Lumby meet

June 11th to 13th we took our VW Westfalia camper van to Lumby with the kids. What a great experience, the kids loved the camping, Lumby days with all the activities and the parties in the evenings. Randy Rauck did an excellent job organizing the event and what really made this event so great was that all pilots/friends/families could camp on site, party and share their stories.
Friday was very warm but still very unstable we only got a couple sled rides done late afternoon.
Saturday started great but turned to a stable day. Only one person (Claudio) made goal in paragliding and John McClintok in Hang gliding. The days where hot and I am certainly not used to wait for a long time on sunny launch sites without a hat. After 2 hours of flying I got a huge headache (due dehydration) which made me land (after a total of 2.5 hours flying time). I was kind of bummed as I knew I could have done better then 10th for the day.
Sunday was sunny and hot again with a strong wind in the forecast. After we where on launch at Copper, the task got moved to Saddle Mountain (across from Copper) we decided to follow Randy Parkin and fly at "Boldy" (by Vernon) After I launched I could sky out to over 2000 meters and headed to Lumby. The winds got stronger and the wind was blowing along the Lumby ridge, which forced me to land just south of Lumby.
Overall a great flight considering that really no flights could be done from Saddle Mountain and the comp ended with only one task.
Sunday was also the 1st day of the Canadian Hang gliding Nationals and there was a great crowed for Sunday night as well. We stayed one more night and again I could see again how much fun the social part of flying events can be.
My message is to not only see a Comp/Event as a serious competition and get stressed about it. See these Comps/Events as a reason for a good party, good flying and a great learning experience as you fly and talk to many people alike.
Our next meet we will attend will be at Wasa, BC for the fun XC meet on July 2,3 and 4 2010.
More details at http://hpac.ca/pub/?pid=229 

May had a lot of unstable weather - Equipment review

April started out great for flying, May had a couple good days but overall it was very unstable and not many flights were happening. In the mean time we have been busy with the canoe's (incl. camping), bike rides, kids' soccer and at the Skateboard park (Erik's favorite place to ride his bike).
Penny did a lot of training and got super fit for her 25 km trail run at Nippika. They had a couple hundred participants and Penny was 3rd overall and got 1st place in her age group. Way to go Penny!!!

In the mean time I'd thought I'd share some of the questions I. have've had. Several people have asked me about the harness/backpack and the MBT's I used during the race.

The Altirando XP from Supair was the harness I used and still use. This harness is excellent and I just love it. Here are a couple remarks of what I love most about it.

• The backpack is very comfortable to carry and most outstanding is the ability to pack it flat and tall as this keeps the weight close to your body. The further you move weight away from your body, the heavier it will feel. My pack weighs about 14-17 kg depending on supplies (5.5 kg the wing, 3.9 kg the harness/backpack, 1.4 kg reserve plus helmet, clothes, GPS, Vario and water/food. 
• The harness is very comfortable to fly and allows you to assist turns with weight shifting. The Nova Triton needs a harness which allows you wight shift in combination with break-line input as it can not only be flown by break-lines. 
• The extra bonus is the leg fairing or pod you can attach (0.850 kg). This is excellent as it saves you from wearing extra pants or a flight suit (a flight suit alone is at least 1.3 kg). It is warm, streamlined and fits nice with the front-mount reserve. The front-mount reserve is also serving very well as a cockpit for your Vario and GPS.  

I am very happy with that harness as it is way more compact and with the extra packing space if needed I can add more stuff to go traveling with this pack alone.

In the video below you can see how the pack carries and a short clip about MBT sandals. MBT is not a good shoe for trails in the mountains as it an unstable shoe with far less traction than proper mountain shoes. But at the same time, I have to say that I would not have been able to walk these long distances (especially in the valley's) for this many days in a row and to be able to recover so quick with only a couple of hours of sleep a night, had I not been wearing the MBT's. I am still wearing MBT's every day as I have sandals, runners and dress-shoes.
Here are the reason what I like on these shoes the most.

• The round sole virtually makes you walk and feels very soft. 
• The MBT system forces you to have a upright posture and this is a mayor advantage as a upright posture will provide you with a good blood circulation for the organs and you will not get tired as fast as with a bend over posture. 

First I got told to use MBT only for training as it builds up your core strength but not to use them for the race. After all the experiences I had with MBT, I am training with them and would use them in the race any time again.

Picking up a VW Westy by air.

This year we are staying at home (Canada) and Penny really wanted a camper van. Well we kept looking on the net and came across a 1984 VW Campervan (290.000 km) and in good shape. There is some rust which needs some attention, but other then that it is a beauty.

The only problem we faced was to get to Vernon (6 hour drive) and back. The weather was great and we could rent a Cessna 172 from www.BabinAir.com to fly to Vernon and get Calvin (from BabinAir.com) to fly back the plane.
So we started to get my check out "Touch & Goe's" in Invermere before heading to Vernon. The flight to Vernon was just amazing, blue sky, a couple clouds here and there.  There is still a lot of snow in the mountains and the glaciers looked magnificent. We flew from Invermere to Panorama Mt. Resort and crossed the Purcell's over Jumbo Pass. What a great view, a ocean of mountains and glaciers. We could see from the Kokanee Glacier up to the Bugaboos. We crossed over the Arrow Lakes (by Nakusp) to Lumby and down to Vernon.

I have flown over the Purcell's many times and every time it is like a new experience. All I can say to all the locals and who is coming to this area, go to www.BabinAir.com and take a flight as words and pictures will not justify the experience. For all the Paraglider pilots, hang  glider pilots and people who like the no-motorized flying, see Trevor at www.SoartheRockies.com and to take you up to the glaciers with his Duo Discuss.

Early start to fly XC in the Valley

Since we are back in Canada, we had a lot of good weather and great flights. Beginning of April I had several flights to cloud-base (+3000m). The thermals where big and easy to fly but my hands got cold very fast and I had no intension to go XC.
Now last Wednesday (April 21st) we had up to 27 Celsius at our yard and great flying conditions. Jeff, Dominic and I got ready around 1:00 pm to head up Mt. Swansea. The thermals came already through and we launched right away. The first 15 minutes in the air where a bit choppy with a SE wind drift, but soon I could get high enough to head north. It was a blue-thermal day which made things a bit more challenging but the conditions got better by the hour. I planned to fly to Golden and back, but once I got to Harrogate (about 4:30 pm), my ground speed slowed down to 10-15 km/h as the wind from the north got stronger, so I decided to turn around and fly back home. On the way back at Spillimachine I got up to at 4000m (with a small cloud) where I had a great view of the snow covered Rockies to the east and the Glaciers at the Purcell's in the west.
Flying home from there was easy going and I got back to our house with plenty of height. I could have flown at least to Fairmont Hot Springs of even to Canal Flats which would have resulted in a 165 km plus flight. But after 5 hours and 125 km in the bag it was much nicer to land right at my backyard watching my kids play and Penny getting ready to head up for an evening flight. After I packed up and we where just about to head up the mountain again, the North wind got to strong on the ground and we ended up drinking a "Landing Beer" with friends.

You can see the flight details at
http://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:maxfanderl/21.4.2010/19:41

Here are a couple pictures of the flight

just about 4000m looking south from Spillimachine

Same location looking north

Easter Fly-in Meet at Panorama

Photo by Stewart Midwinter

We think this year was the 13th Easter Fly-in meet. Our main goal was to come back from Europe early enough to keep on running this great event. Our prep-time was kind of short, but we still had 28 pilots show up, who came along with their families and friends. The main reason why we started this event was to have fun with family and friends. This is not just an idea I have now because I have 2 little kids (Katia 5 years old and Erik 4 years old), it already started 13 or 14 years ago. We don't often see a lot of family and friends come along on flying trips, as hanging out at launch or at the landing site soon gets boring for them. But at Panorama, the resort is ideal for everyone. If the family or friends aren't skiing, they can also go shopping, go to the spa, or swim in the great outdoor pool (and watch the paragliders from there) The best part of it all for the pilots is that there is virtually no "Para-Waiting". If the winds aren't right at the moment, we go for a run, check out the landing, and go back up to try again.

Because of all this, we saw more families and partners out this year. Bob and Natalie Gardener were here with 4 generations of their family (I think about 12 people) to celebrate Easter and having fun.

Here is a quick update of the event:
Friday we got one flight in the morning before the conditions got too strong for flying. Friday night we did an x-alps presentation and showed the RedBull 2009 x-Alps movie.
Saturday we set up in the morning. and all went to the launch with our wings, but it turned very quickly into a very windy day. So "Para-Waiting" turned into a ski-day and some of us had races top to bottom with our packs. Jeff Grieve was the outright winner!. Saturday night we had a great dinner at RK Heli-plex. The rest of the night we spent at the T-Bar, and of course had our traditional "Boat Races" (thanks to Frank, sponsoring most of the beer), but it resulted to some headaches the next day.
Sunday was a blue sky day and we started as early as 9:30 am to fly. The conditions were so good that we could sky-out around noon. Stewart Midwinter and Raul could not resist the lift and decided to fly out to the Lakeside Pup in Invermere, while we were still doing target landings at the resort. After we wrapped up the meet at Lustie's patio aropund 1:00 pm several of us headed up the mountain again and 5 other pilots flew out and landed at the Lakeside Pub. Some pilots decided not to fly as it seemed to easy as Raul flew 2 times to Invermere that day (I am a bit sarcastic here). The flight out was amazing, not too easy as it started to cloud in a bit. The clouds where not big and the cloud base didn't seem too high, but we could still get high. A few of the clouds were even dumping snow. It took a while to get enough height over the top ridge. Once you got up, there was tons of lift and some of us flew between 12.000 and 13.000 feet. It was spectacular when you flew into the Windermere valley over the valley clouds. I flew right over to Mt. Swansea and ended up in snow and decided to fly back to the Lakeside Pub.
What a great weekend.
Thanks again to all the volunteers, Panorama Resort for all their amazing support and donation of such fantastic prizes, and to everyone who come. Thanks also to Glenn Derouin (www.paraglidecanada.com), Trevor Florence (www.Soartherockies.com and Kootenay Coffee for their donation of prizes.
The winner this year was Glen Comfort, 2nd Glenn Derouin, and in 3rd place was Scott Watwood.

We are back home ...

ard to believe we are home already. We have been in Europe for 10 month and already back in Canada for 1 week. Now looking at this blog, we must have been busy as we did not update this since December. Well, this will change as I like to share so many ideas and new things I have seen and experienced.
Here is a short review of the last couple month. Starting with December. Like everyone else, we have been busy with Christmas and to start with the ski season. Skiing was amazing and we had most of the time very good conditions. The kids did very well on skies and started to snowboard (see attached video) as well. We did not bring our skies and run into some really good deals at one of the countless "Ski-Basars". Penny and I picked up a very good set of touring skies (binding, skins and crampons) for 100 Euro each. To get most our of the great skiing around the Allgaeu and Austria, we purchased a Season Pass (only 355 Euro) for about 20 ski resorts. Meaning we had had 580 km on downhill runs within a 45 minute drive from our home.
It even got better with the "Kindergarten" system we had the kids in. They spend 5 days a week from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm in Kindergarten and had a blast, learned to speak a better Germany then I do and we could go skiing almost every day. 3 times a week Penny was going to school and took German lessons and the rest of the time we had a very good Penny & Max time. I still could work full steam as I worked most of the time during the evening hours (from 6:00 pm to midnight or 1:00 am, which is daytime in Canada) and a little bit during the day. Everything was perfect, maybe a little tiering with the full schedule, but for sure a lot of fun. The kids had a great time with all the local activities and the Grand-Parents. It was great as they lived just one apartment below. So they could go downstairs any time and if needed we had baby sitters very close by. In January we run into a pretty sweet deal with MEC. We did a 12 day Mediterian Cruise for 798 Euro (the whole family with outside/balcony room and food) Starting in Genua/Italy, to Barcelona/Spain, to Funchal, Madeira/Portugal, to Teneriffa, Canary Islands/Spain, to Arrecife, Lanzarote (Canary Islands) / Spain, to Malaga, Andalusien/Spain, to Civitavecchia (Rom)/Italy and back to Genua/Italien. What a great experience and fun we had while I was still able to work.
We did one more weekend trip to Praque (also a must see City) and the rest of the time we enjoyed the great skiing in the Alps with our area seasons passes. 

Now being back for a week, we had great weather and I already had 4 hikes up to Mt. Swansea with 2 great flights right up to Cloud-base (3100m and once at 2800m) and one day of skiing at Panorama. Now we are getting ready for our Easter Fly-in Meet next week.

Update of summer and fall 2009

It is already December and we had an amazing summer and fall.
We where so busy with all the cultural events, enjoying the amazing infrastructure of the the alps, we did countless hikes and flights all over the place.
As you can see, we are still in Germany. Since September the kids are going into a German kindergarten 5 times a week from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. Penny is taking and enjoying German lessons 3 times a week.
In the mean time we have held several x-alps presentations and came up with a online slideshow here in the blog.

Everything is in best order, we enjoy every day in Europe and at the same time we miss Canada, our friends and the community. Pretty soon, in March we will be back and get ready for the easter meet.

Thanks again to everyone who was helping and cheering for us at the 2009 x-alps.

Here are a couple videos of our adventures

X-alps 2009 slideshow

Flight in the Dolomite's

Hike and fly in my local area

Here is another way how we get our heard rate up (5 times a week in the morning)

Seasons Greetings and a very good, healthy 2010

Max, Penny, Katia and Erik