Bassano report

This year’s flying in Bassano was the best I’ve had there so far, but sadly it rained the last few days so the competition was cancelled.

We drove for about 30 hours from Oslo, including a stop at Skyline in Übersee to pick up Nils Åge’s new harness. I got a new set of the “old” fibreglass tips, since the new set seemed to bend as easily as the one that came with the glider in Oz. Not much new on the Skyline harness this year, a little longer boot was all.

The first few days was perfect, when we arrived Saturday evening it rained, but Sunday saw blue skies and perfect flying. Everyone got nice flighs, I flew a trip to the river and back, while Robin and Johnny who had been here for a week already crossed the river east and turned at the tunnel turnpoint. The rest of the days went fast, everyone got up and away. Steinar and Arnt set new personal rekords in duration and height gain. It was unusually clear air, good lift, and cloudbase from 1800 to 2300 meters every day.

Pictures – Johnny taking off from Bar Deltaplano – Line, Kjell, and Arnt relaxing before takeoff.
Johnny taking off Line, Kjell and Arnt

A few video clips from takeoff. Audun “El Loco” Etnestad – 745KB, Arnt “Parrot” Opsanger – 565KB, and “Barron” Steinar Sverd Johansen – 796KB

I decided to rest on Friday to be ready for the start of the comp saturday, in retrospect I should have flown that last good day. The rain started as predicted on Saturday, just as we started to set up at the comp takeoff, how typical…

At least we got plenty of time to walk around the fair. I bought the last of the new 4Fight helmets from Icaro, all the other were sold before the fair started. I have not flown with it yet, as I have to mount the headset for the radio first. The helmet have a visir, I have never flown with a visir before, guess it takes a few flights to get used to it. I also got some new flying gloves from Icaro, where the outside of the index finger and thumb are kevlar reinforced. This is important as the VG rope wears thru normal gloves after a only few flights. Most of the fair was Paraglider and Paramotor related, with only a few hanggliders on display.

As the forecast was shitty for Sunday and Monday we decided to start driving bak home on Sunday afternoon. The trip was OK with no traffic jams, and the 2200 km went in just under 26 hours. I was watching DVD’s on my portable PC and trying to sleep most of the time.

Arriving back in Oslo it was even warmer than Bassano, with a solid high pressure and blue skies. Steinar and I went to Ringerud to attempt some XC flying, but it was too inverted and stable. We soared for 30 minutes in front of takeoff without getting up. Forecast for the weekend is rain, next weekend the first comp starts on Frya.