when I was doing tandems in strong wind in Goa, India. Nice flight!
It’s always great to try a new site.
The following day Eduardo told me to meet him at 10:30. I figured that the wind was lighter that
morning but no, that wasn’t the case. It
was honking…coming in at 30+ km/hr. I
could see that Christian was down on the beach with his girlfriend and he was
trying to sort out a wing. Eduardo suggested
that I go down and join him and if I flew, to stay below the ridge. There’s a phenomenon called a Venturi where
the air gets compressed as it goes over a ridge (or through a narrow gap) so
the wind gets much faster compared to the base of the ridge.
It was still fairly windy on the beach but doable. It pained me slightly to open up my fairly
new school wing, a Macpara Muse 5. I had
purchased this year and it had less than ten hours of flying on it. Sand is just horrible for paragliding wings as
is salty air, but what’s the point in owning it if you don’t use it right?!?
Christian took his girlfriend on a tandem flight while I
kited and then had a bunch of little flights.
I was very cautious about not getting lifted up too high, which seemed
easy to do. It was a lot of fun playing
around on the sand. As Eduardo called
it, Playa Supay was a poor man’s Dune de Pyla, a famous sand dune in France
that is a playground for paraglider pilots.
I’ve been there before back in 2010 but sadly that is when Betty (my
campervan) died and a French couple helped me change
the entire diesel engine in their backyard over 11 days. Sadly, I only got to spend about 3-4 hours at
Dune
de Pyla over that time.
After about 45 minutes, I’d had enough. The harness I brought to Peru isn’t easy for
me to get into so a lot of the time I was hanging by the leg straps and after a
while, the inner thighs weren’t too happy!
Lots of fun though and great practice ground handling the wing in strong
wind.
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