Many pilots wonder what it really takes to
set a world record. Some wonder what it's like to fly at a place like Zapata or
other world class sites. Cloudsuck answers these and other questions while
telling the story of how I set the current Distance World Record for Rigid
Wings. Over this winter, I am pleased to make the book available as a gift to my
readers in serialized form. Each Monday, another chapter will be available for
you to enjoy here on the Oz Report. The best read is the one in it's entirety,
and both the soft cover book and an ebook are available to purchase here:
http://ozreport.com/cloudsuck.php. You can find the Kindle version on
Amazon.

If you enjoy the serialized installments, you may wish to skip the text below
and jump directly to this week's chapter, including any graphics or pictures
here: http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck4.pdf

I hope you enjoy the book and this week's chapter as much as I enjoyed writing
it.

In early spring 1997, freshly back
from Australia, Belinda and I purchased a small travel trailer and headed across
country from Seattle to the Wallaby Ranch Flight Park in Central Florida. Since
we wouldn’t have to start on a new Windows Secrets book for a while, we
both had decided to spend a couple of months taking in the great springtime
flying that in the U.S. can only be had on that tropical peninsula.

We'd been to Wallaby Ranch the previous March for a couple of
weeks, and it had only whetted my appetite for a more extended stay. Hang
gliding is so weather dependent, I didn't want to go out to Florida for only a
short time and wind up experiencing a bad run of cold or wet weather, as we’d
had the year before.

Wallaby Ranch is situated on the edge of the Green Swamp, the
catchment basin for the Central Florida Aquifer, and is surrounded by orange
groves, cattle pastures, and cypress swamps. Situated on a dirt road a mile west
of the Florida Ridge and twenty-five miles southwest of Orlando, the Ranch was
once a marginal cattle operation. Malcolm Jones, a Florida hang glider pilot
with a dream, had purchased the land in the early ‘nineties and was busily
changing how those of us outside of Florida thought about hang gliding.

Malcolm had put together a 200-acre parcel, most of which was
cypress swamp or palmetto. The palmettos had taken back much of the cleared
pastureland and were now impenetrable. In the dry areas, fast growing pines were
taking hold. There remained only a twenty acre area of tough, drought resistant
Argentine Bahia grass — what remained of the pasture — that served as the launch
and landing field for the flight park.

Under the mossy live oaks, near the old farmhouse that stood on
stilts ten feet off the sometimes soggy pasture, Malcolm had reassembled a
recycled shed of rusted sheet metal that served as the hangar for his ultralight
tow planes. Four years later, Malcolm would clear away the palmetto and triple
the size of the field, the road would be paved and there would be a new hangar,
but all that was yet to come.

Florida is so flat that there is no place to launch a hang glider
on foot. The Florida Ridge rises only about 250 feet above sea level at most,
and Wallaby lies 125 feet below the Ridge, a mile to the west. The Ridge is
really just a gentle north/south sand dune in the middle of the state, halfway
between the two coasts. If you want to get into the air on a hang glider in
Florida, you have no choice but to be towed up.

Like their counterparts in Australia, Malcolm and many of his
fellow Florida hang glider pilots had grown up water skiing, and as teenagers
had started towing the early gliders behind ski boats on the numerous local
lakes. Later they tried trucks on rural roads out in the cane fields.

Then in the late ‘eighties a few had started towing up behind
ultralight airplanes. The local hang gliding club tried running an aerotowing
operation at the Gator Field ultralight port north of Clermont, in Central
Florida. But soon they had a falling out with the old-line ultralight pilots,
who weren't into towing or hang gliding, and they had to move.

It was getting difficult to find suitable roads without power
lines or traffic for truck towing. Towing over water required landing areas on
the beach, and it wasn’t easy to go cross-country when you started low over the
water. Getting permission to aerotow at ranches and turf farms was also getting
problematic.

Not only that, but the ultralights were difficult to tow behind,
because their slowest speed was almost too fast for a hang glider. It was a
rough ride, and hard to stay in control. What was needed was a specially built
ultralight that could fly slowly enough to safely tow a hang glider. By 1989
Bobby Bailey, one of the locals, had started designing and building just such an
ultralight. Soon he was working with Bill Moyes in Australia to put it into
production.

Bob was a wiry, chain smoking, Pepsi-drinking, good-natured
misanthrope, and hard to get to know on a casual basis. Yet over the ‘nineties
his Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly became the standard hang glider tow plane throughout
the world, and Bob had become a household name among grateful pilots worldwide.

Malcolm and his friends thought that if you could combine this
specialized ultralight — what had become the Bailey-Moyes Dragonfly — with a
field and facilities, you could have a flight park that would draw hang glider
pilots from around the country. At that time, no one had ever built or even
heard of a hang gliding flight park. The Dragonfly was brand new. Almost all the
U.S. hang glider pilots were out in California launching off hills and
mountainsides. Florida was a flat peninsula surrounded by lift-killing water,
for God's sake. Only a few pilots whom no one had ever heard of flew there.

Florida pilots went out west in the summer if they wanted to get
the big miles in and go cross-country. For example, every June Michael Champlin
and Tiki Mashy would leave their home in Hollywood, Florida and trek out to
Rocksprings, Wyoming or Hobbs, New Mexico — Larry Tudor’s old haunts — to get
some real flying in.

There were a few South Florida pilots, including Mike Barber and
Steve Kroop, who were truck towing in the cane fields south of Lake Okeechobee
and getting in some longer flights, but they were just a few. Besides, landing
in cane fields was no fun. The cane was so high and thick that it was almost
impossible to get your glider out. Often the only other option was landing in
the Everglades, with their attendant wildlife.

The club pilots in Central Florida had shown that aerotowing
behind ultralights was possible. A few pilots had begun driving down from
Michigan and the northeast to join them on the weekends when an ultralight pilot
was available to tow them up, and pilots in Wisconsin and Georgia had begun to
invest in their own Dragonflies.

But with the opening of the Wallaby Ranch in 1992, hang gliding
went through the next phase of a great transformation. Now you could go to a
destination "resort," put up your tent or trailer and stay a while. Have someone
pull you up, and if you didn't go too far away you could fly back hours later
and land where you started.

No longer did you have to bandito a road and watch out for the
Sheriff. You didn't have to worry about getting caught in power lines, or
getting out of whack coming off the tow truck and smacking a wing on the road,
maybe getting dumped into a ditch on the road side. There were plenty of open
pastures throughout Central Florida that made for easy landing if you flew away
from the Ranch. No longer did you have a semi-nomadic operation dependent on the
goodwill of a rancher with an insurance problem.

And of course, Florida had one very big advantage over everyplace
else in the U.S. It was reasonably warm in late winter. You could actually fly
in February and March and get really good flights. You could even come down
there over Christmas and count on a few good days of flying.

Continue reading here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck4.pdf.