Labor Day at Dockweiler - September 4, 2023

[Bob Kuczewski]

I am considering a day of flying on September 4th.

Is anyone interested in joining me?

[Bob Kuczewski]

Here's the forecast:

20230904_004301.png (47.95 KiB) Viewed 908 times

Those are good speeds and directions from about noon onward.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Here's an update:

20230904_083507.png (33.68 KiB) Viewed 900 times

[SamKellner]

Hi Bob,

Hope you are getting some airtime.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Thanks Sam!!

I had a fun day. The wind was light but straight. The site was very crowded with Labor Day beachgoers, but there was a nicely open LZ from launch to the ocean.

I made about 25 nice straight out flights and talked to at least a dozen people about how fun the sport is. I encouraged everyone to take at least one lesson with Windsports to try it out.

I planted a video camera to document the day. I'll try to post either some stills or video clips soon.

[Frank Colver]

Fantastic Bob! Wish i could have accepted your invitation to be picked up and go alpng to watch the fun, maybe get in a hop or two myself.

After your call I worried about the holiday crowd, last big day of the summer. Glad you had a clear shot to the tide line.

Frank

[Bob Kuczewski]

Fantastic Bob! Wish i could have accepted your invitation to be picked up and go alpng to watch the fun, maybe get in a hop or two myself.

I'm sorry I didn't give you more notice. To be honest, I wasn't sure I was going to go either until about 9am that morning. I'm glad I did.

After your call I worried about the holiday crowd, last big day of the summer. Glad you had a clear shot to the tide line.

It was a bit more crowded than usual, but everyone was very friendly and cooperative. When a small group set up in my LZ, I asked very humbly if they would mind moving just a bit to give me a larger landing area. They were very gracious, and I talked to them for a while about hang gliding and what they would be seeing.

I also talked to at least a dozen people who came to watch up top. I gave them the usual explanation about how we control the glider and answered the usual questions like why it's almost impossible to reach the ocean. I encouraged a number of people to come back for lessons at Windsports. I often explained that I learned through Windsports and would drive from San Diego for each lesson because the school was very good.

While it wasn't quite soarable, I did have a fun day.

[Bob Kuczewski]

Here's the video I promised:

https://youtu.be/ESuwxdlpmhI

I made 28 actual flights, but the first two were made before I set up the video camera.

As mentioned above, there were lots of people watching and asking questions. One little boy asked me to "race" him down the hill, and his father didn't seem to mind. The little boy wanted to bet me, but I felt I had an unfair advantage so I declined. The third flight of the video (starting around 52 seconds) shows the race (the boy is running down a parallel runway on the left side of the video). I'm glad I didn't take the bet because he was amazingly fast and it's not clear who actually won!

For anyone who's interested, I made this video using the "KDENLive" video editor. The video of the entire day was spread over several files by the cameras 4GB file size limitation. You can see a few missing frames during one of the file changes at 3:12 if you look carefully. I used KDENLive to append all of the files together. Then I went in and "cut" the video at the start and end of each flight. For this video, I decided that I would speed up the "carry" sections (all non-flying parts of the video) so that they were each about 4 seconds. That means each "carry" section may be sped up at a different rate since some were just a few minutes and others might have been dozens of minutes in "real time". After speeding up each segment, I pulled them all together and began working on the sound track. I had downloaded a number of free music tracks and picked one I liked. But the video was over ten minutes long and the sound track was only a few minutes. So I found a section of the music that I could cut and repeat as many times as needed. The only problem was that the repeating segment didn't fill out the video a "whole number" of times. I could have just ended in the middle of the tune or I could have left some quiet space at the beginning or the end. Instead, I decided to "shrink" the video by speeding it up just a little bit (about 102%). That worked great, and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Finally, thanks to Joe Faust and Frank Colver for helping open the site for the U.S. Hawks. Thanks also to Frank for the very nice gift of the Condor 225. And finally, thanks to Joe Greblo for his kind letter of reference that helped us open the site.

[JoeF]

Seagull moving Condor flying Hawk, thou art!