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/Cloudsuck8.pdf

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

Two Hundred Miles in Oz

Only
a few months after my victory in Chelan, Belinda and I were once again stepping
off the plane at Sydney, into the brilliant sunlight of late November. We had
returned to Australia for the summer competition season, which continued to
attract a strong field of international pilots. This time, however, I was
thinking about trying for some longer distance cross country flights on my own
before the competitions began. Maybe even trying to break Larry’s record in the
epic conditions that I’d heard could be found in the dry areas of Australia.

I was beginning to feel it might actually be possible for me to
set a world record, although I knew I wasn’t ready just yet and needed to build
up to it. But, then, you never know, on the right day anything was possible. If
I was ready on that day, then it could happen.

Having experienced the cumulonimbus-laden dry line in West Texas,
I was thinking that Australia could be a much more congenial place than Hobbs
for record attempts. I loved flying in the big, fat thermals at Hay, and I
hadn’t forgotten the long tasks we’d flown under Mad Dog’s relentless goading.
And Australia certainly offered the necessary vast expanses of wide open spaces.

Australia is as big as the continental U.S., but the nearly all
the cross country hang gliding takes place in the eastern states of Victoria,
New South Wales, and Queensland, where the people — and the roads — are. To get
long flights I would need to get away from the coast, to the dry inland side of
the Great Dividing Range. It seemed possible, I thought, to break three hundred
miles, flying over the dry side of these three states. Still, my longest flight
anywhere was only 165 miles. I had caught the bug, but I had a long way to go.

I did have a secret weapon for my record assault, a new improved
hang glider called the AIR ATOS. I had picked up the ATOS at the AIR factory in
the village of Zainingen near Stuttgart in late July on my way to the Word
Championships in Italy. I'd flown it there and in the Austrian Championships in
August, but hadn't flown since then — so it was still pretty new to me. And
after a three-month layoff, I was ready to get back in the air.

I loved flying this new hang glider. Not only did it perform
superbly, but it was also easier to fly than any of my previous hang gliders.
Like the Exxtacy, it used spoilerons to turned the glider when I moved the
control bar from side to side. Moving the control bar in this way was much
easier and less tiring than moving my entire body far to one side of the control
frame and waiting for the sail to shift, as was the case with the standard flex
wing hang gliders.

The ATOS had far better performance than the hang gliders Larry
Tudor had flown when he set his records. Of course, by this time flex wing hang
gliders had also been much improved, so my ATOS was only a little bit better
than the new flex wing hang gliders I would be competing against for the record.
Still, I was beginning to feel I had a chance if I could just get the right
weather.

Strictly speaking, my ATOS was in a different official class than
the flexwings. We were scored separately at meets, and competed for different
records. But no pilot on any class of hang glider had yet flown farther than
Larry. His was the real record, the only truly important record, for all of us.

I had been mulling over two different sites for possible record
attempts. The first was Mt. Borah, near the small country town of Manilla, in
the upper New England region of New South Wales and a five hour drive northwest
from Sydney. The second was the equally small town of Birchip, in the Mallee
country of northwest Victoria.

Manilla is forty kilometers north of Tamworth, site of Australia's
largest country music festival, and looked to me as though it hadn't changed
much in the last fifty years. Like many Australian towns, it took its name from
a local Aboriginal word. There were a fair number of pubs serving the population
of a couple thousand, and it appeared to me as though drinking was the main
source of entertainment in town. All the hang glider and paraglider pilots
congregated in the Royal Hotel, a pub just south of the bridge at the north end
of town.

Belinda and I set up our tent in the caravan park, in the tall
trees near a weir on the river. This park and the adjacent cricket oval were
home to hundreds of white cockatoos called corellas, along with many other kinds
of birds — parrots, honeyeaters, all kinds of birds we’d never seen before. At
dusk the sky would be filled with screaming birds, all homing in on the trees by
the weir, jostling and fighting for their roosting places. For forty minutes
conversation would stop — who could be heard over the noise? — as we watched the
ritual in amazement.

A few miles north of Manilla we found Godfrey Wenness' flight
park, a former sheep station he had dubbed “The Mountain,” at the foot of Mt.
Borah. Godfrey, who owned half of the mountain as well as much of the land below
it, was then holder of the World Paragliding distance record, set from Mt.
Borah. It was Godfrey’s success and the promise of strong cross country
conditions that had drawn me to Godfrey's place in my attempt to set the world
hang gliding record.

Born of Austrian parents in Sydney, Godfrey used his world record
to promote his flight park. He was especially good at drawing paraglider pilots
from Europe to fly there in hopes of founding world record conditions. When it
was winter in Manilla, Godfrey was flying in Europe — along the way mentioning
his flight park. He welcomed us affably, and we joined the multilingual group of
pilots who made his home our social center.

Mt. Borah is part of a long ridge, the last before the great, dry
plains that spread out to the west. To the east a wide, rolling valley holds
wheat fields and open pastures. The Hunter Valley to the southeast had been
settled early by Australia’s English settlers, the first passage they discovered
that led inland from to the coast through the Great Dividing Range. This
location, at the top of the Hunter and the edge of the plains, would prove
important for my record hunt.

Mt. Borah is only a mountain by Australian standards, rising a
mere fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor — but its steep dirt road
challenged the rugged logging roads of the American Northwest. Gum forest
covered its sides, but there were cleared areas at the top for launching and at
the bottom to land if you didn’t get up. Borah was plenty high enough to deflect
upward the southeast winds that ran into it, and to generate lift on its own
when the sun hit its eastern or western flanks.

Continue reading here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck8.pdf