SAFA Skysailor Magazine

6 SKY SAILOR March | April 2020 noticed an eagle climbing. Bugger it, I’ll give it one last crack. I put all the sweaty gear back on, which wasn’t nice, and relaunched at 4pm. It felt similar to the last launch, however, I took a different route and flew out from the hill to a more risky spot… until magical beeps and that amazing feeling of climbing hit me and I just about cried from sheer amazement. I flew a little further out from the hill, just to where I knew I could turn back into this thermal, and it just kept lifting me, I turned hard and couldn’t believe I was finally climbing away at a rather fast rate. I entered this climb only 45m above the ground, as I later found out from the flyskyhy tracking, and it sent me up in 1.2m/s of lift which allowed me to fly over the farmer’s house and towards the town of Bell. Still in shock that I even got up, I was getting a little low over Bell, about 395m agl, when thankfully a bit of lift started me up again right over the centre of town. I climbed up to around 1200m agl from there and noticed I had a nice cloud street in the direction I was heading. It was about 4:30pm and I couldn’t believe I was still going up! It was a super-hot day, so I guess that helped, but I couldn’t help but laugh since usually I’d be paramotoring around this time. I followed the cloud street towards a nice dusty growing pretty high up ahead – I didn’t want to be too low to fly into it, so I hoped for another climb and, thankfully, got one. This time, I wasn’t alone, I had two eagles fly with me and thankfully not attack. It was just beautiful – I had one on each wing tip. I reached a maximum height of 2206m asl and 1842m agl at 5:10pm and by this stage, I could see Dalby. From this point on the ground began to shade over and it looked like my luck of finding any more climbs had ran out. I pushed a bit of speedbar and headed for Dalby. I was able to peacefully glide over town, it felt so nice to be flying over Dalby without motor noise, I was so happy and just couldn’t believe my luck. The last glide of the day stretched out a fair way and I enjoyed the buoyant ride. I floated passed Dalby, landing just north of the cotton gin in a paddock close to the main road that heads south out of town. This flight was one I’ll never forget, the flight was around 50km and although I have flown further