8
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.
What made Mt. Borah special was the way it was affected by southeast winds coming up from Newcastle, down on the coast at the
bottom of the Hunter Valley. The rising air in the heated interior of New South Wales drew these moist winds inland from the coast. When
the moist air came in contact with the hot ground, cumulus clouds formed — even early in the day, and especially over the ridges. The
clouds marked the lift, and if they started early you could start flying early. The earlier I could start, the more hours in a day I would have to
chase the world record.
When the winds blew from the south-southeast, we could fly north into farming and ranching areas. After about sixty kilometers you
passed the little range of hills and higher mountains near Mt. Borah, and all you could see were flat or rolling farming lands.
There were numerous lightly traveled paved roads to the northwest, making for easy retrieval. But after dusk there were very few
drivers on these roads because of the ever-present danger of running into kangaroos. With the advent of agriculture and irrigation, the
population of these emblematic creatures has exploded far beyond previous levels. And very much like a deer, a ‗roo will freeze in your
headlights or even leap out in front of the car at the last minute, making a collision nearly impossible to avoid. Needless to say, a 120pound kangaroo coming through your radiator or windshield can be a serious hazard, and most country vehicles and long-haul trucks are
fitted out with ―roo bars‖ to minimize vehicle damage. The highways of Australia are littered with the results.
We were here in the spring, and it was especially green that year. Australia had just finished its coldest November on record, 4.5
degrees Fahrenheit below normal. To our north, the wheat harvest was just being beginning and the highways were full of massive
combines.
I was looking for hot weather and lots of sunshine to heat up the ground and produce thermals. Cold was okay if the air was cold and
the ground was warm, because unstable air comes about when the air was warm near the ground and cold up high. But too much moisture
in the soil would weaken the lift. And reports of cool temperatures near the ground didn‘t give me great hopes of finding the record
conditions I was looking for.
We were only planning to be in Manilla for a couple of weeks before making a brief excursion to Birchip — but I hoped to come back
and try again afterward. Early each morning I drove up the steep, rutted road to the rounded hilltop with its east and west facing launches,
but I never quite found the conditions that I was looking for – southeast winds and early cumulus clouds. I did get quite a few good flights
to the north, staying within a hundred kilometers of Manilla, but in reality I was just checking out the area, getting ready for the big day.
Finally, on a day that didn‘t look all that promising, with the wind out of the east instead of the south-southeast, I decided to go for it
anyway. There was plenty of wind, and my goal was to see how far into the interior it could take me. Crabbing north to get around a large
forested area, at thirty miles out I found myself right where I wanted to be, over the main highway west to Bourke.
I found plenty of fat lift that was quite pleasant to fly in as I headed west over flooded paddocks. I‘d never seen any of this territory,
since I had been practicing flying to the north; I was only going by what I remembered of the map I had glanced over briefly just before
launching. Occasionally I would check with Belinda on the radio to get her advice on which direction to take, so that she could keep up with
me. Using my Garmin 12 GPS, I could report my location to her at regular intervals.
I ended up that day with a nice 160-mile flight to Walgett, a cotton farming town halfway to Bourke, on the Western Plains. ―Back of
Bourke‖ was officially the Outback, and I was definitely out where few tourists — or even Australians of European extraction — ever went. An
enjoyable flight, and a good one considering the conditions, but not even two hundred miles, let alone three.
……
Soon after the flight to Walgett, Belinda and I drove southwest for two days to the small country town of Birchip in northwest Victoria.
Birchip‘s claim to fame is a heroic statue of the Mallee Bull, presiding over the main shopping street. I never did find out the bull‘s whole
story, but certain of his anatomical features seemed to speak for themselves.
Rohan Holtkamp, one of Australia's top competition pilots and hang gliding instructors, was running a hang gliding adventure tour in
this farming area, just on the dry side of the mountains. Rohan‘s school flight park was near Melbourne — on the coastal side of the Great
Dividing Range. In order to go a great distance from his flight park, you'd have to cross a tree covered mountain range. Most pilots tried to
avoid the risks involved in that kind of flight. So every summer Rohan held a couple of one-week tours based out in the flat, dry mallee,
with a dozen Australian hang glider pilots who came out to get a taste of cross-country flying. We would be static line towing, from — well,
what else — a sheep paddock.
Here in Birchip we were looking for winds out of the southwest that would take us up toward Hay in New South Wales, further
northeast toward Forbes, and (in my wildest dreams) back to Manilla. If I could get going early enough, in strong enough winds, I‘d be able
to get across the Murray River (this time from south to north) and out onto the great flat lands that I‘d flown before near Hay. I had a week
to give it a try.
Birchip is a pretty feeble country town, but country towns in Australia are much livelier than those that you‘ll find in the U.S. Most of
the pilots were staying at the pub, which came with rooms straight out of the forties. Rohan had brought in his own cook since the normal
pub food was just not available at the late hours that we would be getting back from cross country hang gliding.
It was dusty and hot in the bare sheep paddock as we set up our gliders. A high-pressure regime had formed over us and we found
moderate winds in the tow paddock. The fact that there were a few sheep carcasses upwind of where we had chosen to set up didn‘t help
matters. And with stable air and a temperature inversion at five thousand feet, there were no clouds developing over this part of Victoria —
quite a contrast to the pleasant warm days that we‘d had in Manilla with its cooling sea breeze.
As the week went on, we got in some reasonable flying in spite of the poor lift conditions, with a few hundred-kilometer flights. Then a
front passed through in the middle of the week, breaking up the high pressure, but bringing with it rain and high winds. A day of rain was
followed by a day of low clouds and light lift. Still, we flew on the postfrontal day, hoping to take advantage of the continued strong winds.
But the lift was so light that it was hard to go far, even when you were screaming across the countryside.
On the second day after the front, the winds were lighter, which was not what we were looking for — but the cloud base had risen, and
the lift had improved. I got an early start and just kept drifting along to see how far I could go. I was thinking that the conditions weren‘t
right for a great flight, but you never knew.
Soon all the clouds dried up and the day turned blue, with light winds out of the southwest. I was staying up, but just barely, as I
crossed the Murray River and headed northeast into New South Wales toward Hay. Without any visual clues as to where to find the lift, I
was just flying toward areas where I felt it might be.
The day heated up as it got later, and each climb in a thermal took me higher and higher. The winds were light, so I was not going very
fast over the ground — but I was still in the air, so why not keep going? Besides, there were often no roads below me. During the first part
of the flight I wasn‘t too sure I would be found if I went down.
Jim Neff, a Canadian pilot living in Australia and working for Rohan that summer, was following me in his van. I knew that if I could get
to a paved two-lane road (otherwise known as a major highway here in Australia) I could be retrieved. Belinda was back near the tow
paddock flying and doing well, so everyone was taken care of and I could concentrate on going far. By afternoon I passed over the
Murrumbidgee to the west of Hay, and was heading north toward Hillston.
At about 6:30 PM I got low and stayed low, only about two thousand feet or less over the ground. The big lift had gone, it was late in
the day, the air was hot so it seemed stable, and there were no clouds. I was coasting along finding little bits of lift and very little sink. It
looked as though I would go down at about 150 miles out.
I was just over the highway that goes north out of Hay, and I edged over to a little pond (known as a dam here in Australia) that a
farmer had dug out to water his sheep. These dams were also the main source of water for kangaroos, and a major factor in their
population explosion. I was heading for the dam, not because I saw any kangaroos, but because I knew that sometimes the temperature
contrast between the water and the hot dry ground around it created lift. That was the theory anyway. Sure enough, down to thirteen
hundred feet over the ground, I found a nice smooth thermal, the best of the day at 7:15 PM.
I took this baby to seven thousand feet and it was as nice as could be. Thermals are often gentle and great fun to be in this late in the
day, if you can find them. As I climbed up I could see that the shadows below me were elongated, and the stark features of this barren
Australian landscape stood out in sharp relief.
I drifted over an area of dry lakebeds now filled with red soil. Even that late, as the sun approached the horizon, these shallow
depressions were putting out warm air that kept me up and going. With the air smooth and warm I glided, unconcerned about finding more
lift. At the last moment I turned into the wind and landed. I was 199.5 miles from the tow paddock in Birchip, with Jim right there next to
me in the van as I landed. The sun set two minutes later; I had maxed out the day.
……
Now, as I began the trek back to Manilla, I had the confidence and experience that come with a really long flight. I was still looking for
that perfect day, for a flight north from Mt. Borah into Queensland.
December 21st was not a great day for flying at Mt. Borah, although launch conditions were quite good with southeast winds and
cumulus clouds forming early. I launched at 10:50 AM, and my reward was a well-formed thermal right on the southeast corner of Mt.
Borah. I climbed right out over the hill and drifted to the northwest.
I was trying to follow Michael‘s example and launch as early as possible. This was always a tradeoff, because it was so easy to go
down early if the lift was too light. Nevertheless I was thinking the earlier the better — and besides, the air was so nice early in the day.
As it turned out, that thermal at launch was the last well-formed lift for the next five hours. Slowly I made my way northwest under
low clouds, sticking close to the hills north of Mt. Borah. There were clouds over the hills, but they just weren't working all that well. I almost
got caught up there with no lift and no place to land. At one point I had to run hard out to the west through a valley and was lucky enough
to find a little bit of lift on a hillside, just enough to get back up and keep going.
I spent a lot of time fruitlessly looking for good lift, and instead had to settle for poor and adequate. Now I left the hills and struggled
along low over flatlands on their lee side, hoping to get under some clouds. I actually found some useful lift, but I sure wasn't going
anywhere fast; the winds that had greeted me at launch and had promised such a nice day had quit.
It was slow going over open and empty country between major roads southwest of Moree. Cotton farming had caught on big in this
area, so there were plenty of dirt roads for retrieval if needed. Since I was always low, they were reassuring. There were very few houses
out there — in fact, Belinda showed me later that the sheep stations were marked by name on her highway map. To stay within radio range,
she had spent most of the afternoon on unpaved, backcountry roads, pulling over now and then to let a huge, multi-trailer ―road train‖
pass in a cloud of dust.
I made my way slowly north and crossed into Queensland at Mungindi. At about four o‘clock the conditions finally began to improve: I was
now able to stay in thermals that actually allowed for a complete turn in lift. I was getting higher at last, and feeling better about my
chances of going far. As the day got later, the clouds began to street up a bit, lining up to the northwest. I got higher and higher with each
climb. No longer did I have to worry about landing.
This was new territory for me, and I was just guessing where I was. Belinda was following behind me, keeping track of me on her GPS.
In my sail I had an automated hand held radio connected to a GPS that sent out my position every two minutes. Still, she had to be within
twenty miles of me to pick up the signal consistently. Often she was much further behind.
As I flew deeper into Queensland, the cultivated fields become further and further apart and the trees begin to take over. Much of
that part of Queensland was bush. Agriculture wasn't predominant there, and the few farmers had only been there for a generation.
By 7:30 the sun was low and the lift was weak; I finally had to land about twenty miles east of St. George. I'd flown 232 miles, too far
to drive back to Manilla that night without hitting any kangaroos. Belinda and I happily checked in to a motel in St. George, the first time in
my flying career that this had been necessary.
Waking the next morning, we could see that we were in a tropical area, at least compared to Manilla. The air was moist, and it felt like
Florida. I‘d flown far toward the Equator, and a lot closer to my goal of a world record, but I still had a long way to go.
So — a couple of long flights in Australia, and I‘d greatly improved the distances I‘d flown. Conditions hadn‘t been all that good during
the two long flights; this held out the promise of even longer flights if I could just manage to be in the right place on a day with the right
conditions. And it my hang glider certainly seemed to have enough performance to give me a good shot at a record.
More important, these record attempts had been great fun, and the flying thoroughly enjoyable; I had been completely relaxed while
flying in the pleasant Australian conditions. Given all the encouragement that comes from being able to go far and enjoy doing it, I was
committed. Larry‘s record no longer looked so far out of reach.
