Licanfly: Paragliding Festival

To finish off our time together (Geo was  returning back to France 10days later) we drove a bit more south to Lican Ray a beautiful spot in the lake district surrounded by forest and snow capped volcanoes. We had heard from Nico (a pilot from Santiago) that a paragliding encounter was taking place in Lican Ray over the weekend. When we arrived we saw that indeed a big part of the Chilean paragliding scene was there for the event. A great way to celebrate an end to this paragliding trip across the Andes.

View from the camping

At takeoff

The festival was pretty simple: fly during the day, party at night. A programme made for us :) .
It was perfect to enjoy the free shuttle to takeoff all day (thanks to the organisation).

Nico in flight with volcanoe Villarica in the background

Volcanoe Villarica with the lava flow

On one of the flights I had quite a lot of height over the lake so I decided to practice a little bit of acro. What maneouvre should I try? Hmmm helico is what I was working on so I decided to give it a go. I tried a first one that didn't quite worked. Then I got into the box and went for it another time. I entered a good deep stall and started the rotation. But I wasn't concentrated enough and let the outside of the wing fly too much. Classic error! The half wing surged big time, and collapsed, to end up wrapped aroud the other half of the wing. I looked at the lake (maybe 150m) and at the wing and decided to go for reserve.

As the reserve inflated the wing re-opened. I pulled the wing towards me, to be honest I didn't really looked at which lines I was pulling, I just tried to kill it. Then I was in stabilised descent, so I grabbed my GPS and held it over my head to try not to soak it too much. As I reached the water I was floating thanks to my airbag.
Really quickly some jet-skis and a boat arrived to help me. A few minutes after I was riding a jet ski towards the beach with my rescuer, a beautiful chilean girl. And my wing was foollowing in the boat. Finally I didn't really got time to be scared, everything happenned very quickly and I knew this could happen as I was practicing tricks. I just lost my camera and damaged my GPS, but well, this is the price to pay...
So first reserve in 12 years flying. Acro is definitely tricky and has to be practiced in the good environment :). It can quickly cascade!!

Re-packing with Dennis and Nico

On the last day we got the chance to borrow a tandem from another french travelling guy, Ludo, that we met at the festival. Flying tandem was something that we always wanted to do during the trip but that never worked for different reasons so we were really happy to give it a go.

Thanks Ludo!