Annecy Trip 2015 - 1st day
It's been seven years since Jason and I flew in Slovenia. A lot has changed since then. We are both fathers and life is a lot busier. But for one week we got to fly together.
I flew from Toronto, Canada to Geneva Switzerland, where I met Jason at the baggage claim, before we both headed out to pick up the rental car. We drove to our hotel at the Doussard end of lake Annecy, about 1km from the landing field. Cloudbase was low and I was knackered and it was late afternoon. We binned the first day and tried to find somewhere to eat. Nowhere was serving food, so we had to wait until the hotel served dinner. Then a couple of beers before turning in for the night. Next morning the cloud was low so we took the time to brush up on some groundhandling in the landing field.
By about midday cloudbase was lifting and we headed up to the Col de la Forclaz launch site in the navette, a bargain at 7 Euros!
Since we were here last in 2007 the launch area has been astro turfed, fenced off and partitioned for flyers and non flyers. There are also toilet facilities and a picnic area with a small refreshment booth. Very civilised!
No more scrumming to get to launch. Nowadays launch is well organised and marshalled.
We were soon off the launch and making our way towards the notrth end of the lake. Before long I has enough height to hop across the lake and soar the ridge at Fargy known to me as Roc de Boeuf.
Then I managed to top up with height and make a dash 'over the back'. I was fortunate to make it back across the lake where I managed to connect with some lift and gain all my height loss back. At this point Jason had still not crossed the lake, but his glider is older and slower than mine
Then, just as things were going great I started to get low on attempt to push north. I ditched in a field next to a German pilot who had done the same thing.
As you can see from the red x on the track log, I made a nice little circuit of the lake before running out of luck. I might have been able to squeak back along the ridge to the landing field, but I decided to play it safe.
Fortunately he was on holiday with his wife who was kind enough to pick us both up and take us back to Doussard.
Off to try out the local 'pizzaria'
We had two delicious thin crusty pizzas at 'Pizza Sympa', and a couple of beers finish off a great first day of flying.
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