New Hike n Fly Online Contest...I'm winning :)

So there's a new game in town for logging flights.   Created by the Red Bull X-Alps race organizer Christopher Weber, it allows you to hike, fly, top land, fly again, and continue to log everything as distance, rather than just the flying.   The key is that you must log the whole flight, even the walk up to launch.  http://www.xc-hikeandfly.com  This is a new website...I guess that's the reason why there aren't many flights logged on it yet.  That and it's winter in Europe....Read more about it here.

Here's the Rules for Hike n Fly:  http://www.xc-hikeandfly.com/rules/rules.htm

Anyway, the competition in Roldanillo is now over, so I am back to free flying, and I desperately want to try out my new Ozone gear, the Alpina 2 wing and Ozium harness.  In fact I've already hiked up to launch with it, about 9 miles, but then it rained and I didn't get to fly.  The weather turned bad for a few days, so we were all jonesing for a good flying day.

Jim and I started early and hiked up to launch again, this time in dense fog.  It wasn't looking good so I figured it was just good training for bad weather...although the wing on my back seemed kinda useless when it started raining on us!  Luckily, the valley did start clearing, amazingly enough...it looked so terrible earlier I could hardly believe we were getting ready to launch.

My GPS had been logging for hours already, but we did get launched, and I was flying my new Alpina 2!  (I'll have photos of it soon, very pretty!) And then it started raining on me.  It seemed very gentle, but it was definitely dumping in the mountains to both the north and the south....which left the valley looking better and better.   By then I was low from fleeing the rain.   One last low save, and I connected back up with Jim and Matt Beechinor.   After all, I couldn't land my new wing wet and dirty from a short flight in the rain, could I?

Rain dumps over Roldanillo as we fly away

The day was starting to look better and better, so we crossed the valley and headed north (where there was the least amount of clouds and overdevelopment).  I think it rained in Roldanillo all day long, but we were well away from there and heading north to Cartago with a tailwind.   We turned around there and came back partway before the headwind put us on the ground.

With the hiking portion, this turned out to be a 68km flat Triangle, and put me on top of the leaderboard (for now)!  Here's my flight details:  http://www.xc-hikeandfly.com/flight/1195

Jim with friends at the hotel

Hiking in the rain

Waiting out the rain on launch

Clearing sky after we land

Swiss friends Phil and Chris with hanging with us the last day of the Competition