That's my current flying tally after 2.5 years. Not exactly impressive but ok I guess, especially as I was at 24 hours last October. The following few photos were taken on the 30.8., when I finally crossed the 60 hour mark at Flying Fox with a very nice late afternoon flight. The first is the view east over Beechmont to the Gold Coast, the second to the northwest. The third looks north towards Canungra, and on the fourth and last Richard is visible against the Lamington National Park (south). The last few weekends were mostly spent at Killarney, preparing for the Killarney Comp in October. On the weekend of 20.-22.8. we cut one new westerly launch, and launched off it in the afternoon. Conditions were a bit rough but still fun. I didn't make it fully into town, hit big sink and strong headwind... maybe it's time to upgrade to an Oasis or similar more performant glider? A friend of mine is selling his Oasis at a reasonable price...I'm very tempted I must say.

These photos are of Rob launching the new western last weekend.

Last weekend I saw my first koala in the wild! While we were working on cleaning the new northern launch, we saw a dark blob in one of the trees below launch, and it was moving... We were very careful not to disturb the tree it was perched in. However, the koala didn't take our noise making kindly and sent us some bad juju: Andrew got his chainsaw to cut into his knee instead of the trees. 8 stitches. Logging is more dangerous than paragliding, I'm convinced of that.

In the afternoon the others had a nice thermic flight off the western launch, but I inherited the duty pilot and retrieve duty...I was very envious, especially as the lift seemed to be quite good. Ah well, next time.

In the evening, after coming home I spent ages on doing up the panoramic photos I had taken of all the launches. Gimp is cool but it took forever and still was a fucking lot of work. The results are ok, though, and can be seen here.