Good morning, and what a morning it is! My name's Rob Johnson and I'm really pleased to be here
with you this morning. I've been invited as a guest presenter on the on the Flybubble Channel.
I'm a climber and a mountaineer by background, that's sort of
what I've spent the last 18 years doing, and a filmmaker.
So here I am with the opportunity to to share my newfound love of
paragliding with you, and talk to you about what the attraction is and what drew me into it.
So I'm here in Snowdonia. I've got up for sunrise early this morning and had my porridge.
I left the house as quietly as I could without waking everybody up
and I'm on my local hill. So I've walked from home,
it's about an hour and a half's walk I guess up here, and I've come up for sunrise
My plan is to come up enjoy the sunrise and then fly back down -- for me that's what paragliding
is about. It means a lot of things to different people but to me I looked at it and thought "Wow,
that's a that's a pretty cool thing to be able to save my knees!" You know, I wanted to go climbing,
I wanted to go mountaineering, go hill walking, get up for sunrise and then fly back down,
simple as that. I got into it two years ago, a good friend of mine bought a second hand speed
wing, we didn't really know what that was, and we took it up to our local hill had to go,
tried to teach ourselves from YouTube, scared ourselves silly, and then ended up
booking ourselves onto a course. We went and learned with a paragliding school in Spain.
The idea with this little series of videos is to show you the beauty and the joy of flying
free flight, and show you how the kit's come on a lot over the last few years--so
it's so light it opens up a lot of a lot of different options--and take you on some adventures
So one of the questions I get asked a lot when people see either me land or see the
images that I put up is "How do you learn?" and as I said we sort of we bought ourselves a wing,
tried to teach ourselves and uh... struggled, so uh yeah we went out to Spain and did a
did our Elementary Pilot and our Club Pilot qualifications out there,
and then I had a bit more training when I got back to the UK, because I definitely felt the
sort of the flying environment was different, and then the big thing is to join a club
when you get back (and, I've got to admit, I'm not much of a club person, I was a bit
hesitant about joining club I've sort of been a little bit shy of those in the climbing world)
But but it's been fantastic because it gives you access to to all of their flying sites,
and you know we don't need to reinvent the wheel, people have been doing this for decades,
and they've negotiated access, because we haven't got a right to access with with paragliding,
so they've negotiated access to sites, they've tried all the bad sites where
where they don't work, and people are really super keen, super willing to help with advice,
and it gives you access to forums and weather, and what other people are up to so, that's
that's probably my number one top tip is join your local club, and then wherever you want to fly
join that club as well, because it doesn't cost a lot--I think the
club up here in North Wales is like a tenner for a year--so you can join as many as you want and this
gives you access to people and to knowledge, and that's that's really, really valuable.
So now to start thinking about the fun bit!
I've used this take off before--I know the farmer and he's kindly let me fly from here--and
I'm looking to have a little bit of wind. So a little bit of headwind just means
it's a lot easier getting the glider up over your head and then launching
is much, much easier than trying to do it with no wind. It means you can get off the ground fairly
quickly--and here it's quite bouldery, so I don't want to be running down the hill for too long.
This is where the technology has really changed over the years,
because my glider is just so small and so light. I mean, that's it--the wing, and that's 1.8 kilos,
and then the rucksack is only about 300 grams heavier than my mountaineering sac, with a harness
built into it! And then on top of that I carry a reserve parachute, in case things go dreadfully
wrong, and that weighs less than a kilo. So, you know, for not far off three kilos extra
to what you would normally carry you've got the opportunity to fly down instead of walking down.
Oh...
All right.
So there we go. I'm down, and still plenty of time to go home and have a big breakfast if I want to
play. Brilliant. So yeah, hopefully you can join me again. I want to go and climb as many climbs
and scrambles on our mountains here as I can in Snowdonia and then fly back down, and then along
the way I'll show you in a bit more detail some of the kit that I'm using, perhaps chat through some
of the the planning stages that goes into making it work, spend a little bit more time looking at
the weather, and go out and do some cool routes, and fly off some some beautiful mountains!