Long Long Flight

Well, after yesterday's rain today was looking nice. We went up to the map, and it was pretty windy (too windy for students), but reaction took off fine and I was soaring. In the end I was flying for around 2 hours at least before the wind died down and I was forced to land on the beach.

Lovely smooth flight, only hampered by the fact that half way through I managed to drop my goproHD video camera and pole into the middle of the forrest I was flying over....

It WAS attached to a landyard, but it came loose and before I knew it I was watching £300 of video camera plummeting 200 feet down into the ground. arse.

For what it was worth, when I did land I trecked up into the jungle/forrest to try to find it - over an hour later I'd searched all over where I thought it had dropped; crawled through bramble bushes with thorns over an inch long, walking up a river, stumbled upon a bee hive and then had to try to placate a bunch of bees swarmed all over my hair (in the end they were intent on staying in there and I got 2 stings: let me tell you - an african bee sting is SORE... I had to sit down for 10 minutes while I felt my head was exploding).

In the end, I gave up... it was a long shot... and tbh even if I found it there's a good chance it would have impaled itself 3 feet into the ground and smashed the camera to smithereens....

sigh.

So so far:

1 prop : 2-300 quid

a camera: 300 quid.

still... got some good piccies on my DSLR. I've added 3 to the gallery:

http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Paramotor/South-Africa-2011/