Wind & the Zen of Paragliding

Wind & the Zen of Paragliding
Welcome to Expert Village.com. My name is Patrick Eves with Wing and Paragliding. In this clip we are going to be talking about the zen of paragliding. Basically what we are talking about now is being able to stay on your wind line and that is the magic of making the kiting happen. What happens is you have the wind coming from this direction. If you draw a line from the exact direction the wind is coming, it should run straight through your body and go straight to the middle of the wing. If you stay on that line all the time, your wing is going to be symmetric and probably come up nice and smooth. If you don’t do it that way, then the wings are going to have collapses on one side or the other so if you are kiting a lot and your having collapses on one side the other, chances are you are not on your wind line so you need to be able to refocus, find exactly where the wind is coming from and make sure that it is centered up with the wing. That is why we try to keep the wing in the center the whole time. The best way to figure out if you are on your wind line is by building your wall. Your wall means opening up the canopy totally so that you are ready to launch and you have a nice clean wing. If your wing opens up completely nice into a nice wall, it means probably you are on your wind line. At this stage what I want you to do is grab both A’s into one hand and then reach under your risers and grab both D’s or both rear risers in your other hand. Then as soon as you have a little bit of wind, you are going to slightly tug your A’s just enough for it to fill up with air and then you are going to pull your D’s to let it down. You are just going to shuffle between the two until the wing opens up really nicely. Some times you may have to take a good step back to really get some wind into it. Remember build a nice wall first. Once you have a perfect wall chances for launch are pretty great. The final component to the zen of paragliding is keeping pressure on your wing. That means if you are on the ground and the wind is light you are going to have to run faster. The lighter the wind, the faster you are going to have to run. If there is a lot of wind you can build a stand still but you are still going to have to lean forward into your harness, keep a little bit of brake pressure on in order to make sure that the wing maintains internal pressure. If the wing looses pressure, it is going to collapse.