After a day spent riding the recumbent bike on Saturday,  and not having organised any inland flying I headed for Portsea, arriving about lunch time to find a couple of paragliders flying so I  set up the FUN and launched.

It was a little light at times and off to the west a fraction. One of the PG's left leaving myself and Jiri Stipek (PG) flying as the wind slowly increased.  

We were both flying at the Life Saving club when I heard some yelling and finally realised it was Jiri.  I looked back toward him to see what he was on about and was surprised to see that I was trailing a yellow streamer.  I realised with a shock that it was my parachute bridle, and looked down to see that my chute container was half-detached from the harness.  I grabbed it with one hand and with the other worked to fly the glider.  There was no point in trying to soar so I concentrated on flying a straight line down the beach back toward the Portsea takeoff.  At about 2/3 of the way back it was time to land so I dropped out of prone at the latest possible time and had to let go of the chute, which promptly fell off the harness and fell to the ground, opening just as I did my final flare  - which basically stopped me dead in the air at about 1ft altitude!

Fortunately I was able to get unhooked and deflate the chute before it dragged myself and the glider up the hill!

After getting things together and hiking back to takeoff, I replaced the chute with a kite bag and a Melways street directory and had a very pleasant half hour or so flight in the strengthening wind.

Thanks to Jiri for saving me from a possibly serious situation!

Took the afternoon off for a fun zen afternoon at Flinders.  My daughter, Miriam, drove me on her L plates.
The wind was off to the east most of the time, so the bowl was the only real usable area. When I arrived, Paul Tanner was already flying.  After I left, after setting up, flying for 1-1/2 hours landing, walking up to get th car, driving around and packing up, he was still cruising the bowl!

Miriam took some photos, including the one in this entry.

A day flying the ATOS/Thistledown at Locksley.
There was a ferocious inversion at about 2500 ft when I took off at about midday, and the engine got a major workout  as it was a long wway between thermals and the thermals themselves weren't much to get excited about.

About 2pm the inversion broke up to a new one at 6000ft and thermals were bigger and smoother.  This was just as the sailplanes began winching, so they immediately skied out.

As the inversion broke, the southeasterly wind picked up.  As Lockley is in the lee of the range to the SE, this meant that the thermals to the west of the field shut down in sink, but the sailplanes were able to head over to the range where things were better.  I managed to work my way over to the range as well and was rewarded with excellent climbs (1200fpm) up to the inversion top.  Unfortunately it remained blue.

The flight was just over 4 hours in duration, with an uncharacteristically high fuel usage of 5 litres.

I decided to see what the HPV scene in Melbourne was like and went for a leisurely 40km ride on Sunday with members of the Vic HPV club on the Knox ride along Dandenong Creek.  Met Robert W and Jana,  on their tandem Bent plus Rodney on his MR-Swift.

We'd had some major rain in the previous 24 hours, so there were a lot of sections that were quite wet, nad you could see where the creek had risen a couple of metres in places and washed abandoned shopping trollies downstream!

After lunch halfway, we stopped for cappucino at the kiosk near Ferntree Gully complete with live entertainment.   I could get used to this pace!