Soaring over South Australia

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Seeing as there's no whitewater anywhere in South Australia, I've had to find a new hobby to occupy my weekends, and have joined the Adelaide Uni Gliding Club. Australia is one of the best places in the world to glide and I am now working towards my solo licence, in the hope that I obtain it by the time summer and good thermals come round again. I got into gliding through a friend at work - after seeing all the pictures stuck up around his desk and his obsession with the weather forecast, I decided I had to check it out for myself!

Like most Australians I've met here, the guys in the gliding club have gone out of their way to make me feel welcome, and I celebrated my 26th birthday at the gliding field by taking to the air in the mighty Puchatek with Derek, one of the instructors, and being taken on one of the legendary "hangar runs". This gives the instructors a chance to show off their aerobatic skills, performing loops, wing-overs, spins etc and is fantastic fun, once you get used to your head and stomach trying to change places! They laid on a barbeque and birthday cake, with the biggest candle I've ever had - a bonfire of almost an entire eucalptus tree's worth of wood, with avgas for a wick! Luckily I wasn't expected to blow it out!

Apparently one of the arguments put forward by the royalists in the last referendum here was that if the monarchy was abolished, the Queen's Birthday holiday would disappear with it (they love their holiday weekends here!)! I'm pretty sure they would replace it with Republic Day or something similar though! Anyway, the long weekend in June gave us the opportunity to take off up to the Flinders Ranges for three days of ridge soaring action. We enjoyed beautiful, dry sunny days the whole weekend, though it was a tad on the cold side. I was grateful that I had left the tent at home this time and had a cabin with electric blankets!

This was my first experience of aero-towing, where a small aeroplane tows the glider up into the air, as the club uses winch-launches normally. The winch is a big engine seated on the back of a truck, that winds a steel cable in at around 55 knots and lauches the glider like a giant kite. The aero tow can take gliders much higher and straight into pockets of lift, but is obviously much more expensive. The first day at the Flinders I went up in a club member's Bergfalke two-seater glider and floated around 3000 feet up over Wilpena Pound. The landscape here is really breathtaking and I have heard it described as the closest thing on Earth to Mars! It certainly looks very ancient, folded and eroded over thousands of years, and with very little evidence of human impact.

The second day I hiked up to the top of Rawnsley bluff with a fancy borrowed SLR camera, and settled down at the summit to await the approach of my gliding friends. Glider pilots are, as a rule, anything but camera-shy and a bushwalker with a camera is like a red rag to a bull. Within a short space of time I had five gliders swooping overhead and around me, much to the surprise of a few other Sunday walkers! They were so close that we could see the demonic grins the pilots' faces!

On the last day, Derek took me up close to the ridge and we thermalled up to 4000 feet, racing backwards and forwards along the ridge and over the Pound and valley floor. Tim, the pilot and owner of the tug plane, also very kindly took me on a few flights while launching the gliders. So, I soared over, hiked up and flew over Wilpena Pound - not much left to do of it really!

As for my own progress, I'm handling all my own take-offs and landings now and am approaching the half-way point of my training. Last weekend I thermalled up to cloud base at 4000 feet at the airfield outside Truro in the Barossa Valley and stayed up for a flight of 70 minutes - my longest yet. Couldn't help humming the theme to Top Gun as we landed that time!

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Photos

Wilpena
View over Wilpena pound from 4000 ft!

First Lesson
Preparing for takeoff

First Lesson
First lesson in Puchatek