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The Blorenge party is an event held annually in Abergavenny, Wales each year. Pilots of all disciplines from all over the world come to take part in the party atmosphere and, of course the flying!
This year JLD decided it was time to unleash the
cage on the unsuspecting british flying community and present the cage at
Blorenge. So, JLD and a few other pilots, including myself, André Amyot
(who was so instrumental in helping me get my cage registered in Britain!), Ross
Bousie (new Australian pilot), Hervé Joannes and Francis Boué.
I was there Saturday through Sunday but
unfortunately arrived too late to meet up with the Cage party and just used the
time to sort out my accommodation (a tent) and to have a look around. There was
a live band in the evening and generally a party atmosphere all around!
Sunday started off quite sunny and the forecast was not too bad. I met up with JLD at the ASPIC stall kindly donated by Steve Millson of Axis paragliding. Steve is the first british pilot to fly the cage in Britain and is very interested in not only learning to fly the cage but also teaching and distributing the cage within Britain... watch this space! We took the minibus shuttle to a site called
Fochriw, whilst the hangliders went to an alternative site to prevent too much
overcrowding. During our drive there the rain came down and the outlook at that
time did not look great! It was still raining when we got to the hill and we had
to sit in the bus for around an hour before it showed signs of abating! The
clouds however were fairly unforgiving and the wind was also quite strong. The
cage team all set up to do some ground handling practice which was useful to me
as JLD pointed out a couple of things I wasn't doing quite right. He also did
some ground handling demonstrations. One spectacular one was when he inflated
the cage, and the proceeded to walk over the minibus that had brought us. Once
he was on the roof he flew down from it! And I had left my camera in the bag so
missed it all! All too soon the rain came down again and it was like that until
the afternoon!
The wind wouldn't let up though. Although two or three pg pilots managed to get off it was obvious that they were having a tough time of it, with rough air and trouble penetrating the strong wind and more than one ended up stationary or even going backwards. During a short lull Hervé took his cage up and for the short duration he was up, showed off the performance of it. Hervé said that he will normally limit himself to taking off in max 25kph wind and today's winds were between 30-40kph. I never got to fly at all, unwilling to venture those conditions considering my very limited experience with the cage to date! All in all it was a good weekend for myself spoilt only by the fact I never got to fly, but a lot of pilots did manage to fly and a few managed to try out the cage for the first time. See you there next year!
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