FlyNirvana BLOG

Dag arrived at Native Place on Wednesday in the early hours of the morning in time for Diwali this year. The last weekend I noticed that the ‘Raat ki Rani’ or the Queen of the night was covered with buds – such a coincidence that  they have geared up to scent up the night with their amazing fragrance for the next week or more as if in time to welcome Dag back. He simply loves the fragrance!

We can look forward to heavenly scented Diwali nights minus the noise and air pollution and returning to native place each evening after a sunny day at the site to sit out on a cool stone platform and taking deep meditative breaths as the calming fragrance wafts through the air and envelopes us. Fairy lights will simply add to the atmosphere.

In the flying department the weather has played truant with us through the week and the very mild and off conditions have meant small but intense flights staying close to the ridge, taking turns to sink low and then work hard to redeem ourselves back to ridge level.

Thursday was special though and saw us all flying long and hard in the morning. A two hour plus flight ended with landing at the edge of the field with my new glider overshooting and hitting the dusty road ahead of me. It took me a while to clean out the dust from my wing but all of us – Doc who is here for an entire glorious month of flying, Siddharth, Dylan, Dag, Yogi and me were  buzzing after great flights. Strong winds and thermals added to the drama in the air not to mention Dag’s many helicopters, SAT’s and spiral dives.

We got to Kamshet on Friday evening in time to meet Marco Contecelli an old friend who had come back to fly and meet up with us after 6 years of being away in Geneva and Rome. It was wonderful to see him and we reminisced about the early days and caught up on the new stuff.  

Flying at Tower hill was an absolute treat this weekend. Two other visiting pilots (Rene) and Niles as well as a number of Nirvana club pilots – Gokul, Shin Chan, Vineet, Dylan, Sunil, Porush. Dwane and Piku drove up for an afternoon flight on Sunday. 

On Saturday we took off at about three in the afternoon. Pendu took off first and had a blast for a while before returning to takeoff to man the radio. Yogi played around in my wing for a while taking off and landing and dancing about on takeoff before he switched to the tandem flying Bandya and Sandeep. Mild winds and many pilots led to a merry go around of sorts with everyone trying to stay in the narrow lift band, working hard and just about managing to stay above the takeoff level. 

Porush and Renee (a visiting pilot from Singapore) bombed out after a while and landed in the fields below.  I too was pretty low for the 4th time in the span of an hour and was just thinking about leaving the slope when, like a perfect day in January the entire valley began to lift and we were all ‘on’ once more. 

Sunith and his class mate Rehaan flew tandem with Ravi. Sunith was pleased with his half hour flight as Ravi gave him the controls. Sunil me and Gokul, just back from a week of flying in the Himalayas agreed that the experience had left us more confident but all the same we were happy to be enjoying the air the familiarity and the happy company at Kamshet. 

Sunday afternoon began with strong conditions and then it got progressively more hospitable. I headed back home in the morning watching the sky all the way back. It was a perfect day for cloud spotting as you can see in Jessica Mellocastro’s photos.